Gartner's iPhone, Android predictions radically revised in a year and a half - Page 4

There isn't any doubt that Apple will produce a cheaper iPhone which will be cheaper than all but the bottom 20% of Android phones. They do that with iPods while still keeping their margins on higher models. Meanwhile the sell em cheap manufacturers only have tiny
margins which can be wiped out by component shortages. As one of the biggest electronics manufacturers in the world and the biggest in revenue in this space it has the upper hand.

The category error people like you make is to assume that cheap Chinese manufacturers have less costs, but all mobile phone manufacturers are mere integrators of parts built elsewhere. Apple can undercut ZTE if it wants.

iPod Touch

At the end of discussed article the author write that WP have to grow by 1,790 percents to meet Gartner's prediction. How he got this number? Growing from 4 (2011) to 20 percent (2015 market share) definitely is not an 1,790 percents...

Anyone?

What you might not be considering (but you may), is that Apple doesn't build any of these things themselves. Some manufacturers somewhere are supposedly making a profit by doing so. As an extreme example Foxconn themselves could build a phone largely identical to the iPhone4, sell it to the telcos for the same price they sell to Apple, yet still make money (assuming they make one selling to Apple). For Apple to undercut them would require selling at loss, something Apple could certainly do. There can be benefits to a "loss-leader".

HTC assembles their own handsets rather than farming out the production, thus may have lower actual costs than Apple does. Or perhaps not. I don't think either Apple or HTC is going to be so forthcoming.

Not sure if other students are doing this but I find the cheapest

textbooks by using a price comparison site like <a href="http://www.bookase.com/">my link</a> and then when it comes time to sell, I can also find the best buyback prices among
all the online bookstores.

Gartner is a Microsoft pay shrill. They are paid to say whatever their clients fancy. It's like the Republican war machine.

Dilger does opinion pieces for AI, not news articles. The real numbers probably didn't pop enough.

In any case it doesn't detract from his credibility.

Not so fast. I've posted regarding this in the past... but once again, Nokia with 37% of the market world-wide, will more than likely drop Symbian, and every phone they produce will be WinMo7.

Basically... the so-called "feature phone" will cease to exist within a couple years time, and every phone will be a "smart-phone".

But then what?

In the case of iOS and "some" devices made by HTC, Moto, Samsung, etc... I think there already needs to be a separate qualifier i.e. a higher category of "Super-Smart", or "Super-Spec" phones. Just calling them Android, iOS, or WinMo7 does NOT tell the whole picture, nor does it qualify cheap phones to be considered "smart-phones" only due to their installed OS.

Same as with the tablet category. Lumping all of the cheap-Android-trash, with "capable" higher-spec'ed devices, doesn't do anybody any favors, least of all Google. You would think that they would understand that, and I think they are starting to get it by locking down Honeycomb.

I'm a proud Apple-fanboi, but I also enjoy seeing ALL tech advance. I'm asked many times in my job to justify purchases, often times in the, "isn't this good enough" category, and some times I have to admit that the "Ford" (Android/WinMo) will do just fine (with caveats), whereas the "Porsche" (iOS/Android Super-Spec) very well could be overkill, considering the budget as well.

I want to see the break-downs in devices sold and used... not the market-share of their respected OS. That's so 1990's.

NOTE: Currently, many very good Android-based phones are "free", and are a normal upgrade for a new "phone" for many people. Many (if not most) people never did anything with their phones before other than phone, SMS, and take a picture or 2.

It certainly wouldn't surprise me to hear, that those same people with a "smart-phone" in their hands now, are using them the same exact way as their old "feature phone". That would go a long way towards explaining the skewed Google Analytics and stats me thinks

You might have meant shill. I'm not sure what benefit Microsoft would get from paying Gartner to screech for them.

Seriously, none of this Gartner nonsense matters except to Gartner.

"Last prediction wasn't very accurate " is the operative sentence. Gartner does not have a stellar record on predicting the future.

I would not count MS out - they have lots of money and they do have a very profitable and sustained software franchise in Windows and MS Office, Like it or not these two dominate the world of desktop.

Both Google and MS via their 3rd party manufacturers could make the cost of entry for new smartphone users cheap enough that Android and MS will dominate the market. However that may be on the backs of new users not people who currently use iOS. So Apple will continue to gain new users maybe at a slower pace. Once new users get used to the capabilities of smartphone then they will likely switch to a TRUE smartphone, iPhone.

So no matter how the market goes, Apple wins.

Doesn't take a rocket scientist to make a "prediction" like this. Give me a break Gartner, you overrated source of nothing.

