According to KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and 9To5Mac, Apple plans to release a new 13-inch MacBook Air "at a lower price" in the second quarter of this year.
The price of MacBook Air starts today from 999 dollars. The last small upgrade was in June of 2017 (where Apple upgraded the processor to 1.8GHz dual-core Intel Core i5). Please note that no other major upgrade has been made since March of 2015.
Last year the iPhone X broke a new record as it is the most expensive iPhone ever released. The device with the simplest specifications costs 999 dollars in the United States, while the larger-volume version reaches 1.150 dollars.
This pricing strategy made Apple products like this iPhone to be considered as status symbols, as only those who "have" them can have them.
However, the plans of the mobile providers and the monthly ones payments, made the iPhone extremely popular around the world, despite the over-pricing. Each new device sells in fairly large numbers in most markets.
For Apple, this was the approach that made the company the world's most valuable trademark and close to becoming the first trillion-dollar company.
In his case iPhone X, it is estimated that the device costs only 357 dollars (hardware only, without transport and other associated costs), so Apple seems to win too many per device on the market.
But the problem for Apple is that the market has changed:
There are more and more cheap and reliable devices available, something that did not exist when the first iPhone 2007 was released.
So there are some who believe that the iPhone X would sell better at a lower price and Apple wouldn't have to cut production by 50%, a movement which affected not only the company from Cupertino, but also all its partners and suppliers.
Apple is currently involved in a major transformation process that is supposed to help the company recover after the recent omissions and at the same time expand its product line in a way that would make it possible to maintain it in the changing hardware market.
2017 proved to be a fiasco for Apple. Last year, we saw most software bugs, vulnerabilities, and the company's controversial practice to downgrade the device to "Save" battery.
The company already offers cheaper battery replacements, essentially recognizing that it was wrong to reduce the performance of old iPhones with degraded batteries. At the same time, it promised to increase focus on software reliability, security and performance, so the next version of iOS will be expected to relate more to these and less to the new features.
Except repair the software, Apple is also planning a hardware change strategy.
Apple invested aggressively into more affordable devices and the first two product families that benefit from this change of mind are the iPhone and the MacBook.
The iPhone 2018 will include, in addition to the successor of the iPhone X and the iPhone X Plus, an iPhone 6.1 inch LCD that is supposed to be on the market at a lower price. To make this iPhone as accessible as possible, Apple will leave aside a series of high quality features such as 3D Touch, OLED screen and wireless charge.
At the same time, as mentioned above, we will probably see a new cheaper MacBook Air.
In both cases, analysts expect the cheapest devices to represent a significant share of Apple's sales, and this will happen because that's what customers are looking for today.
Apple's biggest challenge, however, is to make more affordable products without making too many compromises. Such a goal is undoubtedly a very difficult task. If the LCD iPhone turns out to be a failure, Apple will have to create a cheaper smartphone without remove things that people like users.
Why the market can determine how a company moves, unless we are just talking about fanboys…
Ultimately, if Apple did not play properly, as 2017 did, strategy could trigger tensions and natural profits cuts, as that may be what the Stock Exchange means.
At first glance, the most affordable devices could translate into better sales for Apple, but it always depends on whether customers prefer a lower quality iPhone, or whether they insist on having an expensive device to get on Facebook…
