No Mystery Why Apple's Sales Are Down; Try To Buy An iPhone 7

I bought my first iPhone on June 29, 2007, the day they first became available. I was number 222 at the Glendale, CA Apple store. I was probably the oldest person there, at least in my line of vision, surrounded by young whipper-snappers with more toys than Best Buy. I was stunned to see them so eager to buy something that many of us (really) didn't think would work all that well. After all, I had a Motorola Razor in my pocket and I hated that phone. It was, to use an old term, "the cat's meow!" To me, that meow was more like a screech.

A friend had dragged me to MacWorld in January that year, my first in fact, and we walked into the Moscone Center just as Jobs was finishing his keynote speech. In the foyer was an image of the iPhone at least 40 or 50 feet high. We all stood looking at it stunned. It was nothing like what anyone had surmised it would look like. Truth be told, it is still an iconic design and the standard that everyone else copies and tries to sell. In fact, the return to the original soft, rounded edges makes it a natural fit in your hand ... just like the very first one whose design luckily works with the two newest phones that are  much larger than the original!

My next phone was a iPhone 3 ... I don't upgrade every year as my plan with AT&T didn't allow that. So the next phone was a iPhone 5 and then now, at this very moment an iPhone 6.

This has been a very reliable phone and suffered through iOS 8, surely the most miserable of all the iOS's, successful through iOS 9 and now iOS10. I am a camera buff using my iPhone for many photos on trips that depend on the amazing panorama software that makes for stunning phones when printed in my Apple albums I frequently make from my trips. In fact, its low light sensitivity is better than that of my Nikon 3200 DSLR!

When I saw the ads and photos taken with the new iPhone 7+ I knew that I had to have one. Here in my pocket would be a camera that was always with me, took much better photos than far bigger cameras and with at least 128 GB of storage would hardly ever run out, movies on board or not.

There is just one problem. Getting one. I started looking into getting one about a month after they came out. If anyone else has had the same experience as me, and I would guess there are just as many as me ... probably far more, it looks like Apple has bitten off more than it can chew. The Apple Store in Palm Desert, CA, my nearest store, hasn't had a phone for sale in apparently weeks. Someone, somewhere IS getting them but not in the desert nor for that matter anywhere in at least a 100 mile circumference from me. The Apple store thoughtfully lists the availability of each color, size and RAM. Other than an occasional rose gold (I'm sorry Apple, pink IS pink) in 256RAM they are harder to find than chicken teeth. On reflection, worse!

So, at the end of October, a full month after they became available, there are just about none to be had. And, I have tried. The AT&T store says depending on color and RAM it can be 4 - 8 weeks. That's even worse than the Apple Store. So ... if 70% of Apple's sales are from iPhones and you can't get one, how does this affect the bottom line. I can tell you ... declining sales. Despite the critics, its not, as they keep insisting, that we don't want one, we simply can't get one. Can it be that Apple got caught with their pants down? Did they listen maybe a little too much to the critics, the analysts? I think so. Hopefully, with the release, finally, of their new laptops and serious upgrades to Apple TV, they turn a blind eye to the soothsayers and pay far more attention to what is going on online and in their stores.

Thank you for reading my blog. Please, take the time to read earlier blogs where the emphasis here and always is to explore the ways design and art affects our lives ... and always has. 

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