What I've been arguing all along on Seeking Alpha is that the 5C is not really a new model and was never meant to be a new model. Apple has typically reduced the price of the previous year model by $100 with the release of a new flagship phone. This time, they did the same thing, but reduced the production cost. Everyone was arguing that the 5C would reduce margins when in fact, it actually increased it. All the 5C had to do was sell better than the previous year's 4S did when the 5 came out. And it did. By a lot.
So the Yugo he just bought from an eastern-bloc country known for cows and land mines is better than one made in Germany??
So your phone is such a better deal since it is a total piece of crap that you (or anyone else) couldn't care less about what happens to it?
..not sure if serious...
Well if "one of these" is an easily verifiable iOS app developer with 30 years of working with Apple products then yes that is me. I am surrounded with stacks of iOS devices. The shelves behind me are a wall of Apple products that looks more like an Apple Store. None of this prevents me from having an objective opinion about the relative capabilities of a $40 Android phone compared to a $550 Apple phone. If price is not an issue that certainly the iPhone 5c is much better in all ways except the screen size and lack of an FM radio (a minor feature I know). However you cannot ignore the price. The Apple phone is almost 14 times more expensive. At some point you have to admit that the 5c is a tough sell for a second rate iPhone.
- Missing true USB ports. Just connect a USB pendrive to share files.
- Missing a decent file system (like the Mac has). Just connect a USB pendrive to see and share files.
- Jailed. Just connect a USB pendrive to share files.
- Sanboxed files and applications. Open any file with any application.
- Expensive. Price should be slashed in half.
Those are deal breakers for hundreds of millions of people. Will Apple learn or will it go the path of the Mac and iOS will eventually become a niche market?
One of the most replied-to posts ever.
As I recall, Apple was criticized for introducing USB. And SCSI and FireWire and non-VGA and … well, you get the idea.
Take it to the cloud, dude.
Now if someone would make a USB card or paper tape reader, or a USB 9-track tape drive, I would feel differently about keeping USB. (maybe the do) I have some old momentos I'd like to look back thru after I retire in a couple years.
Chad or chadless pt?
Here's a 729 for mag tape:
Now, if we could only get a cartridge reader on it
I hear that the A8 APU will use magneto restrictive delay lines instead of RAM.
Mmm ... I do have a cartridge from a DataCell, around here ... Someplace ...
I wrote on another blog last year that the iPhone 5C was selling very well, based on my own observations at a local Apple Store. Not only that, I owned several 5C's myself and found them to be, as many others have, excellent phones. But it seems to me that you miss the real culprits in this scenario: the Apple-centric media who almost without exception panned the 5C and its sales as you hav panned the Moto X in this article. On the other hand, your article fails to account for the fact that the Moto X despite poor sales was almost universally acclaimed as the best Android phone of 2013. The failure of the Moto X to match iPhone sales had nothing to do with the quality of the phone. It had more to do with poor marketing decisions on the part of Motorola or Google, e.g. limiting initial sales and Moto maker to only one carrier, and a less than stellar TV ad campaign. A testimony to the Moto X's superb innovations can be found in the latest (June 2014) issue of MacLife magazine, in an article about what the writer hopes will be contained in the upcoming iOS8. The Moto X and several of its innovations are mentioned specifically as well worthy of Apple's consideration.
So you think that Motorola's success in the UK impeaches the OP's thesis? In the USA, we have a saying: "That's the exception that proves the rule." Your fixation on the Motorola's success in the UK reminds me of a product introduction in the 1980s. That was the Coca Cola formula change to "New Coke." New Coke was a success in Detroit, Michigan. However, it was a failure everywhere else, its success in Detroit notwithstanding.
That's news to those of us living in the Detroit area. Do you have a source for that claim?
I don't know how Tim Cook can say 85% of purchasers go the iPhone 4S are new to iOS . When I purchased one for my wife from an Apple store no one asked me any questions like this and when I took out a monthly contract for an iPhone 5 no questions were asked either.
