Smartphone Sales: Apple Squeezed, Blackberry Squashed, Android 81.3% 390
mrspoonsi writes "Engadget reports: Smartphone market share for the third quarter...as you'd imagine, the world is still Android's oyster. Strategy Analytics estimates that the OS has crossed the symbolic 80 percent mark, reaching 81.3 percent of smartphone shipments by the end of September. Not that Google was the only company doing well — Nokia's strong US sales helped Windows Phone grow to 4.1 percent of the market, or nearly double what it had a year ago."
2.3 million Android phones per day (Score:5, Informative)
Samsung alone accounts for 1 million of those, leaving 1.3 million per day for others. Here are the per-company numbers. [engadget.com]
It will be interesting to see if LG can deliver enough of the Nexus 5 to bump their numbers over the holidays.
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Uh, does any phone vendor other than Apple release actual unit sales numbers?
Re:2.3 million Android phones per day (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually I'm more surprised wiht Nokia taking 4.1% of the market.
While a small market share, 4.1% of a big market still means lots of phones. And for a single manufacturer to have >4% market share is pretty impressive, considering how they messed up their existing position.
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Actually I'm more surprised with Nokia taking 4.1% of the market.
I'm not.
Telcos over here are flogging 520s like they were being given kickbacks for every unit sold. They're being pushed as the default phone on corp deals and other promotions. I'm not sure who's making money off them, but somebody's surely spending a lot.
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The Nokia brand is still strong with people who want a quality dumb phone. It's mostly older people who want something cheap that they only have to charge once a week and which is simple to operate, and Nokia is the only brand they know is supposed to be good.
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Well, Nokia is basically just making just a handful of phones these days, the Lumias. In a market full of Androids and iPhones for years, they stand out a bit as being 'different'. And as far as the hardware is concerned, they're pretty high quality, with good battery life, and stand up to a beating. So they do have a niche.
They're also producing a few new Asha phones that are marketed and sold in developing countries. From what I understand, the OS is based on a souped up version of S40 (or maybe S60?). I think they're meant to compete with the Firefox OS phones coming out.
For low end phones, they look pretty decent.
Are *ALL* Nokia phones *smartphones* ?? (Score:2, Informative)
I believe that the stat is skewed.
I have friends in India, Bangladesh, Africa, Thailand, Indonesia who sell phones, and they tell me that, for every one Nokia smartphone that they sell, they sell 8 Nokia non-Smartphones.
Nokia's offerings in many 3rd world countries are largely comprise of very cheap cellphones, selling as cheap as 15 euro (or about 20 USD) a pop.
None of those phones has Windows installed on them.
Re:Are *ALL* Nokia phones *smartphones* ?? (Score:4, Informative)
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I believe that the stat is skewed.
I have friends in India, Bangladesh, Africa, Thailand, Indonesia who sell phones, and they tell me that, for every one Nokia smartphone that they sell, they sell 8 Nokia non-Smartphones.
Nokia's offerings in many 3rd world countries are largely comprise of very cheap cellphones, selling as cheap as 15 euro (or about 20 USD) a pop.
None of those phones has Windows installed on them.
The stat specifically says smartphones, not all phones.
Apple made the same mistake (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think the closed ecosystem has anything to do with it : i have an iPhone, and while my teenage kids love it and wouldn't stop dreaming about one, they just CAN NOT AFFORD it. So they jumped ship and bought a cheap 150€ android. While their phone is inferior, it is "good enough" for all they need to do. Now that they bought it, they're stuck in the android world partly because of the apps they bought, partly due to pride in defending their choice, but mostly because they see that their cheap phone can do EVERYTHING my iPhone can do at a quarter of the price.
apple is losing the youth, and doesn't give a shit.
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It's all related; Apple's iron grip on their ecosystem is what allows them to position their device as "premium" and charge so much for it. If they'd done what IBM/Google did, and opened their OS so that everyone could make compatible clones, competition would drive the price down.
