obody else has iTunes Store running / dominating so many different platforms.
Nobody else has Xcode with its processor-agnostic dev environment.
MS has Office, but the primary platform for that (PC) is receding.
Nobody uses office because they want to (certainly not office 2013); it's forced on users as a "standard".
Sharepoint is an impressive MS product for "the enterprise" but expensive.
Apple is driving tremendous disruption across the tech spectrum and benefiting from that change. They aren't afraid to cannibalize their own markets. No other single tech vendor manages to do this profitably.
Apple is light years ahead of the competition because their culture is "it's better to be a pirate than join the navy".
where is this bigger screen iPhone you speak of? I'd love to see it.
You will have it next year. This is the reason why Apple is pushing developers to Auto Layouts. Compared to what you have on market today it will offer:
- the best display technology
- long battery life
- ruggedness and solid structure which will not allow breaking screen glass so often
- the best software and development technology to support rapid ports of existing software, as it happened before thus reducing screen resolution fragmentation down to minimum
- unprecedented graphic speed
- single hand operation
There is a lot of factor, which have to be put together to make a good large screen phone. Competition doesn't get it. Still.
Where exactly is Apple ahead 5 years in mobile software? I wish it were the case. I wish Apple had something that blew Google Now and Google maps out of the water.
sorry but are you telling me siri doesn't blow the google search engine out of the park??
The Note III doesn't have 64bit architecture and it's no slouch in performance terms. It's GPU outperforms the 5s according to Anandtech. But seriously, the performance of all the high end phones is so impressive that arguing which one is a few percent better in specs or performance is willy waving.
In the CPU tests for the Note III in which the iPhone 5S was also tested the Note III lost 4 of the 6 tests. And that's with a higher max clock of 2.3 ghz vs the 5S at 1.3ghz, it also has double the cores and double the RAM. Pathetic...
Also, in the GPU tests the 5S won 3 of the 7 tests they were both in. In many of those losses in the rendering speed tests the 5S was only slower by 2-4% in frame rate while "Egypt HD offscreen" was the only outlier with a 20% gap over the 5S at 57 vs 69 (though the 5S was doing near 60 fps so anything much higher than that would be unnoticeable when limited by vysnc). The biggest gap was 30% but was only in a synthetic benchmark which seemed to have little relevance on real world performance. And this is again with the Note III's GPU running at higher clocks than the 5S GPU cores.
So honestly, given the enormous spec difference between the Note III and the 5S the fact that the Note III lost in nearly half of the GPU tests and more than half the CPU tests in Anandtech's article is actually quite pathetic. By specs, the Note III should have easily won every single test no problem.
I understand. Yes, there are examples where Apple is not that far ahead. iCloud vs. the superior DropBox, Apple Notes vs. EverNote, PDF Shrink vs. Apple's Preview all come to mind.
DropBox and iCloud are 2 very different concepts. First is exchanging files while the other is making apps to talk to each other over cloud, sometimes also by exchanging files. While DropBox makes superior solution for file sync, it does nothing else.
Market for so-called premium Android phones will freeze, not just cool down next year with arrival of larger screen iPhone.
Stop buying in to the delusion the large screens sell phones.
Apple's 4" iPhones sell exponentially better than everyone else's 4"+ phones. The people who buy the 4"+ phones do not use them anyway....so what is the point? Where is the gain? These people don't know any better, that's why they bought Android in the first place.
It is not easy for competitors to 'duplicate' Samsung's products as Samsung hold a lot of patents and no one can make the base components in competing volume, quality and price.
Just look at the lengths their competitors have had to go to to steal their large panel OLED TV tech - major scale industrial espionage and hijacking OLED TV display models in-transit to trade shows.
I particularly like their innovative vacuum cleaners
DropBox and iCloud are 2 very different concepts. First is exchanging files while the other is making apps to talk to each other over cloud, sometimes also by exchanging files. While DropBox makes superior solution for file sync, it does nothing else.
Thanks, Poksi. I thought about that as soon as I wrote it.
Samsung is in REAL trouble in 2014 as far as premium smartphones. It really is a 3 prong attack that will cause them not to slow down growth but lose market share at the high end ($450+ phones).