I'm sure they can be extremely accurate in these figures as every iPhone has to be activated against an Apple ID and they will know whether that Apple ID has previously had any other iPhones / iPads / iPod Touch activated against it or not... No previous activations = new to iPhone as it is extremely unlikely that people are going to create a new Apple ID for every new device because they'd lose all previous App purchases, etc if they did.
I am very much an Apple fan but I have to say that factoring in the price, the larger screen, the FM radio and the Google apps and features, the $40 Android smart phone I just purchased from Amazon is a better phone than the Apple 5c. For one thing, you could carry this Android phone around and never worry about it getting damaged, lost or stolen. Neither it or the iPhone 5c can resist water damage but at least with the Android phone I am only out $40 in the worst case. The 5c will cost you $550 to replace since Apple Care does not cover water damage.
The article isn't arguing a subjective opinion that the 5c is a "better phone" that everyone "should" be buying.
It's arguing objectively the plain facts of commercial success. Over the past 6 months, Apple sold a huge number of 5c units at sustainable profit margins that will enable it to continue developing new products in the future, while Google lost $700 million establishing tiny market share gains in a few areas with phones it won't even be selling in the future, because it offloaded Motorola to Lenovo.
You can argue an option about what you personally find likable in a given product, but you can't argue the facts. 5c was very successful and Motorola was very unsuccessful. That's not even really all that surprising given the experience, ecosystem and inertia behind Apple vs the lack of experience and the weakness of Android as a platform that Google was coping with.
What is surprising is that the media would work so hard to spin failure as success and success as failure.
It's impossible to look through tech news reports and not see blatant dishonesty and an incredible double standard between Apple being browbeat over invented problems that aren't really problems while "Android" is given pass after pass despite severe problems that are threatening its very viability, not to mention harming the experience of users who end up stuck with devices that can't/won't be upgraded.
Also, you can Liquipel your iPhone for $60 if you're worried about water damage.
Analcysts. Pundits on Google and Samsung's payroll to talk up their garbage products while bashing Apple for not being like them (thank god). They all remind me of a secretary that bashes Apple products, but still dosen't know how to manage their Outlook inbox or annotate a simple pdf document on their "simple" windows computer. A bunch of tech idiots that hate Apple because it is "so different" when they all basically do the same damn thing damn near the same way. We'll be reading the same thing in about 6 months about the groundbreaking Fire from Amazon.
Wasn't there just an article lately about how a high percentage of S5 customers in the UK were former iPhone users? There's so much slop on both sides of the fence that its hard to know what to follow. I'll go by Comscore's numbers which show Android and iOS growing in marketshare. Though Android continues to grow faster than iOS, they both command a sizable chunk of the market.
Dilger, why are you obsessed with perpetuating this narrative that analysts and the media have it in for Apple? Every 'editorial' is crammed with 'evidence' that the media downplays Apple's successes and accentuates its failures, and that the opposite is true for Android manufacturers.
Frankly you seem to have something approaching an obsession with Google and Android OEMs.
Wow. Just Wow.
When presented with example after example of the press' and analyst's misreporting of fact and creation of failure scenarios all you can deduce is a DED obsession. Perhaps we need someone who can cogently string together an accurate picture and report on it. Thanks DED, your insight is sorely needed and I appreciate your research and consistency of presentation.
I am quite amazed at what appears to be a groundswell of hostility towards Apple. Just think about it for a moment. It's the American dream come to life. A rags to riches story of national proportion. A company started in a garage, beaten down every step of the way, making good and still functioning despite what appears to be a large group of people just itching for it to fail. Let's connect some of the dots here.
Conspiracy theory aside, it is known that Apple does not subscribe to a business model that rewards 3rd party sales people selling its product. It is also known that the competition does provide kick-backs (called sales incentives) as part of their normal business model. Apple has consistently gone up against cell company greed, forcing them to share some of their exorbitant monthly rates by subsidizing the cost of the phones. Forcing low-price unlimited data, though this has been largely undermined by unprecedented demand for more data capacity that the cell infrastructure is only now beginning to get in front of, and gave the cell companies a marketing excuse to wiggle out of. Apple providing a ecosystem-wide alternative to SMS again cutting into cell company margins, although this time, in an area that was near zero cost for the cell companies to support (using existing tower maintenance bandwidth).
