Bart Y

red oak said:

There is almost zero evidence any of these foldable phones (including the ones from Samsung) sell in any measurable volume

Anyone who thinks Apple is now “ too far behind” is someone you need to avoid on all things Apple 🍎 

Roughly, the “measurable” Foldables volume is about 7-9M units total market in 2021, with Samsung maybe 85% of that total.  So about 6M-7.65M for Samsung.  Given we know Flip 3 sells 70% to Fold 3 30%, extrapolates to 4.2M-5.3M Flip models and 1.8M-2.3M Fold models over the Samsung sales season.  If my post above about reliability and customer service  issues reported by Samsung users in their own community discussion boards is true, there’s problems still which eventually will catch up with Samsung.

Anyway, 6-9M is a terribly low number of market units to commit R&D, parts sourcing (especially fragile, low reliability and availability Samsung units), and production for Apple IF it’s to meet Apple’s standards for reliability, longevity, quality, and functionality.  Better to wait till Apple and suppliers perfect this further and even then whether it still makes any sense financially or reputation wise.  

Here’s the link, hope it posts:

https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/forums/searchpage/tab/message?advanced=false&allow_punctuation=false&filter=location&location=category%3Auk&q=Samsung+fold

avon b7 said:

" Many of the first foldable devices were plagued by reliability issues"

I'm unaware of any foldable phone being plagued with reliability issues. Quite the opposite is true.

AFAIK, all folding phones that have come to market have had great reliability so far. 

For the Samsung Fold, many review units were damaged by reviewers trying to remove a screen coating that should not have been removed.

Once that was corrected, along with some further design enhancements, the units that were released performed well.

Uh, here’s a link to (or search for) the EU Samsung Community pages, search it for Samsung Fold.  You’ll find many many issues with the display screen, delamination of the built in screen protector, cracking of the display in cold weather, etc., not just the Fold 3 but also Flip 3.  Plus huge customer support issues trying to get warranty repairs and then having Samsung, their repair agent, or carrier blame the user for damage or abuse and charging them huge €€€ for repairs.

I’m guessing probably the same on US Samsung Community.  I’ll link in next post.

johnbear said:

normang said:

PDRPRTS said:

normang said:

And in other news,

A cart vendor rolls into a Mall, sets up shop, never consulted the management of the mall, has no contract.

After he is removed from the mall, goes down the road to another mall. does the same thing and gets kicked out.  

Unfortunately in the real counterpart of this analogy, the cart vendor is not allowed to set up shop anywhere else. Many do not wish to be in the App Store Mall, as many cant compensate the high sellers fee (which is totally lawful), but they cant go outside and sell either. That is the reason why this whole ordeal is even an issue - even if it is legal now, sideloading is actively deactivated at each system update - one can now legally circumvent this thanks to the jailbreaking court-ruling, but it is not easy for all, and it can be a hassle. At the very least it is difficult to sustain commercially.

Remember that in many legislations and countries your analogy is real and a cart vendor cannot set up an honest shop for survival anywhere simply because malls, or other government-favoured shops do not want competition (or need cheap labour/slaves). This is all fine until it is us needing to survive and make commerce, and as the world economy is going, i wouldnt think it is just something happening in an other continent.

This legal battle may be the grounds for how we and our children will be living in as short as a decade, as this will update Anti-Trust laws to global digital times. Capitalism becomes totalitarianism when monopolies go unchecked, so Anti-Trust laws are conisdered pillars of Democracy. Epic is acting so aggressively that they almost seem to want to wreck this all up in an otherwise valid case - but they are closer to 99% of humans than any monopoly will ever be.

The cart vendor has a choice, if he wants to be in the mall, he has to pay the fee that the mall requires to be there to use "their" space.   Your trying to create fairness where there is none, you can compete or you cannot.. If you decide to setup a cart in a saturated market, you had better be able to market and show that you have a far superior product, or your going to fail..    

Epic has no valid case..  They are trying to upend the app store, and in the process even if somehow they succeeded, its unlikely that things would really improve for anyone else..   It would merely show that if you legally force your will on someone its no different than totalitarianism I assume you decry.. 

imagine if visa and MasterCard charges merchants a 30% fee per transaction. Apple made over 50 billion in revenue from the AppStore last year. Unless they employ 100 mil people or something like that to work for the store and its platform, it’s ridiculous to say they need to charge those high fees to maintain it.
maybe Epic’s approach is not the best one but it seems that they are at the end of their rope after trying to work this out with Apple the nice way. Too many developers are angered and most likely this will hurt Apple too in the end

You seem to think, as many do, that all those revenues somehow are done for free.  They all have real costs and expenses.

Read the 10Q quarterly reports.  Apple in Q3 2020 made 13.16B in Service revenues.  But it cost them 4.3B to make those revenues, about 32.7% goes to expenses, and we are not even considering SGA and R&D expenses.  Apple also has to create, sell and support the hardware all these Apps run on. (Plus new iOS versions that support 90% of all current active iPhones and iPads).  For that, they had product sales revenue of 46.5B with 32.7B in Expenses, about 70% goes to expenses.  Add expenses together and divide by total sales and you get the gross margin of 38%, a fairly consistent point for Apple.  So charging 30% for App transactions (in the first year, remember, then it drops to 15% in successive years), is LESS than their overall gross margin and actually pulls it down.

There are roughly 2.2 million apps in the Apple App Store.  Let’s say 75% of them update at least once a year.  Assign 3 people to review each update taking 2 hours each to review and 1 hr each to document. That’s 6 hours of work for each app update, assuming all goes fine.  That’s 1.65 Million updates x 6 hrs.  Figure you pay $25/hr (flat pay, no benefits).  That’s ~$250M or $0.25 Billion in app update reviews alone.  Then there’s the thousands if not 100’s of thousands of new apps that are submitted annually which likely take much more time to review, test, dialog with, iterate with developer, till acceptable.  

Services is not a simple enterprise, at least not for a company as big as Apple.