1. High end. Apple is really pushing ahead with TouchID, 64 bit, and next year the larger screen. Samsung will only get the scraps from the $650+ market next year when the bigger screen comes out.
2. Mid-level. The one advantage the S3 had was the large screen. But now all the other Android/Windows phones have large screen models. So why would you go Samsung if the Nexus/HTC/Motorola/LG have the same size screen and basically the same OS?
3. Low-level. Its a fact that Chinese makers are gaining steam. Especially Xiaomi which produces a phone that has better build quality and style than the S4 with simular specs but cost half the price. Xiaomi is selling phones at a loss and plans to make money on the services/software it sells. Then we have Amazon who will simularly release a cheap phone that undercuts Samsung. Bottom line is Samsung cannot compete with these companies that are willing to lose money on every single phone they sell.
The only way Samsung can stem the tide on the high end is to bring out a game changing technology like they did with the bigger screen of the Galaxy S2. Without that they will get crushed from all sides: high, mid, and low.
I believe you may be right that Samsung will have a tougher time next year, as it's going to be harder to differentiate itself from Apple if Apple actually produces a phone with a 5" screen. If Apple produces a 4.5 to 4.7" screen, the difference between a 5"+ will still be enough to encourage people to buy Samsung, especially the 'phablet crowd'. Why Apple hasn't released such a phone already is very hard to justify.
The MicroSD slot and replaceable battery is still a winning combination for Samsung and will continue to help it maintain share unless HTC, Sony, Google etc. decide to follow Samsung, which seems unlikely. This is clearly a non-starter for Apple!
I have tremendous respect for Xiaomi, but they are primarily a threat to Samsung only in China. I think the bigger threat to Samsung over the next few years from China will be Lenovo, who have stated that they will be going after international markets. They're obviously bigger than Xiaomi, and can also leverage their existing international presence from their PC division. Longer term, I agree with you that Xiaomi could become a force to be reckoned with.
EDIT: Just read the following from the WSJ, http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/11/06/samsung-overpowers-smartphone-rivals-in-china/ It seems Samsung is doing very well in China versus Coolpad, Huawei and ZTE phones! I've found that Chinese consumers often don't trust their own brands and are willing to pay a premium to get a 'western' brand. I can't help but wonder if that's what this article is alluding to.
One of my colleagues was showing off his new Nexus 5 to some of us yesterday, stating how with it's HD screen & 8 core processor it was much better than our iPhones!!
Specs do matter for some (which is probably why he is on his 3rd phone in 24 months and I am still happily using my iPhone 4S!)
Here's how to burst his bubble. Tell him it's actually only quad core!
Even with a fast chip Samsung still can't compete with the A7. Look at the Note3. Nice specs but it STILL LAGS. UNREAL. Google Note3 lags and you will see a ton of Youtube videos on how to stop it from lagging....most of the time.
As long as the OS is not optimized with the processor (like Apple does) Samsung will always be left behind.
But...but...but... the Galaxy Note IV will have 9001, 96-bit cores at 15 ghz, 8 TB of RAM and a 500 core GPU!! Your puny iPhone won't ever be able to compete!
And on a more fundamental note, one must wonder what will be the state of multitouch phones for Google, Samsung and others after the Rockstar Consortium trial has gotten underway. All competitors other than Apple and Microsoft (and a few others) may suddenly find themselves in a very deep ditch.
Just imagine if Rockstar is able to enforce a $7-10 per phone/device licensing fee, or a $5 fee for every search or ad click should their multiple patents score them an across the board win?
And to dog pile onto the Rockstar suits, Apple has its much stronger Multi-touch patent to go after everyone but Microsoft. The sweet thing about this patent is that Apple doesn't have to let anyone use it if they don't want to...
Gnusmas is a dangerous foe. Selling 100 Million high end phones is nothing to sneeze it - compared to 150 Million iPhones.
Gnusmas is stuck, however, in the direction to go. They are trying to out-spec Apple as always but there are now significant roadblocks.
1. Gnusmas does not own its own viable Operating System. It has to depend on Google's timetable for developing Android. Since Android is 32-bit and will have difficulty converting to 64-bit, it is obvious why Gnusmas has no solid idea when its 64-bit processors are coming out.