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:5, Informative)
What on earth are you talking about? IBM didn't "open up" the PC design. Compaq reversed engineered it using a clean room process to avoid legal issues. (http://computemagazine.com/the-history-of-the-ibm-personal-computer/)
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:5, Informative)
And that reverse engineering process was significantly aided by the fact that all of the hardware was built using off the shelf components, and the only thing they actually had to reverse engineer was the BIOS.
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:5, Informative)
And the BIOS was published in source form and you could buy technical reference manuals for it. Some secret it was!!!
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If you are talking GUIs then you are talking about Macintosh same main processor as Amiga but two fewer custom processors... guess who was cheaper. Atari had a graphical GUI too hardware cheaper... apples always been able to get a gullible subset of computer users to buy there over inflated hardware/software. Now with the marketing wizard dead, it feels like the 90s all over again.
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:4, Insightful)
The early '90s, when Amiga and Atari went out of business? I bet Apple regrets not copying their business models. I loved my Amiga but Commodore were utterly delusional if they thought they were competitive at that time.
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no, the mid 80's, which is more relevant. because the further you go into '80s the crappier deal the "magically designed for gui" apples became.
though compared to mac hw both atari and amiga provided competitive hardware in early '90s :). what every one of those firms provided were shit when compared to 386's though. just another example of macboys first saying they're better value for money and when shown otherwise gloating about how they're proud about the company charging more than competition for same c
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Well, AC is the one who said this was like the '90s all over again, and I thought it was interesting that they chose a time when Apple's supposed betters collapsed in smoking heaps and they not only kept going, but doubled down on the whole "incredibly expensive computer" thing. As someone who owned an Amiga as late as '99 I sometimes wish Commodore had played the long game a bit better.
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The early '90s, when Amiga and Atari went out of business? I bet Apple regrets not copying their business models. I loved my Amiga but Commodore were utterly delusional if they thought they were competitive at that time.
Hardware != business model. Amiga's were superior in many ways. It was the way they were marketed and the way the company was managed that did them in.
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Yes, and the A500 and A600 accounted for the VAST majority of Amiga sales. You may have upgraded your A4000, but few did - and the A4000 was only a tiny fraction of the Amiga market. By the time the 68060 came out, it was destroyed by the Pentium in terms of performance, AGA was destroyed by Super VGA cards, the 8 bit 4 channel audio was destroyed by PC sound cards like the GUS and Awe32, etc. When 3d cards like the Voodoo came out it was pretty much game over.
I used to own an Amiga between 1989 and 1
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In the early 90's I was making money on my Amiga - it was very much a niche computer like the Mac. I think a lot of people think Amiga - they think Amiga 500 or 1200 - games machines. I think personal workstation.
My last machine was an A4000 with 68060 and 148 megs of ram (a lot for an Amiga) and it did serious special effects and graphics - and it had ethernet etc - it could even do NLE (online disk based video editing with the VT Flyer).
Commodore could have developed that into a more mainstream market, bu
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Aside from the lack of custom chips, Apple machines were generally higher end than the common Amiga and Atari models... While Commodore made low cost models like the A500, A600 and A1200, Apple were only making higher end models with faster processors, more memory. scsi hard drives, flicker free monitor vs tv etc, and they weren't unreasonably priced compared to the similar specced Amiga models like the A3000 and A4000.
From my (somewhat hazy) recollection, when the A1200 came with 2mb ram, a 14mhz 68020, dd
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Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:4, Informative)
Complete and utter bullshit.
Apple was famous for their cheapness and that "hardware that could support GUIs" was a 9" monochrome monitor with terrible resolution. PC's had better than that from the start.
IBM PCs were more expensive than Macs in the beginning and were vastly more premium in build. Apparently you weren't born yet.
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:4, Informative)
Thanks for the warning about what was to follow!
