Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/02/26/apple-plans-giant-iphone.html
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What is the siginificance/notability of Gene Munster?
(and no-one better reference the TV show)
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He’s a tech analyst specializing in Apple “predictions,” some of them real howlers. Apple television sets, Apple cars. His last one was “Apple is about to buy Target.”
So whenever you see a news story like this one, declaring authoritatively the nature of some forthcoming Apple product, scroll down. See if there’s more than one named source, see if the source is an analyst whose day job is investing in things or telling people what to invest in, and see if their name is “gene munster.”
Bear in mind that his prediction hit rate is relatively good compared to most analysts. His success amounted to having faith that Apple would continue to do well – hardly a difficult prediction for basically anyone with the slightest familiarity for tech, but tech pundits who cut their teeth in the 1990s always thought Apple was three quarters from death right up until the early 2010s. (There are interesting truths hidden in this, such as the fact that many old-school tech pundits were business journos with only a fleeting grasp on important adjacent science and culture issues, but I digress)
tldr: news stories based on pitches from analysts, or which use dial-a-quote analysts to conceal speculation or weak sourcing, are bad.
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Gene Muster is the source, but Herman Munster is the target market…
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LOL
The I-Tool
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Except for the fact that this correlates with other rumors including parts that seem to be leaking from manufacturing…
I don’t want one.
[sent from my iPhone]
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I wish I could find a typographic means to convey the really, really, really sarcastic way Albert Finney says “wow!” in Erin Brockovitch.
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I predict Apple will start making an app to avoid walking into transparent walls. Put your money in electronic fences.
Where’s my money?
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Will there be a plus-sized Iphone X? Almost certainly. Will anything else in this rumour turn out to be true? Probably not.
I can’t see Apple cancelling the regular Iphone line until their production costs on the X line fall to the point where they can lower the cost of the X to $650-700. They love them their margins at apple, but they also know they need to provide phones at a range of price points as well, or they won’t get the overall numbers they want. So barring a miracle in production cost reductions, this fall we’ll be getting 4 models of phone (X and X+, 9 and 9+, with base prices at every hundred dollar increment $700 to $1000). And also a new SE model, probably this spring or summer.
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Well at last I can text with these fat fingers!
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I’m just saying, people OTHER than Gene whatshisbutt have basically been saying similar stuff, whether or not it ends up being true, so the bb copy on the post seemed mis-aimed to me. But who am I, I’ve just been reading macrumors.com most days for about 16 years now… 
in the corner 
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Do you think that a phone with the iPhone 8 design will live on as the new iPhone SE, with an X and X+ becoming the flagship range?
No.
The Asymco blog has talked about the average sale price of the Iphone, taking into account all models and capacities. Every time they jack up the price of the top of the line model, they have also lowered the price of the cheapest model, with the effect that the ASP of the iphone has stayed remarkably consistent over time. Apple wants the overall price to stay the same, in order to please Wall Street. They want there to be a smooth gradient between the cheapest model and the most expensive model, so that there’s always a “for just a hundred dollars more I could get a better one”, psychological factor encouraging people to buy a more expensive phone. But they also want there to be a low price model, so that there’s an affordable entry point for those who cannot afford a $1k phone, in order to ensure that they sell as many phones as possible to as many people as possible.
Add those together and there needs to be a range of models from cheap to expensive. The SE anchors the low end of the scale and provides a little phone to those who value reachability. Apple would love to lower the cost of the SE further, expanding their market size, but in order to do so they need there to be a smooth gradient of models from the SE’s price point to the X’s price point, and they need to ensure that the X’s price point stays where it is so that the overall ASP does not go down. Which means they need to continue to have multiple cheaper models in between the SE and the X.
WHich means in addition to a new X and X+, the 8 will get upgraded to the 9, at the same or a very similar price, and the two prior year’s models will stick around as usual at the usual price cuts.
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