Indians may find Apple’s new crop of iPhones hard to digest
Apple’s new iPhones are unlikely to help revive the company’s market share in India, with retailers fearing the Rs1 lakh price tag will be a drag on sales after the initial euphoria subsides due to the availability of more affordable Android flagships from Samsung and OnePlus.
Analysts project the Cupertino, California-based tech giant’s annual iPhone shipments in India may decline for the first time. Apple may dispatch about 2.4 million iPhones to India in 2018 compared with 3.2 million units in 2017, according to Hong Kong-based Counterpoint Technology Market Research.
The new iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max will be priced at record highs when they go on sale in India on September 28, after factoring in the rupee’s depreciation against the dollar and a 20% import duty, two senior industry executives said. The iPhone XR, touted as the ‘affordable flagship,’ starts at Rs76,900 and will be available from October 26, about two weeks before Diwali.
The company distributors in India have informed retailers that Apple will for the first time offer ‘affordability schemes’ such as cashbacks and easy EMIs on certain credit cards right from the launch date, unlike earlier, when they were introduced after a few weeks, the executives said.
“Despite the aspirational factor, the lakh-plus pricing has made the new iPhones unaffordable for a lot of consumers.
The starting price this time has gone up by almost 13% for the flagships, while for the affordable flagship it’s up by 20%. It’s going to be very tough,” said the CEO of a leading retail chain.
What's With All the Squares? QR Codes A QR code is comprised of an array of squares, some of which are used for the image sensor to position itself (that's the large squares on three of the corners), while the rest of the cells contain version and format information as well as the data itself, of course, along with error correction coding. Whereas most of the barcodes you come across are one-dimensional, such as UPC labels on items at the store, QR codes are two-dimensional and offer many advantages. For instance, QR codes can be scanned in any direction instead of only one, they can contain thousands of alphanumeric characters versus only a dozen or so, and when configured with a high level of error correction they are particularly capable at continuing to function after sustaining damage. The more error correction a QR code has, the less data it can store and incidentally, the more data that is stored within a QR code, the more squares it will have. More sq...
Machine learning algorithms offer better data analysis at CERN AI to enhance data analysis for the world's most powerful particle collider Scientists say they have created new techniques that deploy machine learning to significantly improve data analysis for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator. "The methods we developed greatly enhance our discovery potential for new physics at the LHC," said Kyle Cranmer, a professor at the New York University (NYU) in the US. Located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, the LHC is probing a new frontier in high-energy physics. The facility may reveal the origin of mass of fundamental particles, the source of the illusive dark matter that fills the universe, and even extra dimensions of space, researchers said. In 2012, data collected by the LHC backed the existence of the Higgs boson, a sub-atomic particle that plays a key role in our understanding ...
Google looking to future after 20 years of search Google celebrated its 20th birthday Monday, marking two decades in which it has grown from simply a better way to explore the internet to a search engine so woven into daily life its name has become a verb. The company was set to mark its 20th anniversary with an event in San Francisco devoted to the future of online search, promising a few surprise announcements. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were students at Stanford University -- known for its location near Silicon Valley The duo went beyond simply counting the number of times keywords were used, developing software that took into account factors such as relationships between webpages to help determine where they should rank in search results. Google was launched in September 1998 in a garage rented in the Northern California city of Menlo Park. The name is a play on the mathematical term "googol," which refers to the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. G...
Comments
Post a Comment