Is Apple In Trouble?

A glitch in Safari and a decline in sales may spell trouble for the computing giants.
Apple has been in the news several times already this week. They announced the launch both of their new iPhone 7 for 2016 and the successor to the iPhone 5c, whether it be named 6c or 5se (if succeeding the iPhone 5s). Now Apple’s stock price has fallen and their economic growth from iPhone sales seems to have curved off too. And to top it all off, today there were reports of a major Safari iOS glitch. Not the best week for Apple so far.
Recently the news broke that many of us Apple iPhone users have encountered a major problem when using the Safari app on our mobile phones. Safari seems to crash every time we tap the address bar to enter a new search or url. According to an article by Aaron Brown in the Express online, Apple has still not made an announcement regarding the problem. He outlines two suggestions as to how to get around the problem for now: one is to browse in a ‘private window’ – “to do this, launch the Safari iOS app, then tap the Tab icon in the bottom right-hand corner,” and the other option is to “disable Safari Suggestions – the websites and search queries the browser pre-emptively guesses as you type into the address bar.” The glitches have been reportedly seen in iOS 9.2.1 and iOS 9.2.
Spookily enough these technical issues come two days after a devilish prank spread across the web. A link – ‘crashsafari’ (and please do not click if seen anywhere!) – was capable of crashing any Iphone or iPad! If this wasn’t bad enough, unfortunately the link also had a disastrous effect on Android devices too. This website is described by Aaron Brown as: “The prank website overloads Apple’s default browser with a self-generating text string in the address bar. This can cause your iPhone or iPad to heat-up – as it desperately tries to handle the ever-growing code of the website.”
Not only does the prank website cause problems on mobile devices, it can also crash Safari on Macs as well as slowing down Google Chrome too. To make matters even worse, people have been using link shorteners to disguise the revealing ‘crashsafari’ name and have spread these links over one hundred thousand times around the web.
As we all know, tech giant Apple was seemingly on a never-ending profit rise. According to fortune.com  Tom Huddleston, Jr. predicted that “After six straight quarters of beating revenue expectations, Apple is likely to report disappointing sales due to weak demand for its latest signature iPhones, which contributed to Apple’s stock dropping nearly 20% over the past six months.” One of the contributing factors is likely to be the turmoil in China, one of Apple’s largest markets.
Today BBC news covers Apple’s report on its slowest growth in iPhone sales since 2007. Apple predicts its revenue for the next quarter to be around $50bn, well below the $58bn revenue it reported for the matching period one year ago. This would be an almost historic first decrease in revenue in the entire history of the iPhone. Furthermore, the iPhone sales constitute 68% of Apple’s revenue in the above mentioned period, according to Rory Cellan-Jones reporting for the BBC.
Cellan-Jones goes on to elaborate that as Apple have already peaked several times, new investors might hesitate as “the worry is that the only way is down – and there’s evidence in these figures to back up those concerns.” Not only is the expected decline in iPhone sales a concern, so is the decelerating growth of China. There people might turn to a cheaper rival such as local Xiaomi. Of course these concerns about Apple having peaked have already been raised in the past, and were quickly blown to pieces with Apple’s hugely successful iPhone sales. But the overall situation is calling to Apple to “deliver another blockbuster product to keep the profit engine running.”
Sales figures for the Apple watch have not yet been announced and it is not very likely that the watch will fill the sales gap. But there is a rumour that an Apple car is in the making. Maybe this will be the successful mind blowing product of Apple’s future?