AppReviewToday- AppReviews

  • A bad quarter for Apple: Is a great one for anyone else

    Apple’s most recent quarterly results were less than spectacular but, while that’s probably better news for its competitors than its usual continual record-setting, don’t schedule the victory parade yet.

    Writing for the Forbes contributor network and candy cane freebasing den, Ewan Spence says “A Weakened Apple Is Vulnerable To Samsung's Attack.” (Tip o’ the antlers to @JonyIveParody.)

    Samsung?

    [The Macalope runs to the window]

    Macalope: You, there! What year is it?!

    Boy: ’Tis 2016, sir!

    Macalope: And people are still saying Samsung is going to beat Apple?!

    Boy: [Shrugs, wanders off to buy a goose.]

    …Samsung is on a roll. Momentum is building…

    Samsung’s year-over-year growth? Down 0.6 percent.

    That’s some roll. Is that a potato roll? Poppy seed? Dinner roll? California roll? Salmon skin hand roll? Because it’s seeming not a business roll.

    Hey, they did do better than Apple. But the smartphone market has gone flat. Now it’s mostly a game of stealing share from others. Samsung has high customer satisfaction but so does Apple and Apple’s share is famously low, so it has more room to grow. Ben Bajarin at least thinks Apple has an edge. We’ll see. The Macalope doesn’t like to make predictions about things that have more moving parts than the Game of Thrones title sequence.

    Remember how Xiaomi was highly touted as the company that was going to dethrone Apple because their phones were so cheap and if there’s one thing that Apple customers want it’s cheap phones? That was a good one. Remember how even Lenovo was going to crush it after buying Motorola from Google because… uh, mumble, mumble, look out Apple? Yeah, now they’re both no longer in the top five.

    More importantly, Samsung’s ascendancy is kicking in just as Apple hits one of its roughest patches of the decade.

    It is a rough patch, to be sure. For Apple. For any other company it’s a kittens and puppies surprise birthday cake delivered by a dozen adorable talking wombats when it isn’t even your birthday. Why, you’d have to go all the way back to 2014 to find a first calendar quarter so bad for Apple.

    While the raw numbers are a concern, the bigger risk for Apple is the damage to the perception of the iPhone brand…

    Yeah, people really think iPhones are crap now.

    The move to larger screened devices ignored a product cycle of iPhone 5, 5C and 5S users refusing to upgrade – and now the four-inch iPhone SE has arrived it’s cannibalizing sales of the larger and more expensive devices in the portfolio.

    Wow, the Macalope is so old he remembers when pundits said everyone wanted big phone because big phones are big and big is always better.

    Pundits like Ewan Spence who said last September before the introduction of the iPhone 6s:

    The potential for the iPhone is greater now than it has ever been.

    Now what does he think?

    Every [Apple] product line has a black mark against it in the media…

    And this is different from any other year how, exactly? Every single product has announced has come pre-failed by the media.

    …the game isn’t always about reality, it’s about perception.

    And, rest assured, Forbes will always be there to not help clear up the difference between the two.

  • Snapchat takes face-swapping to new levels with iOS update

    Now you don’t have to be sitting side-by-side to take a hilarious face-swap selfie with your friends, babies, or celebrities you’ve never met. Snapchat’s latest iOS update lets you face-swap with photos in your Camera Roll.

    This adds a new layer of hilarity to Snapchat’s already ridiculous feature, which lets you trade faces for selfie snapshots and videos. The new face-swap filter works similarly to the original. Open Snapchat, turn the selfie camera on, then do a long press on your face to bring up the variety of filters that Snapchat offers every day. The new option is next to the original face-swap filter, but the icon is purple instead of yellow.

    snapchat face swap filter

    Need an ego boost? Just swap out your mug for Angelina Jolie’s gorgeous face.

    Snapchat will automatically bring up a gallery of faces from your recent Camera Roll snaps that you can swipe through. My obvious choices included my friends, partner, and new baby nephew, all of which looked incredibly creepy. So I decided to see what I would look like as some of my favorite celebrities, which is easy to do by saving images online to your Camera Roll. Not surprisingly, Angelina Jolie’s face is ultra flattering if you need an ego boost.

    Snapchat typically doesn’t allow you to use images from your Camera Roll, limiting you to shooting photos and videos in-app. But people love the face-swap feature, and even Facebook is getting in on the action with its recent acquisition of a dedicated face-swapping video app, Masquerade. Snapchat knows that variety is key to keep people coming back for more, and though it’s had some missteps lately (see: the controversial Bob Marley filter for 4/20), its constantly changing options are usually a hit with users.

    The iOS update also eliminates the option to buy replays of snaps, indicating that Snapchat will focus its money-making efforts on advertising instead of in-app purchases.