cropr

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cropr
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  • Apple's iPhone X delivered a KO punch to cheap Androids: Q1 smartphone demand slumped glob...

    croprcropr
    I've read the original GFK article

    Some interesting points:
     - Nowhere in the article  iPhone or Apple is mentioned. 
     - Only for Europe and to lesser extend China the increase of the ASP is linked to a shift to premium priced models (which could be Apple, but also models of other vendors)
     - In Africa the increase of the ASP is linked to the evolution of feature phones to smartphones.  I doubt we can assume that there are a lot of iPhones involved here
     - In some countries the units sold go down while in to others the unit sold goes up.  For South America: Brazil  -4%, Chile -18%, Columbia +41%, Argentina +6%.  This means that the ASP for South America could change while the models mix in a country remains relatively constant

    For me the conclusion of DED is  speculation, like the media who claim there is a weaker iPhone demand because some of the iPhone component suppliers publish weaker figures.

    We'll have to wait for the Q1 and Q2 results to see whether the iPhone X is a commercial game changer or not.
    muthuk_vanalingamholyone

  • Justice Department investigating AT&T and Verizon for blocking eSIM adoption, Apple report...

    croprcropr
    The SIM card as it was originally designed by R&D team of France Telecom, had 2 purposes: 
    1. the customer could easily swap between mobile operators, by putting a SIM card of a different mobile operator in his phone
    2. the customer could easily swap between mobile phones, by putting the existing SIM card in another phone
    The second point was as important as the first one.  In fact in the GSMA standards it is clearly defined that the only thing a customer needs to do to change phones, is the move the SIM card.  All settings, contacts, .... should be transparently moved to the new phone.  The SIM contains indeed some limited memory to store the contacts.  The SIM card was one of the main drivers to make sure that any mobile phone could work on any mobile network

    There have been various initiatives from both mobile phone vendors and mobile operators to extend this mechanism.  Mobile operators defined packages of subscription + mobile phone, where the SIM card was locked to a single phone.   Mobile vendors expanded heavily the internal memory of the phone to store contacts and other information, abandoning the contacts memory on the SIM card.  Both initiatives undermined the basic principles of the SIM card. 

    Remember the case where a woman filed a complaint because she did no longer received SMS messages after she moved from an iPhone to a non iOS phone.  The culprit was iMessage that violated point 2  and Apple had to solve the issue.

    The eSIM card makes the 2nd point (swapping phones) harder, certainly if the 2nd phone does not support eSIM, which is the case for 60% of phones on the world market.  As such it hampers customer choice.  This might change in the future if 80% or more of the mobile phones on the market will have an eSIM solution. 

    It is nice that Apple wants to innovate and make things better for the consumers.  But the complaint here has nothing to do with innovation.  In a sneaky way Apple just wants to make it harder for iPhone users to move away from iOS.
    airnerdjasenj1

  • Apple grabs 86% of global smartphone profits, iPhone X alone seizes 35%

    croprcropr
    When IDC or Gartner are publishing market share figures, people on this forum justly question these figures.  However if Counterpoint publishes profit figures, there are much less people looking critically at these figures.  And yet the figures of Counterpoint should be taken with a big bag of salt.

    There is a reason why official profit figures are always published on a company level and never on business line or product level.  Acquisitions and mergers, financials gains, ... are all impacting the profit figures.  By definition a profit figure for a single smartphone model is just plain BS. 

    Apple does not disclose its figures per model nor do Samsung, Huawei, Oppo, Lenovo, Alcatel,  ...   So Counterpoint is just guessing the cost and the sales figures per model.  Any error in cost or sales figures generates a much bigger error on the profit figures, so the margin of error in the Counterpoint figures must be huge.

    Samsung and Huawei are designing and producing their own chips and components. So how on earth can an external company have a correct assessment of the internal transfer prices between the chip / component division and the smartphone division (and taking into account that both sell to other companies, they are not inclined to give these details).  For a privately owned company like Huawei, it is even more difficult to make a good guess; I would not be surprised that in this case the cost estimation of Counterpoint is at least 30% wrong, leading to a profit estimation that has no longer a correlation with the truth.

    Does this mean that Apple is not the biggest profit maker in the smartphone business.  Of course not.  Apple is clearly making the most profits in the smartphone business  Only the mentioned percentage of 86% might be wrong.  And yet in the coming months a lot of posters here will use this figure to make a point





    muthuk_vanalingammuthuk_vanalingam

  • 15-inch MacBook Pro refresh could have Intel's new six-core i9 processor

    croprcropr
    linkman said:
    We will still have people blaming Apple for not supporting > 16 GB RAM on the MBP. Yes, Apple could do it with a larger form factor/greatly reduced battery run time. If you really need that much RAM in a laptop, go get yourself something like an Alienware from Dell (prices start at $2300) which weighs 7.69 pounds and gets around 4 hours on battery.
    A Dell XPS 15 also support 32 GB RAM and has s better battery life than the Macbook Pro.  (I have both running in my company)
    rcfamuthuk_vanalingamcgWerksavon b7automaticftp1

  • Video: Everything new in iOS 11.4 including AirPlay 2, Messages in iCloud, and more

    croprcropr
    ameldrum1 said:
    It's a long time since I've been as excited about a feature as I am about iMessage iCloud syncing - having unsynced messages littered across 6 or so devices is not helpful for my mild OCD. Fingers crossed this is finally getting close to release. (Although in the now 9 months or so since it was initially promised I've learned not to hold my breath!) 
    That's one of the reasons I never used iMessage in the 1st place.  It could not sync between all my devices.  And because I have some non Apple devices next to my MBP , my iPhone and my iPad, it will not be possible with the new version neither.   So I am not that excited about a poor cloud service called iCloud, but of course YMMV.
    williamlondon