Apple has made a lot of enemies along the way. Sure, "Haters gonna hate" but public facing sales people who must denigrate the iPhone in order to justify the sales they push that send their kids to college find ears only too willing to believe. Analysts, demanding growth in all phases of product cycles, set unreasonable targets in a rapidly maturing business. Cell companies become fearful of the power that Apple has wielded in the past, that has led them kicking and screaming to a business model that has actually benefited their customers (that's you and me folks). Now that the cell companies have a stronger footing they want to undo a lot of that work and greedily pull in more bucks for their still world-trailing service.
And then there's the government. Oh boy!
Government wants a piece of the action. Apple says emphatically "no" and continues to use existing tax rules to pay the minimum that it legally can. Backlash ensues. It suddenly becomes a reasonable thing, in the eyes of the popular press, to pay the government more than is required by law. As if tthe government were some charitable organization that would do more good works if only they had more money (now who believes that?). Suddenly it becomes popular to bash Apple (who is the largest single tech contributer to the government's coffers) for not paying more in taxes to a government that cannot or will not even provide basic protection for Apple's IP and business model. So what does the government do? Actually I've no idea what they do but suddenly there's a major anti-trust case that appear to be completely unreasonable, headed by what appear to be a politically motivated judge, coming to conclusions that do not pass tests of reasonableness and a whole bunch of states champing at the bit to make the pie bigger (that's to benefit you and me too, right?).
Sure Apple's no angel. Heck they're in business. But they are the ones that brought me powerful UNIX-based computing engines and let me carry them in my pocket. They are the ones that supported those engines with an amazing software eco-system. They were the ones who acted as a buffer to rein-in monopolistic cell phone, entertainment, and publishing companies. They make their money largely by keeping us, the customers, happy and I would rather trust that as a motivation than commoditizing companies like Samsung or any number of companies who have to tell me that they're not evil.
What a shame Schmidt got greedy and tried to horn in on Apple's business. Apple and Google as a team could have created an incredible tech future instead of providing such a distraction and a fertile ground for the legal system to get rich.
Time to get behind the company that is making it its business to provide us with resources to run our lives more productively and say a resounding "no" to disinformation and the companies who spend so much money to spread it.
OK rant-off for now. I'm going out to buy more popcorn and hide behind my sofa with my thumb in my mouth.
What I've been arguing all along on Seeking Alpha is that the 5C is not really a new model and was never meant to be a new model. Apple has typically reduced the price of the previous year model by $100 with the release of a new flagship phone. This time, they did the same thing, but reduced the production cost. Everyone was arguing that the 5C would reduce margins when in fact, it actually increased it. All the 5C had to do was sell better than the previous year's 4S did when the 5 came out. And it did. By a lot.
EXACTLY! This was my notion too, from the day it was introduced. In addition to everything you said, it also created another point of differentiation between the one year old 5 and the new 5S. Had they retained the more expensive metal body, in addition to costing more to produce versus the plastic body, they might have sold more of the one year old model at the expense of 5S sales.
Claiming"failure" is relative anyway. Motorola sold about 6.5 million devices last quarter. For them it's probably a decent showing, an improvement in both numbers and public perception of Motorola as a brand. For Apple 6.5 million would be considered a massive failure of epic proportions, while on the other hand Motorola or any other manufacturer achieving the likely Apple 5c sales numbers would be considered a huge success.
Consider Tesla. Their sales numbers are hardly Lexus-worthy but they still manage to get press reviews that "lavish them with praise" for their accomplishments. I don't think those reviews are "incredibly wrong" either.
In any event the 5c is obviously filling a need in Apple's lineup so it's certainly no failure.
If I recall correctly most of the claims involving it not doing well were relative to the 5s and the performance of previous models in the $100 below current generation price slot. Its performance is really somewhat relative to that, although margins may have been better for Apple if it's easier to construct and frees up expensive machinery.
