the.bear

bestkeptsecret said:

Yet again, execution is lacking. Come up with a cool concept, but fumble at execution to get the privilege of saying "first!".

It says 1.5 hours if you stream music from your phone, or 3.5 hours if you copy music onto its RAM. So that begs the question, what happens when the health/ fitness functionality is turned on? Will it last 30 minutes?

Suddenly, for a heart-rate monitor, step and calorie counter that plays music, with the added bonus of notifications, the Apple Watch's 16 hours is not too shabby, right?

You do realize that Samsung sells A LOT of products that have nothing to do with Apple, right? Samsung has a whole line of fitness, wearables, smart home and IoT products, all on Tizen. The only products that Samsung directly competes with Apple on are phones, tablets and smart watches. The latter of which Samsung had a product out 3 years before Apple did and has a bunch of features that the Apple Watch does not have like 3G and GPS, and still has better battery life. They also have a fitness tracker (though with a small watch type display that runs apps) to compete more directly with the likes of Fitbit and Garmin, a device that Apple does not have and likely will never release. Samsung's goal is to eventually gain an IoT ecosystem based on Tizen that is big and profitable enough to allow them to switch their smartphones from Android to Tizen also. Android devices from other manufacturers will not be compatible with Samsung's Tizen devices, so if you want compatibility with all of your Samsung smart home and health gear, you will have no choice but to switch from Android to Tizen. They already have an SDK that allows developers to convert Android apps to Tizen apps. So they would have released this gadget whether Apple would have or not, and plan to release a bunch of products that Apple never will (i.e. Android-based smart printers).

Apple and Samsung are two totally different companies with different business strategies, goals and customer bases. They only happen to overlap in a few product lines because Samsung tries to enter almost every area in consumer electronics and appliances, even if it isn't "high tech". Samsung was no more thinking about Apple when they made this device than they do when they make their next streaming DVD player or smart TV.

maestro64 said:

Ask Samsung and Motorola how well it work for them getting big time Stars to be their brand ambassadors.

To be fair, Samsung's billions in annual profit selling Android devices - when the other Android OEMs make hundreds of millions to $1 billion in a good year and break even in a bad one - is due primarily to their massive marketing campaigns. Other companies produce good hardware, and yes other companies have copied Apple. Samsung is the only one who managed to pull it off, and do so in North America and western Europe selling tens of millions of Galaxy S and Galaxy Note devices that cost $800. Perhaps if LG had hired LeBron James instead of Joseph Gordon-Levitt (?) or gotten their hooks into Steph Curry before he became the face of the NBA and snapped up by Apple they would be doing better. HTC for their part did hire Robert Downey Jr. (and Jason Statham who is huge in Europe and Asia) but did not have enough money to actually use them in TV ads that anybody actually saw.

Shah Rukh Khan will probably help Apple make inroads with Indian populace that can afford their products today, which would help Apple become an aspirational brand for people who will join India's middle and upper classes tomorrow. That is probably Apple's real problem in India: it is not an aspirational brand there the way that it is in China and Japan (and South Korea). That is why none of the Android device makers have made creating lookalike iPhones a strategy point the way that manufacturers have for the Chinese and Japanese markets. That is consistent with how you build an image and a brand.

Although it may have been totally by accident, Samsung's going with LeBron - and remember they were also a partner with Beats - worked like spades for them too. I guess you can say that where Apple had the "suburban" constituency for the iPhone, Samsung was able to get the "urban" one. Their campaign painted iPhone owners as brand-conscious and elitist and not concerned with more practical stuff like multi-tasking, battery life, screen size and the latest tech.  Then again, it probably wasn't accidental at all. I just remembered: Samsung America came up with that marketing strategy. The headquarters in Korea got all nationalist and forced them out with bogus fraud type investigations because they couldn't handle the Yanks outdoing them in their own company. After that Samsung started managing the North American marketing efforts from Korea, and sales for the Galaxy S5 and S6 cratered. They had to do a total corporate reshuffling with younger, more western-influenced executives taking over the company for the S7 to rebound.

