freeper

2old4fun said:

stageofhistory said:

qwwera said:

Good to see you guys start doing videos. Good job! Keep it up. 

I'm actually in two minds about videos on AI - They are great, but it makes harder for me to browse the Apple news at work when I should be working!

AirPod to be rescue!

Since I read much faster than I watch videos, I pass 95% of the time. I guess I am not fit for the YouTube generation, or even the podcasting generation that preceded it.

Android fans once claimed that the Apple Watch launch would be good because it would raise awareness of the existence of smartwatches, leading to increases in sales of Android Wear. Hasn't happened. Didn't happen for Samsung's terrible Tizen watches either. And now some Android OEMs like Motorola and Huawei (who predicted Android Wear's failure from the beginning but pitched in with a couple of models anyway) are saying that they are exiting the Android Wear scene. Sony never officially announced that they are doing so, but never followed up their initial Android Wear device. Xiaomi, Oppo, OnePlus, Acer and HTC never launched Android Wear devices in the first place and have no intentions to. Other than legacy watch makers who came out with Android Wear models, the only new company offering an Android Wear device is ZTE, and they are only doing it because Verizon requested one from them as a carrier exclusive to be bundled as package deals with phones (though the option to buy them separately does exist). And curiously, virtually none of the new Android Wear models have NFC to support Android Pay, even though Apple and Samsung watches support mobile payments.

So while the Apple Watch is slowly gaining momentum and has started to be a real generator for Apple, Android Wear has done nothing but lose money for Google and their partners and is locked in a death spiral. The last hope - Android Wear 2.0 - came and went and didn't make a bit of difference. And this is despite Android Wear preceding the Apple Watch by more than a year, and independent Android smartwatch efforts from Samsung and Sony - that weren't Google's Android Wear but were rather tablet Android loaded onto a watch - by more than 2 years.

Google really blew it. They didn't advertise the platform, so even most Android device owners don't know that Android Wear exists. Their initial version of the product - voice remotes for your phone - was horrible. They never released phone or SMS apps customized for the watch - i.e. Hangouts or Voice apps that would work independently of the phone - and still haven't. They also failed to create a gateway tier of cheap Fitbit type devices that could have been a gateway to the platform for like $70 that would have only provided fitness tracking and notification mirroring features. They had the opportunity to do so by buying Jawbone - which has since gone belly up - but chose to be stubborn and fail. Oh well. For most of the population, smartwatch is going to be analogous to Apple Watch just as MP3 player basically meant iPod. That is the difference between a company that actually knows how to design and market products - Apple - and a company who really only knows search and ads in Google. Android Wear was designed around getting more people to use voice search to collect more voice search data. That is one reason why it was doomed from the start and you can just go from there.

qwwera said:

It helps Android numbers with carriers giving away free Android junk tablets with the addition of a line of service. Or that most of the sales of Android tablets are ultra low budget junk.  it makes Android numbers artificially high.

Except that the Samsung, Huawei, Lenovo and especially Amazon tablets that appear in the chart above aren't the ones that you describe. The next Amazon (whose Fire platform actually competes with Google Android), Lenovo or Huawei tablet given away by carriers in phone promotions will be the first. Samsung tablets used to be popular in those promotions - especially with Samsung phones - but haven't been in years, with Samsung promotions now focusing on giving away Gear devices (VR headsets and smartwatches). The devices that carriers are giving away are usually LG, Alcatel and more representatives of the "others" category above ... that dropped 15% year over year. By the way, it doesn't matter. Carriers are customers too. So whether it is a consumer walking into a store to buy a tablet for personal use or a carrier buying a tablet to give away in a promotion, it counts. It is revenue that the company would not have if they were not making tablets. HTC hasn't made tablets since the (terrible and failed) Nexus 9. If they were making a few hundred thousand budget tablets a year - or even letting someone else make them while licensing their brand name - to sell to carriers on promotions, they would be in a lot better financial shape. Instead they are losing a ton of money making $800 VR headsets that everyone praises the design, hardware and software ... but no one actually buys.

chasm said:

It's also worth noting that if you deduct the difference in channel reduction from the year-ago quarter and this one, Apple actually sold slightly MORE iPhones this quarter than a year ago. The 50.8M figure only represents shipments to resellers; the total sell-through, Cook said, was quite a bit higher.

Yes, but that "slightly MORE" includes sales of the $399 iPhone SE, a device the likes of which that right up until it was released Apple and many ardent Apple fans insisted should never and would never exist because it was IMPOSSIBLE to make a smartphone for less than the cost of a premium iPhone without sacrificing basic quality and design, eliminating vital profit margin, and subjecting Apple to the same destructive race to the bottom that destroyed the Windows PC industry (except that it didn't happen as Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Toshiba and pretty much everyone but IBM, Sony and Packard Bell are still making PCs, not to mention a lot of new companies that are now making Windows PCs and 2-in-1s like Razer, Huawei, Xiaomi and RCA). So yes, while total sales of iPhones increased, sales of premium iPhone models declined. In other words, remove the several million iPhone SE sales - some of which were bought by iPhone loyalists who wanted a bargain or preferred a smaller device but a great many would have otherwise bought a midrange name brand Android device - and the drop would have been much more noticeable and much harder to spin away. And this is not my naysaying conjecture - I am not an Apple hater but someone who has bought a MacBook Pro, multiple iPads, an Apple TV and an Apple Watch just in the past couple of years - but something that was predicted in advance by Apple sites such as https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/04/iphone-7-sales/ !!! And by the way ... that article also predicted the squeeze that Apple was going to put on the likes of Imagination, Nokia, Qualcomm etc. over licensing and components costs as a result too. Selling fewer premium high margin iPhones means getting as much out of each iPhone that you do sell as possible.