The ur-Mac had a bit mapped 512x342 display with excellent sharpness and contrast, and used a 32/16 bit 68000 processor. The PC offered 640x200 with CGA (VGA wasn't until 3 years later) on a fuzzy-pixeled display (color, though), and used a 16/8 bit 8088 processor.
EGA (Score:3)
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Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
....
While their phone is inferior, it is "good enough" for all they need to do
....
but mostly because they see that their cheap phone can do EVERYTHING my iPhone can do at a quarter of the price.
So with that last sentence you're saying it's superior to your iPhone....
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:5, Funny)
He's just bitter that he's stuck in the apple world partly because of the apps he bought, partly due to pride in defending his choice.
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If your phone needs are the same as a teenager's, sure.
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:4, Insightful)
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....
While their phone is inferior, it is "good enough" for all they need to do
....
but mostly because they see that their cheap phone can do EVERYTHING my iPhone can do at a quarter of the price.
So with that last sentence you're saying it's superior to your iPhone....
I was thinking along the same lines until I noticed that his kids paid 150 Euro. It's my understanding that phones are sold without being subsidized in Europe, unlike the US. In the US a $150 phone after subsidies is really a $250 to $300 phone. So, it does sound like they bought a lower end Android phone. While it may have much of the same functions as an iPhone, it wouldn't be as smooth or as high resolution, etc.
Personally, I think that anyone who thinks that iDevices are superior to today's higher e
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
Same thing happened with computers, Apple only really competed at the higher end with SCSI drives and color screens, while crude ibm-compatible clones could be had for a fraction of the price. People are quite ok with inferior so long as its cheaper and "good enough", especially during tougher economic times. And once you've bought into one system, the cost of escaping it for another incompatible system is high because you'd need to reacquire all your applications.
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
These days it's the opposite. The Nexus 5 beats the iPhone 5S in pretty much every area. Better screen, NFC, wireless charging, full 1080p video output, better camera, and arguably better software. Yet it costs half the price.
At one point you could reasonably argue that it was worth paying extra for an iPhone, but these days unless you are already locked in I think it's going to be hard to justify paying double for an inferior or at best equal product.
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I've never understood why anyone would buy one that didn't already have at least one OSX machine.
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Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually no, your iPhone 4 doesn't do 1080p. It scales its SD screen up to 1080p, except for video which can be higher resolution. Even then it isn't really 1080p because the image is heavily compressed. The HDMI adapter cable is basically an AirPlay receiver, and the image quality is awful [arstechnica.com].
Personally, I see NFC as just another attack vector and would never use it.
But wifi, the mobile network, Bluetooth, BTLE, SMS and the Lightning connector are all fine.
Better camera is subjective. Does it take better pictures or just bigger pictures?
Better. Aside from anything else it has optical image stabilization.
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
If these companies could put their greed aside, we'd already be running apps from one OS on another OS, and the interoperability would be seemless.
The technology is there.
Everything would be simpler.
And less development effort would go to waste.
Capitalism is just working against us here.
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's the true problem:
Apple put all their effort in building "the perfect" user interface.
However, people are getting more educated and tech-savvy in general.
They don't need Apple to hold their hand anymore.
There's this saying:
Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.
(George Bernard Shaw)
Now, older people may still depend on easy one-button interfaces. However, this group of people clashes with the "image" that Apple tries to associate itself with.
The youth understands this and is not falling for their marketing tactics anymore.
There's another saying:
Once your parents use a particular technology, it has lost its coolness.
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However, people are getting more educated and tech-savvy in general.
That is false: familiarity with facebook does not mean tech-savvy.
A surprising portion of even the very best and brightest 18-22 year olds would still hold a floppy disk completely level if you told them the bits might fall off.
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So you're saying that as people become more familiar with something, they want it to be harder to use, and more obtuse?
Are you cracked?