2. Gnusmas needs someone to copy. But Apple has made leaps which are difficult for Gnusmas to copy. This includes custom chip design and fingerprint sensors. Apple has the patents on the best fingerprint sensor technology. Gnusmas would lose the patent battle if it copies this technology. This is why it ignores discussion of fingerprint sensors or even innovation and instead talks about out-specing current designs.
3. Gnusmas has difficulty doing custom chip design. Its 8-core chip was a disaster. Gnusmas has been dependent on using stock ARM designs for its chips. Yet ARM designs need a lot of power and are slower compared to the completely custom-designed Apple A7. They have to run twice as fast and run twice as many cores as Apple's A7 just to fall short of keeping up with it. Apple's engineers are all experts in custom chip design.
4. Gnusmas doesn't do software well. Its tacked on interface to Google's Android slows down Android, is difficult to upgrade and customize by Android fans. It is several steps slow in upgrading even this limited amount of software. In contrast, Apple has done custom software since it was born. It lives in software and knows how to blend it to the hardware.
5. Gnusmas does cheap phones so often - the vast majority of what it sells - and includes cheap components to his high-end phones that it has lost any cache that its is a high end phone company. Review after review note how cheap Gnusmas's phones feel on the hands. There is no pleasure and delight to the senses when one holds a Gnusmas phone. This is why Gnusmas' high end phones are contracting in sales.
6. Google it self is cutting Gnusmas' throat by selling its Nexus phones AT COST. Customers can get Google's high end Android phone at half the cost of Gnusmas' high end phones. And Google doesn't care about making profit on Android hardware since 95% of its profits are from ads sold through the software on its phones. This puts Samsung in a bind. This forces Gnusmas into a race to the bottom with lower profits. Talk about the mother eating her young or throwing them to the hungry low-end Chinese tigers.
Samsung can produce an 8 cores ARMv8 SoC if they want, but since they are not a software shop they can't go alone without Google. Android is a least 6 month behind Apple to 64 bit transition, we still yet to see how they would manage it considering their heterogenous development platform.
Comments
Silly rabbit, trix are for kids.
E C O S Y S T E M. N
obody else has iTunes Store running / dominating so many different platforms.
Nobody else has Xcode with its processor-agnostic dev environment.
MS has Office, but the primary platform for that (PC) is receding.
Nobody uses office because they want to (certainly not office 2013); it's forced on users as a "standard".
Sharepoint is an impressive MS product for "the enterprise" but expensive.
Apple is driving tremendous disruption across the tech spectrum and benefiting from that change. They aren't afraid to cannibalize their own markets. No other single tech vendor manages to do this profitably.
Apple is light years ahead of the competition because their culture is "it's better to be a pirate than join the navy".
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/an-Pczu422bmhbb2t/the_meaning_of_life_1983_the_very_big_corporation_of_america/
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/an-Pczu4444th2mm/the_meaning_of_life_1983_the_very_big_corporation_of_america_part_2/
Great points, Vapor!
It's Apple's biggest competitor, and they are driving certain market trends, such as larger screens.
Yes. They are also driving the trends of broken screens to very high percentage.
Clickbait insider
Seriously. So does Qualcomm and all the other ARM chip makers.
where is this bigger screen iPhone you speak of? I'd love to see it.
You will have it next year. This is the reason why Apple is pushing developers to Auto Layouts. Compared to what you have on market today it will offer:
- the best display technology
- long battery life
- ruggedness and solid structure which will not allow breaking screen glass so often
- the best software and development technology to support rapid ports of existing software, as it happened before thus reducing screen resolution fragmentation down to minimum
- unprecedented graphic speed
- single hand operation
There is a lot of factor, which have to be put together to make a good large screen phone. Competition doesn't get it. Still.
Where exactly is Apple ahead 5 years in mobile software? I wish it were the case. I wish Apple had something that blew Google Now and Google maps out of the water.
sorry but are you telling me siri doesn't blow the google search engine out of the park??
The Note III doesn't have 64bit architecture and it's no slouch in performance terms. It's GPU outperforms the 5s according to Anandtech. But seriously, the performance of all the high end phones is so impressive that arguing which one is a few percent better in specs or performance is willy waving.
In the CPU tests for the Note III in which the iPhone 5S was also tested the Note III lost 4 of the 6 tests. And that's with a higher max clock of 2.3 ghz vs the 5S at 1.3ghz, it also has double the cores and double the RAM. Pathetic...
