freeper

"In addition to ditching a physical home button, the S8 also appears to be preempting the "iPhone 8" through its facial scanning and augmented reality support."

Please guys, tell the truth. The Galaxy Note 7 had iris scanning. Further, Android phones have had iris scanning as far back as 2015 when Qualcomm first began building the capability into their chips.

Second, augmented reality support was built into Android thanks to Google and Qualcomm in Android 7. So thank Google's Project Tango for AR support, and Google announced Project Tango in 2014. The first device to fully support Project Tango was the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro released in 2016. And as Project Tango is supported at the hardware layer with the Qualcomm SOC, every Android phone that has the Snapdragon 835 and Android 7 will fully support AR, and also will fully support VR because Android 7 and the Snapdragon 835 support the Daydream VR platform too (although you will not hear Samsung mention that, as Samsung's Gear VR is on the competing Oculus platform). In fact, as the Snapdragon 821 also supports both Tango and Daydream, the LG G6 and the $499 Asus ZenFone AR - the best Android device for the money as the thing even has 8 GB of RAM! - also have AR and VR support.

So please folks, stop claiming that ideas that Samsung - and a host of other Android OEMs - implemented first, and in some cases YEARS FIRST - are attempts to copy Apple. Even the physical home button ... less an attempt to copy Apple than an attempt to maximize the screen to bezel ratio. Physical home button support was never in base Android but was added by Samsung into TouchWiz. Samsung - and LG - are adopting a design similar to 2014's Sharp Aquos Crystal. So, unless Apple emulates Samsung with a curved OLED screen, the iPhone 8 will be a derivative of this guy ... which also does not have a physical home button.

http://www.sharpusa.com/ForHome/Mobile/Models/AQUOSCRYSTAL-306SH.aspx

The REAL STORY is that Apple's profit share DECLINED from 110% the last 2 years to only 83.6% last year, and this was DESPITE 1) the iPhone 7 outselling the iPhone 6S by large margins and 2) the Note 7 debacle and 3) the LG G5 and LG V20 debacles and 4) Lenovo's totally messing up the acquisition of Motorola, resulting in their selling both fewer of their phones and Motorola phones than before and 5) Xiaomi's sales plummeting. This year, look for Samsung's profits to significantly rise and the situations with LG, Xiaomi and Lenovo to at least stabilize.

chasm said:

The article suffers from serious Kool-Aid-ism, but the lead sentence tells the entire story: "Because the Android model (or rather the manufacturing part of the Android model) is simply not sustainable.

You guys have been spouting that wishful thinking for years. It has never been true and it never will be true. Profits of $8 billion a year are not sustainable? Since when? Profits of $800 million a year are not sustainable? Again, since when? Profits of $100 million a year are not sustainable? Again, when did this begin to be the case? Especially since - realize this - for everyone but HTC, Android smartphones and other mobile devices are not their only business. For Samsung, LG, Asus, Acer, Sony, Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, LeCo, OnePlus and the rest, Android smartphones are just one product of many in their portfolio. Many of these companies actually offer more products and services than Apple does. So, selling Android phones adds $50-$150 million to their bottom line in a good year that they are glad to get, and subtracts $50-$150 million from their bottom line in a bad year that they can easily subsidize with their other businesses. Especially if these other businesses include manufacturing components - which are sold in their own devices - as well as selling accessories for their Android devices, and selling Internet and mobile plans for their Android devices. And in China, companies like Huawei, Xiaomi and the rest can actually make money off their own app stores as well as by renting and selling movies and music, and do so. Even outside of China, LG a couple of years ago stated that so long as they continue making enough money on Android accessories to cover their losses on Android phones and tablets, they will continue to make Android phones and tablets. Sony also continues to sell Android phones - primarily in Japan - because their Android products are part of the larger Playstation ecosystem, to the point where they compete with and cannibalize sales of the PlayStation Vita (which is a failure in America but a huge deal in Japan). This is why the only companies that have ever exited the Android phone business are HP and Dell, who were very small players to begin with. (Several more have exited the Android tablet business: HP, Dell, Philips and Pyle.) Instead, new companies enter the Android phone business every year. Including Nokia (or rather the HMD consortium that is selling products with the Nokia name), who if they had switched to Android instead of wasting years with Symbian and then going all in with Windows Mobile, they would have never gone out of business to begin with, but instead would be making billions along with Samsung right now. This should not be a surprise. There has ALWAYS been a bargain electronics market of companies who make profits of a few hundred million a year by selling large volumes. Bargain TVs, stereos, clock radios, you name it. And Apple fans never go around claiming that those guys are going to go out of business. It is only the laptop, tablet and smartphone makers that Apple claims will go out of business because it is only those guys that compete with Apple. It makes no sense. Go to Amazon.com, Best Buy or whatever and look at all the TVs, computer monitors that can be had for $99 or all the routers that can be had for $40. Or the folks selling bluetooth headphones for $20 when Beats and Airpods costs 10 times that much. Do those guys have "unsustainable business models" too? If you guys are hoping for a world with no competition, it is not going to happen.

cropr said:

cali said:

I love seeing thieves pay. 

Now for the U.S. to go after other android scumbags. 

The article is about export American technology to Iran and North Korea.  Whether ZTE has paid for the American technology or not, is not part of the investigation.  Your rant about thieves is totally irrelevant here.