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I don't think the closed ecosystem has anything to do with it : i have an iPhone, and while my teenage kids love it and wouldn't stop dreaming about one, they just CAN NOT AFFORD it. So they jumped ship and bought a cheap 150€ android. While their phone is inferior, it is "good enough" for all they need to do. Now that they bought it, they're stuck in the android world partly because of the apps they bought, partly due to pride in defending their choice, but mostly because they see that their cheap phone can do EVERYTHING my iPhone can do at a quarter of the price.
apple is losing the youth, and doesn't give a shit.
Except that when we look at the most popular Android smartphones, it's always the high end Galaxy S series and such arriving on top. 150 euros phones alone do not explain how Android gets over 80% of world-wide sales during a quarter. High end Android phones certainly get over 13% anyways.
But I agree that when you have the choice between an iPhone 5C or a much cheaper Nexus 5, the decision isn't hard for a teenager. Only, the later is superior in every point despite being cheaper!
The closed ecosystem has ev
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they're stuck in the android world partly because of the apps they bought, partly due to pride in defending their choice, but mostly because they see that their cheap phone can do EVERYTHING my iPhone can do at a quarter of the price.
Sounds more like you're sticking with your iPhone to defend the choice of spending four times as much as you needed to :p Did you ever consider that the "Android world" might just be a nice place to be? Android is nicer for the always-there-back-button alone.
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Mac had the worst SCSI implementation ever devised, had proprietary SCSI connectors, had the worst networking in the market, and had CPUs that lacked memory management hardware. Meanwhile, those 286's had complete protected memory subsystems. You are mistaken...what a surprise.
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the DB25 SCSI connection was a disaster. I knew so many people who mixed up non SCSI db25 devices (e.g. iomega zip drives) and killed their chain.
the standard SCSI1 and SCSI2 interfaces used on many unix boxes were much better and were clear that it was SCSI
ahh the bad old days. SCSI was fast but not being able to plug it in/out hot was such a mess.
Niche market (Score:5, Interesting)
[] apple computers became just a niche market back then, iphones are becoming right now. []
Both are/will be very profitable niche markets though:
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/10/30/apple-earned-more-than-samsung-lg-nokia-huawei-lenovo-motorolas-mobile-shipments-combined [appleinsider.com]
And regarding Androids ubiquity, fragmentation or open-source-ness, this article suggests Google wants more control:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/ [arstechnica.com]
Re:Niche market (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Niche market (Score:4, Funny)
The user with "a million lemmings can't be wrong" as their sig thinks that popularity is more important than profitability. Classic.
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And repeats a line about MBAs that's only been said about .... a million times already.
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It would be nice if they applied that thinking now and then. It seems to be trained out of them at some point so the end product is a profit driven asshat who cannot see much past the next quarter or consider what may really matter in life until its too late.
Re:Niche market (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, from my perspective I can't help but to notice the huge boner most people on internet have towards market share and mainstream market acceptance, regardless if it's for smartphones, computers, game consoles and accessories or services. People just seem to forget that business are about making money. Having a huge share may have some help with it, but that is not always true.
Depends on whether you are thinking as an investor or consumer I guess. I find it puzzling when consumers have a huge boner for the extreme profit margin a manufacturer is extracting from them ;)
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Half of all the profit in the smartphone market goes to Apple, the other half to Samsung. [businessinsider.com]. Everyone else is losing money. It's an alarming situation for smartphones. Google can afford to stay in the game to keep Android going - they're basically selling the Nexus line at cost- but I'm not sure that the rest can. The idea of a Samsung-Apple duopoly controlling smartphones does not appeal.
Re:Niche market (Score:5, Informative)
Hell, as a real world user, and not a paid reviewer, I prefer Samsung's plastic case, because it is harder to damage, and my phone rarely leaves its leather case anyway.
All my family has Samsung phones, and every single one will change brand next contract if another brand has a better offering.
Some had iPhones b4, but poor reception and broken screens led to a change of heart.
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They're good phones, but I'm just saying, it's not Android that's doing well right now, it's Samsung. And I dare say that Samsung's more interested in boosting the Samsung ecosystem than Google's.