Spot on article Dan, the media and industry will never give Apple its credit where due, they single handedly reshaped the mobile space, and everyone wants them to mimic the fail business model of Microsoft, Google, and Samsung.
Well if "one of these" is an easily verifiable iOS app developer with 30 years of working with Apple products then yes that is me. I am surrounded with stacks of iOS devices. The shelves behind me are a wall of Apple products that looks more like an Apple Store. None of this prevents me from having an objective opinion about the relative capabilities of a $40 Android phone compared to a $550 Apple phone. If price is not an issue that certainly the iPhone 5c is much better in all ways except the screen size and lack of an FM radio (a minor feature I know). However you cannot ignore the price. The Apple phone is almost 14 times more expensive. At some point you have to admit that the 5c is a tough sell for a second rate iPhone.
Why even spend $40 if you are surrounded by stacks of iOS devices? Grab one of them, and if you lose it, no big deal, just grab another one!
I assume you have an Apple ID? Now think about it again just for a few. See now how they might be able to tell?
Anyone who installed iTunes on a PC, or previously owned an iPod, Nokia, Blackberry, feature phone, etc., would either be miscounted or not counted in your scenario. I think Apple probably use multiple methods of arriving at an estimated number of Android switchers.
Comments
I am very much an Apple fan but....
Oh great... another one of these....
...the $40 Android smart phone I just purchased from Amazon is a better phone than the Apple 5c.
So the Yugo he just bought from an eastern-bloc country known for cows and land mines is better than one made in Germany??
For one thing, you could carry this Android phone around and never worry about it getting damaged, lost or stolen...
So your phone is such a better deal since it is a total piece of crap that you (or anyone else) couldn't care less about what happens to it?
..not sure if serious...
Oh great... another one of these....
So the Yugo he just bought from an eastern-bloc country known for cows and land mines is better than one made in Germany??
So your phone is such a better deal since it is a total piece of crap that you (or anyone else) couldn't care less about what happens to it?
..not sure if serious...
Well if "one of these" is an easily verifiable iOS app developer with 30 years of working with Apple products then yes that is me. I am surrounded with stacks of iOS devices. The shelves behind me are a wall of Apple products that looks more like an Apple Store. None of this prevents me from having an objective opinion about the relative capabilities of a $40 Android phone compared to a $550 Apple phone. If price is not an issue that certainly the iPhone 5c is much better in all ways except the screen size and lack of an FM radio (a minor feature I know). However you cannot ignore the price. The Apple phone is almost 14 times more expensive. At some point you have to admit that the 5c is a tough sell for a second rate iPhone.
Chad or chadless pt?
Here's a 729 for mag tape:
Now, if we could only get a cartridge reader on it
I hear that the A8 APU will use magneto restrictive delay lines instead of RAM.
Mmm ... I do have a cartridge from a DataCell, around here ... Someplace ...
Said without a trace of irony, as well!
I wrote on another blog last year that the iPhone 5C was selling very well, based on my own observations at a local Apple Store. Not only that, I owned several 5C's myself and found them to be, as many others have, excellent phones. But it seems to me that you miss the real culprits in this scenario: the Apple-centric media who almost without exception panned the 5C and its sales as you hav panned the Moto X in this article. On the other hand, your article fails to account for the fact that the Moto X despite poor sales was almost universally acclaimed as the best Android phone of 2013. The failure of the Moto X to match iPhone sales had nothing to do with the quality of the phone. It had more to do with poor marketing decisions on the part of Motorola or Google, e.g. limiting initial sales and Moto maker to only one carrier, and a less than stellar TV ad campaign. A testimony to the Moto X's superb innovations can be found in the latest (June 2014) issue of MacLife magazine, in an article about what the writer hopes will be contained in the upcoming iOS8. The Moto X and several of its innovations are mentioned specifically as well worthy of Apple's consideration.
So you think that Motorola's success in the UK impeaches the OP's thesis? In the USA, we have a saying: "That's the exception that proves the rule." Your fixation on the Motorola's success in the UK reminds me of a product introduction in the 1980s. That was the Coca Cola formula change to "New Coke." New Coke was a success in Detroit, Michigan. However, it was a failure everywhere else, its success in Detroit notwithstanding.
