Notsofast

entropys said:

Reminds of the eighties when those Japanese executives decided they wanted to get into Hollywood. 

Put it me in the half who hates Apple making content. Competing with their customers.

Latko said:

Notsofast said:

Respected analyst Neil Cybart persuasively calls IDC numbers "embarrassingly" wrong,  and here's more from an article that discusses Cybart's refutation as well as an overall alleged pattern of intentionally misleading estimates from IDC.

IDC data is much more suspect than "historically underestimating iPhone sales."  Remember, no other phone manufacturer reports their actual sales figures so, ALL of its data is suspect and unverifiable.  

IDC's subset of publicly reported data isn't designed to give away valuable free information as a public service. Market research groups sell their reports to companies for $10,000 or more, so when they issue free bits of public data, journalists should review these reports with some healthy skepticism and consider why they're getting free data that tells such compelling stories. 

This is particularly the case because those stories are often wrong to the point of clearly not being just a mistake. There's a history of market data firms releasing bad data coached to make winners look like losers and losers look like winners. 

In fact, that's a primary goal of these groups, as history shows beyond a shadow of a doubt. These companies even admit that they work, not to enlighten the public with free data, but to help their paying clients with "influencing consumer behavior and buying preferences." 

We've caught IDC and other market research groups reporting estimated numbers that didn't align with Apple's actual data before, including massive underestimations of Mac sales as part of an overall misleading history of reporting in PC sales and of course in tablet sales."


https://roughlydraftedbeta.com/home/2019/5/2/idc-latest-estimate-of-q1-2019-iphone-sales-highly-inaccurate-to-the-point-of-embarrassing

Of course they’re wrong - nobody is right, as Apple doesn’t want salesnumbers (or anything potentially embarassing) to be publicly available

simbalion said:

Both the commenters above probably aren’t aware at how dependent modern day apps and websites are on third party analytics and behavioral analytics software. Think simple ones like google analytics, mixpanel. More advanced ones like fullstory.

for the most part these are not insidious money grubbing moves by pbs and actually are used by product teams to understand things like what features aren’t being used etc. 

im hoping Apple isn’t just taking this blanket ban as a PR move and unreasonably taking this weird stance against these innocuous tools.