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That Ars article doesn't seem to understand the difference between the OS and the applications that are bundled with it by the manufacturer.
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That Ars article doesn't seem to understand the difference between the OS and the applications that are bundled with it by the manufacturer.
Did you read the article? Put simply, Google has set up a system where it is impossible to fork Android and grow a market share. That's fully within their rights to do, but let's not pretend that Google is working on a free mobile OS.
Google is working on an OS that will prevent total and utter dominance by Apple. A worthy goal IMO since a duopoly is vastly better than a monopoly.
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How is it impossible to fork? Amazon continue to maintain their fork without issues. You can fork the OS as much as you like, it's just that some of the apps are closed source. There are open source versions of those apps but they are not quite as good in most cases.
The OS is fully open source and easy to fork. If you want Google apps bundled with it then you need to agree to Google's terms for including those apps.
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You might indeed be able to fork the OS, but you also would have to go your own way with an earlier version of the SDK, or build your own, as clause 3.4 of the Android SDK license says:
3.4 You agree that you will not take any actions that may cause or result in the fragmentation of Android, including but not limited to distributing, participating in the creation of, or promoting in any way a software development kit derived from the SDK.
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It's not impossible to fork Android. It's nearly impossible to fork Android and grow a market share, even if you're a big corporation with lots of cash to spend. And Google is making harder with every new update.
Again, there's nothing wrong with this, but let's not pretend it isn't happening.
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Re:Niche market (Score:5, Informative)
He's annoyed that they aren't free-as-in-speech, in that Google is making the most fundamental Android apps proprietary. The open-source versions have been abandoned by them. It'd be like if Ubuntu was still ostensibly open-source but everything outside of the window manager had to be written by the customer or bought via a non-compete licence agreement with Canonical.
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple is actually selling more iPhones than ever, even if their market share is falling. A big portion of the Android increase is coming in the form of people replacing "dumb" phones with smart phones, but as the usage stats show, many of them are still treating them like dumb phones. Apple has carved out a niche, and seems to be doing quite well in that niche without the need to sell an iPhone to every single user on the planet(which given their business model won't necessarily make them more money).
Apple's situation now is not really comparable to the situation in the 80s. Maybe when large #s of devs start jumping ship, but you will still be hard pressed to find a large # of apps(note the pedants, I didn't say 0) that are available for Android but not iPhone.
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Apple is actually selling more iPhones than ever, even if their market share is falling.
Just like BlackBerry was not very long ago...
Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:5, Informative)
No it doesn't. Those stats are for iOS (iPhone + iPad) vs Android phones and tablets. And it's only for wifi traffic. On web traffic over cellular networks, Android devices generate slightly more traffic than iOS devices [allthingsd.com]. Basically your link cherry-picked the one chart favorable to iOS.
If you limit the comparison to just iPhone vs Android phones [statcounter.com], Android generates more web traffic. And before you pull out the NetMarketShare data showing iPhone still leading: (1) NetMarketShare gets data from only a few tens of thousands of sites, while StatCounter gets its data from millions of sites. And (2) NetMarketShare's figures are normalized to unique visitors per month. i.e. Someone who visits a site once in a month counts as much as someone who uses the site every day. StatCounter counts web hits, so is measuring actual web usage rather than counting number of users. In other words, more iPhone users browse the web on their phone than Android users, but they don't do much browsing. The hardcore phone browser users are on Android and they generate more web traffic than the larger number of iPhone users who use the browser..
Basically the only lead Apple still has is the iPad in the tablet market, and it's rapidly losing that too. Their share of quarterly tablet sales dropped from a commanding 60% in 2012 to 33% in 2Q2013, and now 29% in 3Q2013 [cnet.com]. Those are quarterly sales, so iPads probably still comprise the majority of tablets in use, which match with your initial stats showing iOS dominating in wifi-based web traffic.