Also, in the GPU tests the 5S won 3 of the 7 tests they were both in. In many of those losses in the rendering speed tests the 5S was only slower by 2-4% in frame rate while "Egypt HD offscreen" was the only outlier with a 20% gap over the 5S at 57 vs 69 (though the 5S was doing near 60 fps so anything much higher than that would be unnoticeable when limited by vysnc). The biggest gap was 30% but was only in a synthetic benchmark which seemed to have little relevance on real world performance. And this is again with the Note III's GPU running at higher clocks than the 5S GPU cores.
So honestly, given the enormous spec difference between the Note III and the 5S the fact that the Note III lost in nearly half of the GPU tests and more than half the CPU tests in Anandtech's article is actually quite pathetic. By specs, the Note III should have easily won every single test no problem.
I understand. Yes, there are examples where Apple is not that far ahead. iCloud vs. the superior DropBox, Apple Notes vs. EverNote, PDF Shrink vs. Apple's Preview all come to mind.
DropBox and iCloud are 2 very different concepts. First is exchanging files while the other is making apps to talk to each other over cloud, sometimes also by exchanging files. While DropBox makes superior solution for file sync, it does nothing else.
64 bit
Liquid metal
M7
Saffire
its all coming together in iPhone6. Competition will take 2 years to catch up.
I'm actually taking for granted all of the above.
Yes, iPhone6 will be the riot. Competitors in so-called premium range will loose the last argument. Their investors should be worried.
Who cares about Samsung, Apple Insider?
Market for so-called premium Android phones will freeze, not just cool down next year with arrival of larger screen iPhone.
Stop buying in to the delusion the large screens sell phones.
Apple's 4" iPhones sell exponentially better than everyone else's 4"+ phones. The people who buy the 4"+ phones do not use them anyway....so what is the point? Where is the gain? These people don't know any better, that's why they bought Android in the first place.
It is not easy for competitors to 'duplicate' Samsung's products as Samsung hold a lot of patents and no one can make the base components in competing volume, quality and price.
Just look at the lengths their competitors have had to go to to steal their large panel OLED TV tech - major scale industrial espionage and hijacking OLED TV display models in-transit to trade shows.
I particularly like their innovative vacuum cleaners
DropBox and iCloud are 2 very different concepts. First is exchanging files while the other is making apps to talk to each other over cloud, sometimes also by exchanging files. While DropBox makes superior solution for file sync, it does nothing else.
Thanks, Poksi. I thought about that as soon as I wrote it.
march, march, march, march.....
Samsung is in REAL trouble in 2014 as far as premium smartphones. It really is a 3 prong attack that will cause them not to slow down growth but lose market share at the high end ($450+ phones).
1. High end. Apple is really pushing ahead with TouchID, 64 bit, and next year the larger screen. Samsung will only get the scraps from the $650+ market next year when the bigger screen comes out.
2. Mid-level. The one advantage the S3 had was the large screen. But now all the other Android/Windows phones have large screen models. So why would you go Samsung if the Nexus/HTC/Motorola/LG have the same size screen and basically the same OS?
3. Low-level. Its a fact that Chinese makers are gaining steam. Especially Xiaomi which produces a phone that has better build quality and style than the S4 with simular specs but cost half the price. Xiaomi is selling phones at a loss and plans to make money on the services/software it sells. Then we have Amazon who will simularly release a cheap phone that undercuts Samsung. Bottom line is Samsung cannot compete with these companies that are willing to lose money on every single phone they sell.
The only way Samsung can stem the tide on the high end is to bring out a game changing technology like they did with the bigger screen of the Galaxy S2. Without that they will get crushed from all sides: high, mid, and low.
I believe you may be right that Samsung will have a tougher time next year, as it's going to be harder to differentiate itself from Apple if Apple actually produces a phone with a 5" screen. If Apple produces a 4.5 to 4.7" screen, the difference between a 5"+ will still be enough to encourage people to buy Samsung, especially the 'phablet crowd'. Why Apple hasn't released such a phone already is very hard to justify.
The MicroSD slot and replaceable battery is still a winning combination for Samsung and will continue to help it maintain share unless HTC, Sony, Google etc. decide to follow Samsung, which seems unlikely. This is clearly a non-starter for Apple!