Everyone arguing about selling price to the consumer being some indication of worthiness is ridiculous. IMO, the only reason you don't see an iPhone being offered free is apple won't allow it. It doesn't jibe with the way it's marketed as a "premium" device. The fact that some Android phone is offered as Buy one/Get one is not, in and of itself, any evidence at all that the iPhone 3GS at $50 is the better device. So the telcos use Android to draw 'em in. They'd at least use old Apple models if it was allowed.

Just remember the kind if phones, smart or otherwise, we all had when the telcos had full sway. Including Android prototypes...

ITunes is a good example. When they started, in order to reach even the minority of people who had "high speed" internet, they had to serve music at the ridiculous 128,000 bps rate that has now become standard. They have pretty well destroyed the CD market, and worse yet, they've conditioned a generation to look at anyone who still wants tolerable music as if they're one of those lunatics who put green magic marker on the edge of their CDs or buy $50,000 speaker cables.

The demise of DVDs is now being predicted the same waystreaming of worse-than-cable video is replacing DVDs as we speak. "Videophile" will become the same kind of contemptuous epithet as "audiophile" is now.

The Blu-Ray market will simply be destroyed before it even takes off. Heavily-compressed 720p will become the new "HD"and before you say so, yes, without compression artifacts you can tell the difference between 720 lines and 1080.

All this because a few propellerheadsnot just at Apple, but they've had the marketing success to take this mistake mainstreamhave grossly overestimated the current or foreseeable-future capabilities of online distribution.

The irony is that for this decade compression quality won't matter much because most movies have become so lousy anyways. I get more cinematic experiences from video games nowadays. 1080p 50mbit/sec 3D of rubbish is still rubbish.

It's almost as though for mainstream music and films, things have gone to the lowest, lowest common denominator in both qualitative and compression quality.

1) Your defense of CD audio as high quality is not a sound argument.

2) HD cable is much better than DVD quality.

3) Its the consumers as a whole that have made streaming, downloadable and on-demand media popular. In pretty much every technological shift the consumer will chose the most convenient. Thats the nature of things: Life is opportunistic, not quixotic.

They really have some engaging stories, but video games do have the advantage of long form to play out like a novel. You can expand and embellish the storyline well past the 2 hour average for movies. Id imagine one of the hardest parts to making a movie might be what not to include in the script and in editing when taking from a more involved story line.

Gartner's three year guesses are very unimaginative. it's all about the total ecosystem, not the individual pieces in isolation. i guess that:

- iPhone will continue to hold 20-25% of the smartphone market. and Android about half (but very fragmented by the OEM's). with all the others - RIM, WP, and "other" (proprietary OEM OS's like Bada, etc.) - splitting up the remainder.

- i don't think Apple will come out with an iPhone Nano - an iOS feature phone with few apps, like a 2009 iPod Nano with a phone. it wouldn't add much to the iOS ecosystem. unless ... it really was a cool wrist watch/phone with complete voice UI. that would be special enuff for Apple.

- i do expect a, say, 5.5" iPod touch this Fall. there is a distinct market segment there, especially for kids and gaming (vs. the PSP and DSI), that Apple can expand into and hold. but never a 7" iPad. added all together, i expect these three iOS tablets to hold 70% of the market long term, like the iPod has.

- that leaves TV as the big question. Apple can't ignore the huge TV market, still the centerpiece of every home. Apple TV is nice and could do a lot more with apps added, but no third party STB (Roku, GoogleTV, TiVo, etc.) is going to lead the situation. everyone - TV OEM's, cablecos, etc. - are building apps into their hardware now too. AirPlay is a way to project the iOS ecosystem into any product, and Apple is licensing it now. but the OEM's and cablecos don't want to let Apple into their own walled gardens, so i expect very few will license it. talk about fragmentation! Apple could sell its own brand of TV's of course with iOS built in. but sales would be modest at best. so i don't think so. Apple needs to cut an AirPlay deal with several of the major TV OEM's that don't compete directly with it otherwise. so not Sony or Samsung. Panasonic? Vizio?

Jean-Louis Gassée just released an article on that very topic.

•

http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/04/10...e-iphone-nano/

this is totally off topic, but i wonder if apple will change the way of naming iphones in the future. in twenty years, discussing the rumors around 'iphone 25' just doesn't sound right lol

Imagine what the cellphone technology was like 20 years ago…

(click for larger image)
Now imagine that difference between today’s iPhone and try to apply that to 20 years in the future. I don’t think we can possibly have a clue of what to expect then except for some basic generalities.


According to Wikipedia the first GSM (2G) network, Radiolinja now Elisa, launched in Finland in 1991. We’ve come a long way.

didn't mean the features, but just the name. now we have an iphone 4 and an iphone 5 maybe comming out soon, but as the years progress iphone 10, iphone 20 etc just sounds weird... other than that, the features of it in 25 years, no one can guess what they will be...

If only it where as easy to buy off consumers as it was to buy off Gartner.

