iPhone Still Just 1.5% Of Mobile Market
This will undoubtedly make some people happy:
http://www.businessinsider.com/iphon...-market-2009-4
It looks like Apple has a lot more room to grow in this field.
http://www.businessinsider.com/iphon...-market-2009-4
It looks like Apple has a lot more room to grow in this field.
Comments
This will undoubtedly make some people happy:
http://www.businessinsider.com/iphon...-market-2009-4
It looks like Apple has a lot more room to grow in this field.
Aren't they citing total phone shipments? Much more significant to know Apple's share of the smartphone market.
Aren't they citing total phone shipments? Much more significant to know Apple's share of the smartphone market.
At the end of the day, the iPhone is still just a phone, so it's interesting to see it compared in that light. Comparing it just to smartphones artificially removes a vast chunk of the mobile market!
They pull a lot of money out of that 1.5%, then again they're not selling any $30 phones.
Comparing it just to smartphones artificially removes a vast chunk of the mobile market!
See, this is the point that most everyone has gotten into their brain but a few simply refuse to: Apple doesn't give a flying fuck about phones outside the smartphone market, and does not and will not ever compete in that market, making comparisons outside that market totally pointless.
Now, a time will come when the vast majority of the mobile phone market IS the smartphone market, but until that day.......
See, this is the point that most everyone has gotten into their brain but a few simply refuse to: Apple doesn't give a flying fuck about phones outside the smartphone market, and does not and will not ever compete in that market, making comparisons outside that market totally pointless.
Now, a time will come when the vast majority of the mobile phone market IS the smartphone market, but until that day.......
Of course you can compare the iPhone with only other smartphone sales, but mostly that gives absolutely no indication of how well it is doing in the overall mobile Market, and obviously never will until all other phones are smartphones.
Just a dumb argument.
The major point not being touched is that these are premium phones with premium service plans. They are never going to hold a majority of the market share, but they make far more profit per unit than cheaper phones.
At the end of the day, the iPhone is still just a phone, so it's interesting to see it compared in that light. Comparing it just to smartphones artificially removes a vast chunk of the mobile market!
But it's not really "just a phone" is it? It's a little curious how the major research firms can distinguish between "smart" phones and... just phones, but certain people here cannot.
Comparing iPhone to other 'smart' phones is not artificial. That's the market it was designed to compete in. For all the fans of Nokia, or for people who just like 'the big numbers'... you seem to be missing one important point. Apple doesn't sell a 'non-smart' phone.
To add some context after 10 years Black Berry only has 1.9% of the over all market. So in comparison 1.5% in just under two years isn't bad at all.
The major point not being touched is that these are premium phones with premium service plans. They are never going to hold a majority of the market share, but they make far more profit per unit than cheaper phones.
I'd go further and say that, particularly since the introduction of the iPhone, the market is being defined by handheld computers that aren't "phones" at all.
Such devices have phone apps, and use cellular networks for ubiquitous connectivity. Beyond that, they are orthogonal to "cellphones", a fact somewhat obscured by early entrants into the market that appeared to "evolve" cellphones into "smartphones" by "adding features."
However, with Android and Pre helping to define the new, burgeoning category of handheld computer, I think most people and pundits will come to understand that these products share as much market space with cellphones as the Prius shares with the Segway. That is, if one wanted to be oddly pedantic, one could claim that the consumer, upon considering purchasing "transportation", would be obliged to consider all his options, and a sale of one type would be a net loss for another.
But that would be pointless.
But it's not really "just a phone" is it? It's a little curious how the major research firms can distinguish between "smart" phones and... just phones, but certain people here cannot.
Comparing iPhone to other 'smart' phones is not artificial. That's the market it was designed to compete in. For all the fans of Nokia, or for people who just like 'the big numbers'... you seem to be missing one important point. Apple doesn't sell a 'non-smart' phone.
Well, yes, it is just a phone, first and foremost. You can compare iPhone sales figures to other smartphones if you want, but a truer reflection is to compare it to ALL phones. After all, a customer can walk into a shop and decide between a smartphone or non-smartphone just as much as they can decide between 2 smartphones - I could walk out of the shop with an iPhone (smartphone) or an LG Arena (non-smartphone) so you have to lump it all in together to get anything meaningfull from it. It's Apple's choice to not make a non-smartphone, they are perfectly entitled to release one if they so wish.
I wonder who has the other 98.5% of the market? Comparing a cellphone to a smartphone is a little misleading.
1. Nokia: 38.6%
2. Samsung: 16.2%
3. LG: 8.3%
4. Motorola: 8.3%
5. Sony Ericsson: 8%
6. RIM (BlackBerry): 1.9%
7. Kyocera: 1.4%
8. Apple (iPhone): 1.1%
9. HTC: 1.1%
10. Sharp: 1%
Other: 14.1%
Are the 2008 figures apparently.
I've used this analogy before, but it is as if the early history of computing had first created dedicated email devices that could do only that, and with the emergence of general purpose computing devices we continued to insist on thinking of them as sort of supercharged email clients.
Just misses the point. It'll get clearer over the next year or two, however, and I don't think anyone will continue to bother to pretend that any of this has anything to do with "the cellphone market."
We should probably just get past the whole "smartphone" terminology. There are historical reasons for it, but technology is quickly obsoleting that way of thinking.
I've used this analogy before, but it is as if the early history of computing had first created dedicated email devices that could do only that, and with the emergence of general purpose computing devices we continued to insist on thinking of them as sort of supercharged email clients.
Just misses the point. It'll get clearer over the next year or two, however, and I don't think anyone will continue to bother to pretend that any of this has anything to do with "the cellphone market."