That's news to those of us living in the Detroit area. Do you have a source for that claim?
I'm sure they can be extremely accurate in these figures as every iPhone has to be activated against an Apple ID and they will know whether that Apple ID has previously had any other iPhones / iPads / iPod Touch activated against it or not... No previous activations = new to iPhone as it is extremely unlikely that people are going to create a new Apple ID for every new device because they'd lose all previous App purchases, etc if they did.
Ooh, I like that image. “Hurt me with the truth; don’t comfort me with a lie.” That strikes home with me.
I am very much an Apple fan but I have to say that factoring in the price, the larger screen, the FM radio and the Google apps and features, the $40 Android smart phone I just purchased from Amazon is a better phone than the Apple 5c. For one thing, you could carry this Android phone around and never worry about it getting damaged, lost or stolen. Neither it or the iPhone 5c can resist water damage but at least with the Android phone I am only out $40 in the worst case. The 5c will cost you $550 to replace since Apple Care does not cover water damage.
The article isn't arguing a subjective opinion that the 5c is a "better phone" that everyone "should" be buying.
It's arguing objectively the plain facts of commercial success. Over the past 6 months, Apple sold a huge number of 5c units at sustainable profit margins that will enable it to continue developing new products in the future, while Google lost $700 million establishing tiny market share gains in a few areas with phones it won't even be selling in the future, because it offloaded Motorola to Lenovo.
You can argue an option about what you personally find likable in a given product, but you can't argue the facts. 5c was very successful and Motorola was very unsuccessful. That's not even really all that surprising given the experience, ecosystem and inertia behind Apple vs the lack of experience and the weakness of Android as a platform that Google was coping with.
What is surprising is that the media would work so hard to spin failure as success and success as failure.
It's impossible to look through tech news reports and not see blatant dishonesty and an incredible double standard between Apple being browbeat over invented problems that aren't really problems while "Android" is given pass after pass despite severe problems that are threatening its very viability, not to mention harming the experience of users who end up stuck with devices that can't/won't be upgraded.
Also, you can Liquipel your iPhone for $60 if you're worried about water damage.
Wow. Just Wow.
When presented with example after example of the press' and analyst's misreporting of fact and creation of failure scenarios all you can deduce is a DED obsession. Perhaps we need someone who can cogently string together an accurate picture and report on it. Thanks DED, your insight is sorely needed and I appreciate your research and consistency of presentation.
I am quite amazed at what appears to be a groundswell of hostility towards Apple. Just think about it for a moment. It's the American dream come to life. A rags to riches story of national proportion. A company started in a garage, beaten down every step of the way, making good and still functioning despite what appears to be a large group of people just itching for it to fail. Let's connect some of the dots here.
Conspiracy theory aside, it is known that Apple does not subscribe to a business model that rewards 3rd party sales people selling its product. It is also known that the competition does provide kick-backs (called sales incentives) as part of their normal business model. Apple has consistently gone up against cell company greed, forcing them to share some of their exorbitant monthly rates by subsidizing the cost of the phones. Forcing low-price unlimited data, though this has been largely undermined by unprecedented demand for more data capacity that the cell infrastructure is only now beginning to get in front of, and gave the cell companies a marketing excuse to wiggle out of. Apple providing a ecosystem-wide alternative to SMS again cutting into cell company margins, although this time, in an area that was near zero cost for the cell companies to support (using existing tower maintenance bandwidth).
Apple has made a lot of enemies along the way. Sure, "Haters gonna hate" but public facing sales people who must denigrate the iPhone in order to justify the sales they push that send their kids to college find ears only too willing to believe. Analysts, demanding growth in all phases of product cycles, set unreasonable targets in a rapidly maturing business. Cell companies become fearful of the power that Apple has wielded in the past, that has led them kicking and screaming to a business model that has actually benefited their customers (that's you and me folks). Now that the cell companies have a stronger footing they want to undo a lot of that work and greedily pull in more bucks for their still world-trailing service.
And then there's the government. Oh boy!