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Re:Apple made the same mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
You're conflating marketshare and sales volume. If your sales volume goes down, so does your marketshare* but the inverse is not true. Your sales volume can be increasing - and with it your profits - while your marketshare declines, simply because other companies are now selling products in your sphere. As long as volume is good and your margins are good, you keep making money.
This is why Apple continued to be profitable in the days when all it was selling was iMacs and Powerbooks to a tiny portion of the market: they made money on every unit sold and the number of units they sold was enough for them to operate. This is why Apple's balance sheet was at its healthiest in the period when its smartphone marketshare was declining most rapidly: there was a boom on, and their volumes were increasing spectacularly even as their share shrank.
I'd be more concerned about all the phone companies who are making losses every quarter on their devices, despite growing market share. If you're selling 10% of the world's smartphones and you're losing $100 per device sold you need to turn that around or you are up the creek.
*Unless the whole market is shrinking, but that wasn't the case for Nokia or Blackberry
Re: Apple made the same mistake (Score:2)
You, the lay man, can't build a smartphone from components.
Their only mistake was not shipping a cheaper phone model around 2009. make it out of plastic and all that.
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In 2009 all the available iPhone models were made out of plastic. They didn't switch to metal until 2010.
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Oh dear (Score:2)
Android is what IBM was? You mean doomed to become totally obsolete in the phone business the same way IBM was?
I could understand what you meant if you had likened Android to Microsoft or even Compaq but to a company who no longer makes PC's and whose PC OS (OS/2) was dead on arrival seems you either think Android is doomed, or have a shaky grasp of IT history.
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The "control everything" (or in a positive light "integration"), is what Apple is selling and what they are good at. Apple cannot compete head to head with Android, history taught them that - they failed until Jobs came back and started to focus on their niche. After a decade of restructuring, Apple is simply not ready to compete on many fronts, like Samsung is for example.
That is what is amazing with Apple this time. They had the whole smartphone market by the balls, but they let it go to stay focused o
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The "control everything" (or in a positive light "integration"), is what Apple is selling and what they are good at. Apple cannot compete head to head with Android, history taught them that - they failed until Jobs came back and started to focus on their niche. After a decade of restructuring, Apple is simply not ready to compete on many fronts, like Samsung is for example.
Apple doesn't have to, nor do they want to, compete on every front. They have focused on what they believe is a profitable market segment and develop products for that segment. By focusing, they can build a product set that is very profitable and not waste time and money on less profitable commodity products.
That is what is amazing with Apple this time. They had the whole smartphone market by the balls, but they let it go to stay focused on a smaller number of products.
The early smartphone market was for high end devices; an area that Apple competes in quite well. As the market expanded and cheaper phones came out, Apple chose not to go into the more price sensitive a
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What are you babbling about? Sure, iPhone is closed, what with the company store and all. But Macintosh never was. Development info was freely available (Inside Mac, etc.), software sold on the open market without needing Apple's approval, hardware was mostly based on standards like SCSI and NuBus (AppleTalk and ADB were exceptions, but there were no comparable standards based alte
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Android is IBM? Uh, no. Not even close. They never went from controlling everything to outsourcing ala IBM. Android was open source from the start, and would have been a 100% GPL'd product had it not been for Sun in the first place. This is something they stated themselves in lawsuits.
Your comparison of "android today" instead of google simply highlights a shortcoming in your thought process. IBM basically stagnated in the 80s, while android is continually expanding and innovating and leading the market.
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I've heard of deifying Steve Jobs but this is ridiculous. You do appreciate that their profitability came out of Tim Cook's ops management, iOS came out of Forstall's engineering team, and their design was by Jonathan Ive, right? And the zillions of people that work(ed) under them?