Yeah, even 'dumbphones' are 'smartphones' these days by the definition that the iPhone follows. As such, we should just drop the term 'smartphones' and just call them 'phones', making them pretty much all lumped in together again.
The goal for Apple now is to establish and position the platform. Over the years the smartphone market will grow and Apple will benefit.
The market for the dumb-phones will be larger than the smartphone market for quite a while, however. My grandparents never use any phone feature other than quick dial. They can't read or write SMS (and they don't care - why write when they can talk!), they don't listen to music and they don't care how nice and colorful the display is, they want larger numbers, b/w will do.
If you take the worldwide needs it gets worse. <my guess>The majority of the population of our planet lives in areas with no coverage </my guess>. Think China, Africa, India, Middle East, may be Russia and South America as well. Those countries/regions will grow their mobile networks, but the smartphones are a couple of decades away for the majority of the population.
People have different needs, ant that will always be the case. Nokia has countless number of models because it tries to cover the entire spectrum of the market. Apple has one model and this is a clear indication that they are not after the whole market.
So why phone makers are worried about Apple and try to copy their success?
Let's get Nokia because they are the market leader the phone business is the only one they have. They want to be alive for more than a decade or two, and smartphones are the future. To get there, they need to be recognized as a smartphone maker. Also, the smartphones are where the money are, and business is about money. If we could get the numbers for the profits made, Apple will be among the first three, and the share would be significant. Most of the companies in the list are struggling to get ANY profit or are LOOSING money on the phone business.
Apple is the best positioned for the future of the phone market. The nature of the hardware components production and distribution as well as the broadcasting infrastructure will not allow any company to have definite long or medium-term advantage hardware-wise over the others, say, a magic built-in super video-camera or 10x better reception, or GPS that works in a submarine. The main differentiator will be the software. The brand and style comes second. Apple is really good in this departments.
With it's AppStore, mature developer tools and a huge and growing developer following Apple is out of the reach of any competitor for the forceable future. Apple execs keep sayng "We are years ahead of the competition", and they mean it. And I agree. You may argue that some RIM/Nokia/Palm/Android model is better than the iPhone and you might be right, but you are missing the point. None of Apple's competitors, as they stand now, are able to challenge the iPhone as a platform. That may change, but not overnight (and NO, Pre is NOT the killer).
So it makes precisely as much sense to weigh iPhone sales against the entire cell market as it would to lump together every device that uses WiFi to connect to data services and consider a given notebook's "market share" against that aggregate.
Or, to compare every device running VoIP against "the phone market." Or just to throw up your hands and talk about "phones sales" as including each and every device that can allow me to speak to another person-- desktops and laptops with the appropriate software, landlines, etc.
Any of these comparisons might have some nominal interest-- cellphones vs. landlines, for instance, gives us a sense of the changing technological landscape-- but it would make no sense at all to suggest that the market share of a given, say, Nokia handset was smaller that we might have imagined, once we factor in land lines and insist on making our comparison include "all phones."
And it would be fairly unsupportable to claim that excluding land lines, in that instance, was somehow an artificial or arbitrary distinction.
The primary point of overlap between a device like the iPhone and a "cellphone" is that they happen to share the same connectivity infrastructure. That, and a device like the iPhone includes an app that allows peer to peer voice communication on that infrastructure.
So it makes precisely as much sense to weigh iPhone sales against the entire cell market as it would to lump together every device that uses WiFi to connect to data services and consider a given notebook's "market share" against that aggregate.
Or, to compare every device running VoIP against "the phone market." Or just to throw up your hands and talk about "phones sales" as including each and every device that can allow me to speak to another person-- desktops and laptops with the appropriate software, landlines, etc.
Any of these comparisons might have some nominal interest-- cellphones vs. landlines, for instance, gives us a sense of the changing technological landscape-- but it would make no sense at all to suggest that the market share of a given, say, Nokia handset was smaller that we might have imagined, once we factor in land lines and insist on making our comparison include "all phones."
And it would be fairly unsupportable to claim that excluding land lines, in that instance, was somehow an artificial or arbitrary distinction.
I'm not entirely sure what the point of all of this is given that the iPhone is still, at heart, a mobile phone, and as such is measured along side all of the other mobile phones out there. If you want to compare it only against other smartphones, be my guest, but that only shows you a very narrow segment of the entire market. As such, to see it in its true light, it needs to be compared against the entire mobile market. And that's exactly what these numbers show
One would buy an iPhone when he is shopping for a phone. In most countries it is sold solely by mobile operators. Oh, and the service provided by the mobile operator is an integral part of the iPhone experience. The mobile operators decide which phones to advertise, subsidize and push for sale. In all these the iPhone competes with other phones.
That indeed is how it has been. That's what Apple is changing. The iPhone is an Apple device before it is the creature of any given carrier, marketed by Apple and sold in Apple's stores. The carriers would rather be more than more than a provider of bandwidth, which is why Apple made their exclusive deal with AT&T in the US, to get around that tendency.
At any rate, the remaining control of the wireless carriers over the "user experience" is in no way a technical argument as to why lumping in a given small computer with the vast number of cell phones sold tells us anything significant, beyond the general uptake of small computers.
The quality of my internet service is an "integral part" of my laptop user experience, but does not necessitate comparing laptop sales to set top boxes, even though both of them sport ethernet cables talking to the same provider.
Well, yes, it is just a phone, first and foremost. You can compare iPhone sales figures to other smartphones if you want, but a truer reflection is to compare it to ALL phones.
It's not truer. It's just different.
After all, a customer can walk into a shop and decide between a smartphone or non-smartphone
Sure. And a customer could choose a notebook computer or a desktop. Or a sports car or a pickup truck.
Is the desktop computer market or the sports car market an artificial construct that isn't worth counting? No? didn't think so.