Government wants a piece of the action. Apple says emphatically "no" and continues to use existing tax rules to pay the minimum that it legally can. Backlash ensues. It suddenly becomes a reasonable thing, in the eyes of the popular press, to pay the government more than is required by law. As if tthe government were some charitable organization that would do more good works if only they had more money (now who believes that?). Suddenly it becomes popular to bash Apple (who is the largest single tech contributer to the government's coffers) for not paying more in taxes to a government that cannot or will not even provide basic protection for Apple's IP and business model. So what does the government do? Actually I've no idea what they do but suddenly there's a major anti-trust case that appear to be completely unreasonable, headed by what appear to be a politically motivated judge, coming to conclusions that do not pass tests of reasonableness and a whole bunch of states champing at the bit to make the pie bigger (that's to benefit you and me too, right?).
Sure Apple's no angel. Heck they're in business. But they are the ones that brought me powerful UNIX-based computing engines and let me carry them in my pocket. They are the ones that supported those engines with an amazing software eco-system. They were the ones who acted as a buffer to rein-in monopolistic cell phone, entertainment, and publishing companies. They make their money largely by keeping us, the customers, happy and I would rather trust that as a motivation than commoditizing companies like Samsung or any number of companies who have to tell me that they're not evil.
What a shame Schmidt got greedy and tried to horn in on Apple's business. Apple and Google as a team could have created an incredible tech future instead of providing such a distraction and a fertile ground for the legal system to get rich.
Time to get behind the company that is making it its business to provide us with resources to run our lives more productively and say a resounding "no" to disinformation and the companies who spend so much money to spread it.
OK rant-off for now. I'm going out to buy more popcorn and hide behind my sofa with my thumb in my mouth.
EXACTLY! This was my notion too, from the day it was introduced. In addition to everything you said, it also created another point of differentiation between the one year old 5 and the new 5S. Had they retained the more expensive metal body, in addition to costing more to produce versus the plastic body, they might have sold more of the one year old model at the expense of 5S sales.
I generally do too.
Claiming"failure" is relative anyway. Motorola sold about 6.5 million devices last quarter. For them it's probably a decent showing, an improvement in both numbers and public perception of Motorola as a brand. For Apple 6.5 million would be considered a massive failure of epic proportions, while on the other hand Motorola or any other manufacturer achieving the likely Apple 5c sales numbers would be considered a huge success.
Consider Tesla. Their sales numbers are hardly Lexus-worthy but they still manage to get press reviews that "lavish them with praise" for their accomplishments. I don't think those reviews are "incredibly wrong" either.
In any event the 5c is obviously filling a need in Apple's lineup so it's certainly no failure.
If I recall correctly most of the claims involving it not doing well were relative to the 5s and the performance of previous models in the $100 below current generation price slot. Its performance is really somewhat relative to that, although margins may have been better for Apple if it's easier to construct and frees up expensive machinery.
U.K., France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Poland, Czech Republic, Ireland, Portugal, Austria, Spain, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Hungary, and Luxembourg
... at Apple online stores in those countries and some carriers in U.K., France and Germany.
We've had them for a while in Australia.
They sell quite well.
Well if "one of these" is an easily verifiable iOS app developer with 30 years of working with Apple products then yes that is me. I am surrounded with stacks of iOS devices. The shelves behind me are a wall of Apple products that looks more like an Apple Store. None of this prevents me from having an objective opinion about the relative capabilities of a $40 Android phone compared to a $550 Apple phone. If price is not an issue that certainly the iPhone 5c is much better in all ways except the screen size and lack of an FM radio (a minor feature I know). However you cannot ignore the price. The Apple phone is almost 14 times more expensive. At some point you have to admit that the 5c is a tough sell for a second rate iPhone.
Why even spend $40 if you are surrounded by stacks of iOS devices? Grab one of them, and if you lose it, no big deal, just grab another one!
Anyone who installed iTunes on a PC, or previously owned an iPod, Nokia, Blackberry, feature phone, etc., would either be miscounted or not counted in your scenario. I think Apple probably use multiple methods of arriving at an estimated number of Android switchers.