So if this actor is able to do for Apple in India what Michael Jordan did for Nike, then 5 years from now this will be the move that everyone saw as a stroke of pure genius.

So the Shah Rukh Khan's advertising campaign versus ... Sundar Pichai and his effort to train 2 million Android programmers in India by 2018. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Google-to-train-two-million-Android-developers-Sundar-Pichai/articleshow/50219545.cms It will be curious 5 years from now to see to what extent each approach yields fruit for its respective platforms. Google's previous India strategy, Android One, was a massive failure but that was not a Pichai project.

VisualSeed said:

Apple Pay is a feature of the Apple ecosystem and not product or service onto itself at the moment. Apple wouldn't need to make any revenue at it as long as it drove users to its products all would be good. 

Apple Pay was originally intended to be a key part of Apple's big push to lure Android (more specifically Samsung Galaxy) users away. It didn't work because so few retailers supported NFC payments that Apple Pay was never able to become a real differentiator in ways that most iPhone owners regularly use their devices. Apple made a huge error. Instead of working with retailers to implement a solution that would be in their interests, Apple thought that they could side with the banks and pressure the retailers, which totally backfired. Apple treated the retailers as if they were, well, companies like Apple, who enjoys both high margins and heavy brand loyalty. Instead, large retail chains operate at very low margins, with lots of individual stores actually being operated at a loss to retain market share. Also, their consumers have absolutely no brand loyalty, but will instead just patronize who offers the most convenience or best deal. So, it is very much in the interests of those chains to avoid credit card fees wherever possible, to collect consumer data that can be used by analytics to create micro-campaigns to target shoppers, and to maintain rewards/loyalty programs to drive as much repeat business as possible.

Another problem: Apple underestimated how quickly Google and Samsung would be willing and able to respond. First, Google had absolutely no pride in the product that they had introduced with much fanfare and worked hard to promote since 2011 and instead dropped Google Wallet like a soiled nakpkin, and Samsung did the same with their even less successful Google Wallet competitor. Instead both made major acquisitions (Softbank by Google, LoopPay by Samsung) and were able to launch competing products with real hardware and software support in less than a year. This was due to Samsung and Google being able to repurpose the infrastructure from their previous mobile payment apps for their new ones and also - along with their suppliers like Qualcomm - had been working on issues like biometrics, encryption and security since Apple launched the iPhone 5s. Had Apple launched Apple Pay with the iPhone 5s instead of the iPhone 6, it would have been nearly 2 years before the Android ecosystem would have been able to respond - just as it took that long to adopt 64 bit hardware, encryption and decent biometrics in flagship and mainstream devices - and Apple would likely have been able to gain a lot more headway with retailers in the interim. Instead, in addition to Android Pay and Samsung Pay, retailers and banks are launching their own mobile payment products that are modeled - and even named - after Apple Pay, fragmenting a space that Apple could have owned had they played their cards differently.

Sorry. My initial post got hammered. Enterprises are not going to supply local iClouds when the shift is toward offloading as much as you can to the cloud to save hardware. Anyone who thinks that server I/O can or should be handled by USB type C needs to go locate a networking or administration handbook. No enterprise is going to buy and manage a server to meet the needs of the small percentage of their workforce that uses Apple products when all other servers support all comers. Also, servers need to be able to handle scalable and high performance enterprise tasks like networking, databases, web servers, authentication, enterprise communications, ERP applications, content management, monitoring, security, storage management,  etc. Not only must the hardware and OS be able to run it, but the enterprise applications need to be supplied too. Apple doesn't make true enterprise software. Even if they made their hardware OS and application agnostic or really pushed virtualization (and Apple has no enterprise virtualization software like VMWare or Hyper-V) there would be no reason to choose Apple's server hardware over anyone else if you are just going to install Red Hat or Windows Server on it anyway.

Enterprises have different needs from households who have a bunch of MacBook, iPads, iPhones and Apple TVs. What you all are describing are home media "servers" and not serious enterprise products that actually have business value by creating revenue for their owners. Maybe it would be great if Apple got into that market to compete with the likes of Microsoft, Red Hat and IBM in actual data center type enterprise products instead of just end user stuff but they are not that type of company now and never have been.