freeper

About

Banned
Username
freeper
Joined
Visits
22
Last Active
Roles
member
Points
205
Badges
0
Posts
77
  • Apple maintains worldwide tablet marketshare lead in Q1, but cedes ground to Samsung

    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.
    gatorguy
  • Apple overtakes Fitbit to become world's largest wearables vendor, study says [u]

    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.
    GeorgeBMacwatto_cobra
  • How Apple subdivisions compare against Fortune 500 companies

    2old4fun 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.
    mike1watto_cobrachasm
  • Apple maintains worldwide tablet marketshare lead in Q1, but cedes ground to Samsung

    Grimzahn said:
    IDC has a history. I am recognizing their numbers as untrustworthy and a waste of time. I am surprised seeing AI taking the time to report about them.
    So when IDC reported declining sales of Windows and Android (especially Samsung) devices and increasing sales of Apple devices (as they did when the iPhone 6 came out for example), are they equally trustworthy? Or did you like their numbers just fine back then? It seems like lots of Apple adherents love numbers from IDC, Kantar and Gartner when they show good numbers for Apple and bad numbers for everyone else but challenge them otherwise. Even though IDC, Kantar and Gartner have no business reason whatsoever to make Apple look bad and the other companies look good. Or that if the numbers from IDC, Kantar and Gartner do not match numbers from consumer surveys, retailers and supply chain data then companies will stop buying their data and they will go out of business. See, that is the thing. IDC, Kantar and Gartner don't produce their reports to fuel fanboy wars. Their reports are PRODUCTS that they SELL to investment firms, the media and companies themselves. If they were wrong year in and year out, the many companies that buy their reports would lose money, IDC/Gartner/Kantar would be discredited as a result and they would go out of business. Since that hasn't happened yet, obviously their data is pretty good. Not to mention that it clearly reflects anecdotal data and advertising trends. 5-6 years ago iPads were huge news. Everyone was talking about buying them, developing apps for them, rolling them out to their businesses etc. and carriers - especially AT&T - were running promotions based around data plans for LTE iPads and retailers - physical and online - prominently featured them in their advertising campaigns ... when you walked into a store iPads would often be the first thing that you saw. You even saw characters flaunting iPads - or devices designed to look like them - in movies and TV shows that were trying to appear cutting edge (or hip and cool). That isn't happening anymore, hasn't in awhile. But hey, you can believe that Kantar, IDC and Gartner are conspiring against Apple if it makes you feel better. But in the process, just know that retailers AND Apple have long confirmed the sales declines in iPads too. Where Apple used to have them front and center and almost as much attention as the iPhone, they are now barely mentioned in quarterly earnings calls and Apple doesn't even hold launch events for the media when new models are introduced anymore. So basically, all IDC is doing is providing numbers that confirm and provide context to Apple's own behavior.
    muthuk_vanalingamsingularitygatorguy
  • Imagination enters dispute resolution with Apple, prepares to sell off secondary businesse...

    Imagination should have sold to Apple when they held talks.
    I wish people would stop saying this. Apple never at any point decided to buy Imagination on any terms, so they never made an offer for Imagination to accept or reject. Instead, Apple decided that it was better to create their own graphics product. Yes, Apple hired Imagination engineers for that effort but they also hired engineers from other companies as well as hires straight out of college too. So Apple is not just developing their own version of Imagination's product, but rather gaining expertise and ideas from various sources - including their own R&D people - to create their own GPU product. Pretty much the same as with the Ax chips ... they didn't buy an ARM design company or hire guys from an ARM company to create something similar, but rather used a mix of people to create their own ARM design.

    So this isn't Beats, where Apple actually added another company's products to their own product line. And it isn't Authentec, which Apple bought in order to prevent them from licensing their IP to Android competitors,which forced them to either go without such tech like Google, LG and HTC or create their own bad ones like Samsung until Qualcomm integrated good fingerprint scanning tech in their SOCs.

    So there never was any solution for Imagination: Apple doesn't need them anymore and the competition never needed them in the first place. But then again, it wasn't Apple's responsibility to protect Imagination's best interests in the first place. Apple gave Imagination plenty of notice to develop new products and seek new markets and customers for them. If Imagination can, great. Hopefully Imagination will come up with something that will contribute to an actually profitable and widely used VR product instead of the current situation where the most popular product is one that Samsung gives away for free to people who pre-order their premium phones, for example. But if they can't, then they won't be the first tech company to go out of business or the last.
    gatorguypscooter63