Steve Jobs could cure cancer (Score:3)
Agreed, but ... also realize it needed Steve Jobs to pull the iPhone off, as all others did not have the vision. We would still have clumsy phones without Job
Ironically their is strong evidence, that Apple copied from Sony. Even if it is not true it shows clearly that others were moving in the the same direction. We also saw in the trial the massive range from Samsung in the pipeline, we also see full screen prototype from Google. Hell they were beaten to market by similar phones
The reality is Apple came out the gate with an great first product, and have become the richest company by market cap on the planet because of it, but that was then and the myth of Steve
“SOURCE: Strategy Analytics” (Score:3, Interesting)
Strategy Analytics is the company Samsung uses to push the numbers they like to the press, while at the same time avoiding any regulatory oversight. Strategy Analytics‘ Korean headquarter even is in the same building as Samsungs.
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Almost everything they publish is about Samsung. It's shameless:
Pages about Strategy Analytics that mention Samsung [google.co.uk].
Pages about Strategy Analytics that don't mention Samsung. [google.co.uk]
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Because it's completely unheard of for multiple companies to have headquarters in the same massive building...
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They may be in bed with Samsung but that doesn't in any way mean they are wrong or misleading (well they are publishing stats, and stats are always misleading). There's been a massively rising trend from any source you wish to cite over the past few years. The articles date well back and each says something about Android increasing market share.
For instance from the first 6 hits on Google for "Android Market Share"
4 hits were from the story here (no surprise there, latest news get priority)
1 was from the Sy
Re:“SOURCE: Strategy Analytics” (Score:5, Informative)
Let's stick to facts - they are both in one of the most prestigious part of the capital city. Alas that's not really such a great conspiracy, is it?
Expensive Apple (Score:4, Informative)
Here in Australia, Apple have completely priced themselves out of the market. ... I just bought the Nexus 5.
iPhone 5S 16 GB: $869
Compared with a brand-spanking-new:
Google Nexus 5 16 GB: $420 (inc. shipping)
It's hard to justify _double_ the price for effectively the same thing.
Needless to say
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Those prices are in line with North America as well. The Nexus 5 is a much better value than most Android phones though. The Samsung Galaxy S4 is in the same ballpark as the iPhone5. It's not just price, it's choice. You don't _have_ to buy a really expensive phone to get good performance, battery life, etc. Connectors follow standards. You can install software from different sources if you want. If you look at the iPhone 5c sales, I don't think price is what's hurting them, I think it's lock-in awareness
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The Nexus is so much cheaper than the S4 and iPhone 5 because it's sold basically at cost. Don't expect that pricing from companies that are trying to turn a profit on the hardware.
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Even more - compared to Apple, Google is selling the Nexus 5 at hardware cost and taking a very large loss on Android itself, selling it for nothing, in order to get their hands on your data.
Cheap on cost expenive on Price iPhone (Score:2)
Those prices are in line with North America as well.
America is an unusual market that has a business model by carriers that allows for highly subsidised phones. So Price has less impact as well. It has allowed the iPhone which is a cheap phone with an expensive selling price to be massively profitable (The same model in china means it commands 1%). Samsung is selling phones with more expensive features (large screen, more memory, faster processor) at a cheaper price...as a direct competitor to Apple, something you perpetuate here, and it has also made it ver
Re: (Score:2)
How the hell do you get a 15k phone bill?
And why are you bragging about your stupidity to not get a contract to accomdate your usage profile?
It's time to sue everybody! (Score:4, Informative)
Bring out the clowns (... err lawyers): http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/31/rockstar-consortium-nortel-patent-google-lawsuit/ [engadget.com]
Ahh, another no-name two-bit "analytics" firm! (Score:5, Interesting)
Ahh, another no-name two-bit "analytics" firm! It's really hard to pry numbers out of anybody but Apple regarding the number of phones that are in the hands of actual consumers. Google likes to pussyfoot around with "activations" and Samsung will tell you how many they loaded into shipping crates, but nobody actually thinks they are purposefully this obscure regarding their phone numbers for no reason. And let's not even talk about Microsoft's dishonesty regarding their sales numbers.