I have tremendous respect for Xiaomi, but they are primarily a threat to Samsung only in China. I think the bigger threat to Samsung over the next few years from China will be Lenovo, who have stated that they will be going after international markets. They're obviously bigger than Xiaomi, and can also leverage their existing international presence from their PC division. Longer term, I agree with you that Xiaomi could become a force to be reckoned with.
EDIT: Just read the following from the WSJ, http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/11/06/samsung-overpowers-smartphone-rivals-in-china/ It seems Samsung is doing very well in China versus Coolpad, Huawei and ZTE phones! I've found that Chinese consumers often don't trust their own brands and are willing to pay a premium to get a 'western' brand. I can't help but wonder if that's what this article is alluding to.
One of my colleagues was showing off his new Nexus 5 to some of us yesterday, stating how with it's HD screen & 8 core processor it was much better than our iPhones!!
Specs do matter for some (which is probably why he is on his 3rd phone in 24 months and I am still happily using my iPhone 4S!)
Here's how to burst his bubble. Tell him it's actually only quad core!
Even with a fast chip Samsung still can't compete with the A7. Look at the Note3. Nice specs but it STILL LAGS. UNREAL. Google Note3 lags and you will see a ton of Youtube videos on how to stop it from lagging....most of the time.
As long as the OS is not optimized with the processor (like Apple does) Samsung will always be left behind.
But...but...but... the Galaxy Note IV will have 9001, 96-bit cores at 15 ghz, 8 TB of RAM and a 500 core GPU!! Your puny iPhone won't ever be able to compete!
And to dog pile onto the Rockstar suits, Apple has its much stronger Multi-touch patent to go after everyone but Microsoft. The sweet thing about this patent is that Apple doesn't have to let anyone use it if they don't want to...
Gnusmas is stuck, however, in the direction to go. They are trying to out-spec Apple as always but there are now significant roadblocks.
1. Gnusmas does not own its own viable Operating System. It has to depend on Google's timetable for developing Android. Since Android is 32-bit and will have difficulty converting to 64-bit, it is obvious why Gnusmas has no solid idea when its 64-bit processors are coming out.
2. Gnusmas needs someone to copy. But Apple has made leaps which are difficult for Gnusmas to copy. This includes custom chip design and fingerprint sensors. Apple has the patents on the best fingerprint sensor technology. Gnusmas would lose the patent battle if it copies this technology. This is why it ignores discussion of fingerprint sensors or even innovation and instead talks about out-specing current designs.
3. Gnusmas has difficulty doing custom chip design. Its 8-core chip was a disaster. Gnusmas has been dependent on using stock ARM designs for its chips. Yet ARM designs need a lot of power and are slower compared to the completely custom-designed Apple A7. They have to run twice as fast and run twice as many cores as Apple's A7 just to fall short of keeping up with it. Apple's engineers are all experts in custom chip design.
4. Gnusmas doesn't do software well. Its tacked on interface to Google's Android slows down Android, is difficult to upgrade and customize by Android fans. It is several steps slow in upgrading even this limited amount of software. In contrast, Apple has done custom software since it was born. It lives in software and knows how to blend it to the hardware.
5. Gnusmas does cheap phones so often - the vast majority of what it sells - and includes cheap components to his high-end phones that it has lost any cache that its is a high end phone company. Review after review note how cheap Gnusmas's phones feel on the hands. There is no pleasure and delight to the senses when one holds a Gnusmas phone. This is why Gnusmas' high end phones are contracting in sales.
6. Google it self is cutting Gnusmas' throat by selling its Nexus phones AT COST. Customers can get Google's high end Android phone at half the cost of Gnusmas' high end phones. And Google doesn't care about making profit on Android hardware since 95% of its profits are from ads sold through the software on its phones. This puts Samsung in a bind. This forces Gnusmas into a race to the bottom with lower profits. Talk about the mother eating her young or throwing them to the hungry low-end Chinese tigers.
Samsung can produce an 8 cores ARMv8 SoC if they want, but since they are not a software shop they can't go alone without Google. Android is a least 6 month behind Apple to 64 bit transition, we still yet to see how they would manage it considering their heterogenous development platform.