I think iPod sounded weird and iPad still sounds lame but you get used to a name so it really doesn’t matter in the end. My point about technology changing was a subtle way of stating that we don’t even know how the tech and market or consumer will evolve, yet at least with technology there are certain trends that are tangible. If we can’t predict that for 2.5 decades we certainly can’t predict a marketing name.

Steve Jobs will have passed way for a long time, very few current Apple employees will still be at the company, the CEO at that time is probably still in college. There might not even be a product called the iPhone, any cellphone from Apple, or even a company called Apple by then. It’s eons away in CE time.

Note that only one iPhone has been giving a non-lettered numerical value in accordance to its generation: iPhone 4. The G1 model was simply called iPhone, the G2 model was called iPhone 3G in association with the network in connected to; the G3 model was given in an S to mean speed due to the ARM v7 Cortex-A8 improvement over the ARM v6 ARM11 CPU. If they don’t release another iPhone until they include access to some carrier’s 4G network, like LTE or HSPA+ then I’d think the G5 model would be called iPhone 4G.


edit: Here is perhaps something to think about. Consider those 1950s videos of the homes of the future. What they did was take some bleeding edge concepts and technology and predict the future of that tech, but what they always failed to do was include how society would evolve because of this new technology or how technology would be accepted or rejected due to changes in the society. They always had the housewife at home doing the dishes and cooking, but now she had more time for some other “womanly” activity because of the extra free time offered by the tech.

I think perhaps that he meant - flatten-out - as in hit a period where growth rate is not such as it is today.

And to the post that mentioned Android growing at a faster rate than iOS - that is a basic error regarding statistics that is often made. (making up numbers here) If Apple has already sold 30 million devices and this year only sell 3 million more that is 10% which sounds very low compared to the Android sales this year of 90% compared to total sales so far - that sounds impressive but if total sales up to now is only 100,000 then 90% of that number is only 90,000 - a far cry from 3 million.

Or in other words - if I am traveling at 100 miles per hour and I increase my speed by 10%, how fast am I going? 110 miles per hour. And if you start at the same point I did and are traveling at 20 miles per hour - and you increase your speed by 200%, how fast will you be going? 60 miles per hour. And how long do you think it will take you to catch up to me? and of course your next speed increase from 60 to 120 will not be another 200% increase but only 100%, what happened, why has your rate of growth fallen off? and in the mean time I have increased another 10% so now I am going 121 mph - have you caught up to me yet?

Steve Jobs will live forever. Ask anyone.

Very good analysis. Another mistake people make is seeing this sudden takeoff and thinking it's the beginning of an exponential expansion, when it's just the bottom of a sigmoid curve, and then are surprised when it approaches saturation and levels out.

Has Android reached saturation? Who knows? I'm willing to bet they've taken a big bite out of the steep part of the curve this last year, though. Yes, there will always be some high-end Android phones in competition with the iPhone, but the big surge of first-time upgraders from dumb phones is, if not used up, at least approaching it. Will they be trapped for life into the "Android" ecosystem? Again, who knows? I think a lot of them will stay there because they use their "smart" phones the same way they use their dumb phones and see no reason to change. Those who make any use of smart phone features will see how limited and fragmented the "Android" marketplace is and move on.

While your basic premise is absolutely true, the fact remains that Android has grown at a much faster pace than iOS over the past 16 months. If not, how would you explain Android now having a higher smartphone market share than iOS?

You agree with his premise and then go on to show you don't understand it. Besides, is it really necessary to explain something that probably isn't true to begin with? You're conflating "market share" with "installed base" for one thing. Android hasn't approached iOS's installed base yet. Secondly, you're lumping dozens of incompatible OSs together as "Android" (Yes, I know you can't see that, but, oh well....) while simultaneously failing to add all the non-iPhone iOS devices to their total. Typical "lying with statistics".

By your logic of "having a higher smartphone market share [by number of units] as the determinator of growth then you have to assume that RiMs BB OS is growing the fastest. Yet the reality is the opposite.

Why is Android at such a weak 26%? Why are they barely besting Apples unit marketshare and well behind RiM when neither on RiM nor Apple sell or give away their OS? Why doesnt Android have a monopoly when I keep hearing how superior in every way it is while being free and having a plethora of options to choose from?

And you keep using the term grown and faster pace without any qualifiers, just as you failed to use any when stating the marketshare. You also arent qualifying the time frame for these activations. Sure, Eric Schmidt said they were activating 300k per day, but you havent accounted for a great many factors. For instance, is that an average of the entire 2010 year, for a fiscal quarter, that or the previous months average, or simply some single, record breaking day?

The Zune also had record breaking sales for some wonky timeframe that made it look impressive for some cheap marketing but look where that is now.