These analytics firms all have serious issues, as well. They may pay a developer peanuts to throw their shitware / bloatware into a free game (or even a paid app, yikes!) and they might be able to get some of the more idiotic "home page" type setups like Gawker to put their scripts up, but they only ever manage to sample a small, small number of the actual smartphone users out there.
The most reliable numbers come from the Wikipedia, a resource used by most everybody. The Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report obviates the need for shitty poo-butt bloatware "analytics" firms whose job it is to obscure an already obscure statistic, and the numbers for smartphones in September 2013 break down thusly:
Total Mobile: 29.5%, all Apple mobile OS versions: 18.1%, all Android versions: 8.47%, all Blackberry: 0.47%, all Windows Mobile: 0.33%.
Since we're only dealing with 29.5% of the total traffic to Wikimedia-related sites in the mobile category, a burst of quick math will tell us what percentage of all mobile devices are running which OS's. 61.78% of the mobile devices are Apple devices, 28.62% are Androids of ANY MAKE, 1.59% are Blackberries, and a whopping 1.11% are Windows Mobiles. This only totals to 93.1%, the rest being a bunch of other amalgamated nonsense brands like Sony or Symbian and "Linux Other" aka Nokia.
Quite a different story than the fuckin' crapware two-bit "analytics" firm's tale.
"But WAIT, RocketRabbit," you say, "We're talking third quarter here!" And to that I laugh, a big hearty har har har, as you are such a fuckin' twit that you don't realize that most of the companies out there are either flat-out lying about their numbers, aren't telling, or are going by some bullshit made-up statistic like Google's shady "activations." Oh, I know the numbers guys at lame ass investment firms need these percentages to justify quarterbacking loser companies for the next quarter, but they live in their own little fantasy world and real life facts are not important to their economic calculations.
So what's all this tell you? You're an idiot of the highest order if you think anybody but Apple is actually telling you how many phones they actually sold into the hands of consumers. And there's a reason they're not telling you, dummy!
Re: (Score:2)
Your analysis may be disputable but props for the writing flair and wit.
Apple Window Dressing Figures. (Score:3)
Ahh, another no-name two-bit "analytics" firm! It's really hard to pry numbers out of anybody but Apple regarding the number of phones that are in the hands of actual consumers. Google likes to pussyfoot around with "activations" and Samsung will tell you how many they loaded into shipping crates
Ironically for you Apple also publish "shipped" figures and they do so because they are confident they can sell their products, and I agree with them. Here is them defending their massive sales drop in iPads "Regarding iPad, Oppenheimer said the year-over-year drop in iPad numbers from 17 million to 14.6 million units was in part the tough comparison with last year’s debut f the third-generation model, with no such revamp this past spring, and also the reduction in channel inventory last quarter of 70
Re: (Score:3)
Err, the very article you link to seems to indicate that Apple publishes "sold" figures and not "shipped" figures.
Re: (Score:2)
What is it that Blackberry phones ostensibly do that other smartphones don't? Is it just that they have that little keyboard on there?
Facebook buy Blackberry (Score:2)
I'm sad to see Blackberry, a local company, getting so little love... They are still one of the best phone out there for business purpose but lack a few feature that many people take for granted these days. (an app store that doesn't s*ck and have people actually developing for it for example.)
I always hoped that Facebook would buy them. Facebook is a killer app and a perfect march for BBM. With the Rise of Twitter(supported heavily by Apple!?), and Google+(supported by well Google). I think they have both missed a real opportunity.
The cake is a lie (Score:2)
Perpetuating a lie https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1YDYUrD22Xq12nKkhBfwoJBfw2Q-OReMr0BrDfHyfyPw/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000#slide=id.g1202bd8e5_05 [google.com] here is Googles response.
The bottom line is their is a real problem with Apps stealing users data on *every* platform; it needs to be addressed, The Android lie is not only offensive; It obscures a real problem.