He is part of the cabal that simply resents the fact that Apple has competition of any kind. Never mind that Apple's competition accounts for like 85% of the "new features" in the iPhone since the iPhone 4s, or that were Apple to actually enjoy the sort of monopoly that they want, Apple would have gotten hammered with the same sort of anti-trust lawsuits that targeted Microsoft a couple of decades back and now threaten Google. ZTE makes good, affordable products. And no, their phone designs do not resemble iPhones in any way. And yes, they entered the smartphone business long after Android was viable thanks to Samsung, LG and HTC paving the way, and other manufacturers had figured out a business model on making quality products and selling them at enough volume to make profits on low margins. $450 million a year is peanuts to Apple, but it is more than worth their while, and the same is true of a lot of other Android OEMs, especially those for whom Android phones is not their primary revenue stream (which is the case for LG, Huawei, Asus, Lenovo, LeCo and a bunch of others). So if anything, their designs copy Samsung Galaxy phones and their success has nothing to do with Apple. As ZTE's phones cost 1/3 to 1/2 as much as the Apple equivalent, their going out of business would not add a single device sale to Apple. Instead, their sales would go to Xiaomi in China and probably Huawei and Samsung outside of China.

sog35 said:

This is why Apple didn't go thermo-nuclear on Samsung the last couple years.

They still need OLED panels from them

I think Jobs would have gone thermo-nuclear on Samsung and torched the bridge. Then he would be stuck without an OLED supplier. 

I think this is why Cook is a great CEO. He is very strategic and does not let emotion take over. He sees the big picture, years ahead.

Certainly you jest. First, Apple neither needs OLED and certainly not curved screens to retain their massive profits. Second Apple tried to go thermonuclear on Samsung and other Android OEMs and all their tactics ultimately failed just as did their UX/UI lawsuit against Microsoft failed in the early 90s Only HTC gave into Apple's licensing demands and lawsuit threats, and even Apple's much smaller and less comprehensive than they hoped legal victories were mostly overturned with the Supreme Court likely to reduce further still or outright overturn the last outstanding case.

Other than the good PR that they received as the press still accuses Samsung and other OEMs of copying Apple to this day even for features that the other OEMs actually adopted first, there never was any ability for any war against Samsung or Android to succeed. The precedent set by the Supreme Court when they ruled for Microsoft over Apple more than 25 years ago made sure of that.

On one hand, Apple sells more iPhones in a month than Echos have sold in their entire lifetime. When you add to that the iPad, Apple Watch, Mac and even go back to the pretty much obsolete iPod, the idea that a platform that has sold billions of devices has to compete with one that has sold MAYBE 25 million is absurd. I get that Echo gives the tech press something new to talk about in a tech landscape that hasn't produced a new product in a long time. I get that the Echo marries IoT and AI, two areas that the tech media have claimed will be the next new hot world shattering thing for years, and in this way it replaces VR which was SUPPOSED to be the new big thing. If anything, the press probably WANTS Apple to enter this field - just as they want Apple to enter the VR field - in order to drive more sales and headlines. But until the Echo reaches 100 million regular active users - not just people who bought an Echo Dot because it was $35 on Prime Day - it isn't a platform and it isn't something that Apple has to take notice of. MAYBE it is an issue for Google, which is another company that has spent years trying and failing to be a factor in the hardware market. So Amazon has moved more Echos than Google has been able to sell Chromebooks (to actual consumers and not standardized test-driven schools), Nexus/Pixel phones and tablets, Android TV/Google TV units, Android Wear watches, smart routers, smart speakers, Google Glass and Google Cardboard/Daydream units. Fine. Write about this Titanic battle between two companies selling gadgets that no one has any practical daily use for and have no developer support to your heart's content. And even there: the 25 million Alexas pose no actual threat to Google, who absolutely owns search on desktop and mobile on BILLIONS of devices on ALL platforms where Alexa is only a factor in Amazon's tiny walled garden. Amazon likely pays Google more in ad revenue in a month than their Alexa program has generated for them in its lifetime. But on the other ... Apple's claim that they want Siri to be on a variety of devices ... meaning a variety of devices that Apple will manufacture. And Apple, by virtue of the type of company that they are - they aren't even LG, let alone Samsung - will only manufacture a small number of very expensive devices that will only be used by a small subset of the population. Now once again, this is not that big of a problem so long as their biggest "competition" as 25 million Alexa devices. But if someone does come up with a ubiquitious solution that is platform and hardware agnostic - i.e. something akin to a browser or browser based solution - it could be a real problem. The issue right now - with the A.I., IoT and VR fields - is that Google, Samsung, LG, HTC, Huawei, Xiaomi etc. are being stupid, each developing their own solutions in this area instead of working together. They each have their own smart TV platform, VR products, IoT platforms etc. ... and as a result have almost no market share or developer support between them. Virtually no one even uses the connected or smart features on Samsung's smart appliances, and Samsung's VR platform is only a kinda sorta success - 5 million devices shipped - because of their BOGO promotions and because it runs on the Oculus platform, not their own. LG's buying what remained of webOS and trying to use it to create their own smart TV platform to compete with Google (and Samsung and Apple TV and Roku and Amazon) was an even bigger failure. But again, this is not Apple's problem, and until someone actually figures this stuff out and starts to compete in this area, there won't be a real revenue-producing threat for them to respond to.