We see an increase in iPhone sales during the Summer when a new model comes out but is it right to say the iPhone is activations are 600k per day and ignore that it was only for a weekend? Some might jump on that stat but I dont think its valid as stated.

Q: If you take all iPhones and all Android-based smart phones which one was activated on more units in the calendar year 2010?

In the example I posted a page back I did in fact include iPnones, iPods and iPads in the total sales figures. Read it again if in doubt.

Here's the reason the OP's figures don't demonstrate anything. He's referring to a statistical process, which is correct. (Picked that up in business school myself) Unless he then takes the time to follow thru with plugging figures into his statistical model, there's no result, thus no claim he can make that Android is NOT growing faster than iOS.

Rather than post several links to sources showing that Android currently has a larger market than iOS in smartphones, it might be easier if you could find one that shows the opposite. I have never claimed that there's a larger installed base of Android devices than iOS, tho there is a remote possibility that that may happen in 2011. So your attempt to change the terms of the discussion doesn't make me wrong.

But why does that matter anyway? iOS still has the bulk of the profits, which is all that really matters in business.

Youre still ignoring the facts yet at the same time you do realize that the iPhone takes the "bulk of the profits from the handset market.

Market share isnt just a comment about number of units. It can also be expressed in terms of revenue. Again, what time frame are you using here? What happens when you use a full year or move it to the first full quarter in which the iPhone is released.

How much revenue does Android take? Being a free OS it takes zero profit directly from Android OS.

If you want to slide to Android-based handset then tell me why you think its fair in business to put every handset maker that is using Android against one handset maker? Why would anyone think that dozens of handset makers wouldnt be able to sell more units than a single handset maker when grouped in such a way?

Sorry to keep harping on the same old theme but I try to put these stats in perspective and align them with my own personal experiences, otherwise I have this nagging feeling that something is not right.

Where are all these Androids? I live in OC SoCal and I'm out and about all the time. I have never actually seen an Android in the wild. My co-worker has one and so does my neighbor but everywhere I go in public all I see is iPhones and Blackberrys. Plus, from my earlier thread that my server logs don't show any Androids, I'm continuing to doubt all these Android out selling iPhone reports as bogus. There are 20 or so people in my office, one Android the rest are iPhones and Blackberrys, in about equal in number.

Yeah but if you walk into a coffee shop in SoCal youd think that Mac is only computer on the market and FaceBook was the only thing you could do with it.

Seriously though, wasnt there some report after Schmidts 300k activations per day comment that said that also included updates and restores and the like, which would make completely bogus compared to actual iPhone sales activations as reported by AT&T and Apple?

Actually no I didn't, because there are not seven "different versions" There are a max of 6, with a majority being 2.1 and later.

And yes, there are dozens of manufacturers. Here's the thing: That doesn't matter in over 90% of cases. Because no matter WHO makes the device, or what version of android it's running it can still run the same apps.

That's what I've been saying since the start. You just don't get it yet.

Here are the publically released versions of android:
1.5
1.6 (1.5 and 1.6 combined make up less than 6% of the android distribution)
2.0/2.1 (The only 2.0 device was the OG droid)
2.2
2.3
3.0 (Which just came out, so it wouldn't have been in any "statements" you remember me saying)

Yes, there might be hundreds of third party builds (roms, etc) but they're not shipping to customers. And China's fork doesn't have market access, or connection to most google services.

Google's Methodology is to check devices that ping the market for the first time. It doesn't include updates or restores (and Google released a press release for this). Steve Jobs implied that they were counting Restores in one of his many Android rants, but there was never any report, and Google quickly released a statement that clarified their position.

Yes, because our conversation was about phones, so let's throw in a non-phone device, shall we?

Exhibit A: http://www.rovio.com/index.php?mact=...t01returnid=58

I guess running shouldnt be confused with useable. Hell, I can get Photoshop running on a netbook but that doesnt mean its an experience anyone would consider decent.

No. First of all, every major company who produces android also produces devices with different operating systems.

HTC: Windows, Android, Brew
Motorola: Android, Brew, Feature
Samsung: Android, Brew, Feature, Windows, Bada

When they report their numbers, they report total numbers. Sure, they may highlight that Android was their big seller but they'll rarely report android numbers separately.

That's why the article I linked is a pretty valid look at "hard numbers" They looked at over TWELVE MILLION devices. Is that every single one? no, but it's a heck of a lot of them, and furthermore, the company collecting the data has a large presence on mobile sites.

Secondly, I'm not going to take my time to find data, because you don't care about data. You're the first to demand that other's furnish proof, and I have yet to see you EVER provide any evidence to back up your claim on your own. Even in this thread, when I merely asked you the NAME of the cheap device you saw, you said you "couldn't be bothered" to remember it.

I don't do lazy people's homework.