If Apple offered customers a cheaper way to get iOS than a 3GS, the 3GS wouldn't be around either. It still exists because it's the only way to get an iOS device that's not a top of the line model. Again, apple's to oranges. It's two totally different ways of doing business.
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...
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.
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
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...
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.
....Gartner's predictions on WinPho7 are asinine. Android is the low cost bottom feeder.
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
Gartner recently issued a new prediction of the direction of the smartphone industry, but its last one from 2009 doesn't suggest the company has very accurate foresight.
Last prediction wasn't very accurate
Gartner's profitable projections
Gartner's projection of WP7 overtaking the iPhone and outpacing Android growth by 2015 is literally the only good news available for Windows Phone 7, which has completely flopped as a consumer platform despite a half billion dollar ad campaign.
Even Microsoft's leading partner LG called its launch as disappointing and the software itself as being "a bit boring."
"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.
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.
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...
That?s what I don?t get your comment, it?s a reality right now and has been for a long time. It?s not an all or nothing shift to the internet. Years after DVDs became the most common you could still buy VHS tapes. Sony just stopped producing 3.5? floppy disks last year. Who is being left out that makes it premature for Apple to have started the iTunes Music Store in 2003, which is the single largest supplier of music in the world. Who is being left out that makes it premature for Netflix to streaming media, which has seen phenomenal growth with a decline in shipped DVDs.
Paradigm shifts can happen quickly that it seems like there is some toggle switch being moved but usually it?s a gradual slider from one model to the other. Just like B/W TV adoption, then color TV adoption, then cable TV adoption, then home computer adoption, followed by internet adoption, et al. there is a trend from none to ubiquity. Each one of the examples above surely had people saying that the technology was premature, but without these premature users the tech would have never become ubiquitous (I.e.: mature).
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 way?streaming 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 propellerheads?not just at Apple, but they've had the marketing success to take this mistake mainstream?have grossly overestimated the current or foreseeable-future capabilities of online distribution.
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 way—streaming 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 propellerheads—not just at Apple, but they've had the marketing success to take this mistake mainstream—have 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.
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 way?streaming 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 propellerheads?not just at Apple, but they've had the marketing success to take this mistake mainstream?have grossly overestimated the current or foreseeable-future capabilities of online distribution.
1) Your defense of CD audio as high quality is not a sound argument.
2) HD cable is much better than DVD quality.
3) It?s 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. That?s the nature of things: Life is opportunistic, not quixotic.
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.
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. I?d 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?
- 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.
Jean-Louis Gassée just released an article on that very topic.
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
Comments
If Apple offered customers a cheaper way to get iOS than a 3GS, the 3GS wouldn't be around either. It still exists because it's the only way to get an iOS device that's not a top of the line model. Again, apple's to oranges. It's two totally different ways of doing business.
iPod Touch
Anyone?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
....Gartner's predictions on WinPho7 are asinine. Android is the low cost bottom feeder.
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
Gartner is a Microsoft pay shrill. They are paid to say whatever their clients fancy. It's like the Republican war machine.
You might have meant shill. I'm not sure what benefit Microsoft would get from paying Gartner to screech for them.
Gartner recently issued a new prediction of the direction of the smartphone industry, but its last one from 2009 doesn't suggest the company has very accurate foresight.
Last prediction wasn't very accurate
Gartner's profitable projections
Gartner's projection of WP7 overtaking the iPhone and outpacing Android growth by 2015 is literally the only good news available for Windows Phone 7, which has completely flopped as a consumer platform despite a half billion dollar ad campaign.
Even Microsoft's leading partner LG called its launch as disappointing and the software itself as being "a bit boring."
[ View this article at AppleInsider.com ]
"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.
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...
That?s what I don?t get your comment, it?s a reality right now and has been for a long time. It?s not an all or nothing shift to the internet. Years after DVDs became the most common you could still buy VHS tapes. Sony just stopped producing 3.5? floppy disks last year. Who is being left out that makes it premature for Apple to have started the iTunes Music Store in 2003, which is the single largest supplier of music in the world. Who is being left out that makes it premature for Netflix to streaming media, which has seen phenomenal growth with a decline in shipped DVDs.
Paradigm shifts can happen quickly that it seems like there is some toggle switch being moved but usually it?s a gradual slider from one model to the other. Just like B/W TV adoption, then color TV adoption, then cable TV adoption, then home computer adoption, followed by internet adoption, et al. there is a trend from none to ubiquity. Each one of the examples above surely had people saying that the technology was premature, but without these premature users the tech would have never become ubiquitous (I.e.: mature).
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 way?streaming 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 propellerheads?not just at Apple, but they've had the marketing success to take this mistake mainstream?have grossly overestimated the current or foreseeable-future capabilities of online distribution.
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 way—streaming 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 propellerheads—not just at Apple, but they've had the marketing success to take this mistake mainstream—have 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.
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 way?streaming 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 propellerheads?not just at Apple, but they've had the marketing success to take this mistake mainstream?have grossly overestimated the current or foreseeable-future capabilities of online distribution.
1) Your defense of CD audio as high quality is not a sound argument.
2) HD cable is much better than DVD quality.
3) It?s 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. That?s the nature of things: Life is opportunistic, not quixotic.
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.
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. I?d 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.
- 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?
- 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.
Jean-Louis Gassée just released an article on that very topic.