Quote:
Originally Posted by solipsism 
I read his use of the term want to specifically imply desire, not a feasible choice. Its obvious he knows that dumb phones are the vast majority of phones being sold in the world. The iPhone simply isnt a viable option for the hundreds of millions of customers buying/getting phones every year and when you look at how the handset vendors are trying to copy and/or trump the iPhone its not unreasonable to make that statement about want.
In your defense, I wouldnt use the term hardly anybody without qualifying it more since I would wager that most of worlds 4.8(?) Billion people have never seen an iPhone.
I read his use of the term want to specifically imply desire, not a feasible choice. Its obvious he knows that dumb phones are the vast majority of phones being sold in the world. The iPhone simply isnt a viable option for the hundreds of millions of customers buying/getting phones every year and when you look at how the handset vendors are trying to copy and/or trump the iPhone its not unreasonable to make that statement about want.
In your defense, I wouldnt use the term hardly anybody without qualifying it more since I would wager that most of worlds 4.8(?) Billion people have never seen an iPhone.
The point of my observation is that most people prefer a phone with well-implemented features. I don't know anyone who prefers a different kind, i.e., a "dumb" phone (which, once again, I will put in quotes, so it will be perfectly clear that I wasn't referring to everything that we don't currently call a smartphone). A lot of "dumb" phones have some fairly advanced features, they are just so badly done that hardly anyone uses them.
The primary problem with the "smartphone" category is that for a long time it was populated with devices with poorly implemented advanced features. This greatly reduced the audience for them, restricting their popularity to those who either have enough need for the features to overcome their basic clumsiness, and/or people who are geeky enough to want to use them.
I didn't think it was overly controversial to suggest that the iPhone has gone a long way towards erasing the line between what we've been calling "smartphones" and the rest of the mobile phone market. IMO, the audience for the iPhone is not just the people who were buying smartphones before the iPhone. It seems to be a much broader audience, including a lot of people who were stuck using "dumb" phones before, not because they have no desire for the advanced features, but because before the iPhone these features were so poorly implemented. That's why I prefer to look at Apple's share of the worldwide mobile phone market, rather than their share of the increasingly irrelevant smartphone category.
I will also take a not-so-wild stab at the future and suggest that in a few years, most phones will have features that are considered advanced today. Email and web access will be considered standard features, just as texting is today. The company which figures out how to deliver this, wins big.
Please don't be insane.
Please don't be insane.
