So the US sanctions on Huawei, that were intended to be crippling and were fairly abrupt and harsh, had only a minor effect on Huawei. That should scare the shit out of the US government. It means that China is much more self-sufficient in technology than they figured.
The future of high technology at this time does seem to be in the hands of China with the rest of the world contributing a bit. I suspect OSes and architectural chip designs are one of the last things that China hasn't really developed home grown in a successful way, but it is likely next. Thus taking on directly Microsoft Windows, Android, ARM and Intel.
This posting's article also had a side bar link to a suggested article on the same news site, CN Tech Post. China is releasing its own OS, too (Unity OS -- UOS):
Their plan is to replace foreign PCs and software in all government offices and public institutions in three years. It means replacing 20-30 million PCs! That will definitely also accelerate the OS development.
https://www.ft.com/content/b55fc6ee-1787-11ea-8d73-6303645ac...
The original sanction charge on Huawei was for selling American equipment to Iran, and all the financial transactions related to hiding that. Stealing trade secrets and patent infringement is usually fine and a block on specific products and were tacked on later.
The official reason is that they exported US tech to Iran. But its pretty obvious the whole thing is political. Even trump contradicted the official reason a day later.
No one has actually managed to find and actual security reasons not to accept Huawei devices. There were some really poorly informed stories that listed standard features (telnet support in routers) and tried to play them up as a sinister commie plot but they were all pretty laughable. Most countries (for instance here in the UK) assess infrastructure equipment, providers can only buy from the approved and have for decades. Huawei always passed those tests with flying colours.
But I guess "chinese spies eat telecoms babies" is a much more dramatic headline...
Sure, backdoors will slip under security audits, until one day they're revealed and you find out you've been pwnt all along.
I don't think the US is innocent either, of course tech that we use internally and export is probably backdoored out the wazoo.
I would rather assume almost everything I use is backdoored one way or another, and operate that assumption, rather than assume the opposite to be true and be wrong.
It's not a dramatic headline. Governments spying on each other and their citizens is the boring default state of the things.
It's important not to shift the goalposts. Western security establishments are concerned that once Huawei has overwhelming marketshare in systems like 5G networks, they will have the ability to use these against target nations. They (at least the credible agencies) are not claiming that current Huawei devices are backdoored now.
Even if you believe the worst about China and Huawei, it wouldn't make the slightest bit of strategic sense for them to implant backdoors into products now, when marketshare is still small and growing rapidly. You'd add the backdoors once you had network dominance, like the US did.
> Huawei always passed those tests with flying colours.
Those tests have usually identified several issues, and Huawei has been slow to address them. For example, one of the conclusions of the 2019 report [1] was that "No material progress has been made on the issues raised in the previous 2018 report" Some of these issues are known vulnerabilities in old versions of dependencies like OpenSSL that Huawei has forked and then neglected to update.
That might have been one of the stated reasons. But I think it was protect the profit margins of several well-connected US Manufacturers notorious for expensive, high margin equipment.
> So the US sanctions on Huawei, that were intended to be crippling and were fairly abrupt and harsh, had only a minor effect on Huawei.
Of course they had only a minor effect, since they were always postponed to some future date. [1] The sanctions weren't intended to be crippling and harsh, but to threaten becoming crippling and harsh unless China makes certain concessions. So long as the concessions remain on the table, the sanctions remain off the table.
When the sanctions came out, I was surprised that Apple and Google DIDNT go nuclear. It seems pretty obvious that the nation of China won't just voluntarily give up all it's western smart phones. So the only other medium term alternative would be to begin work on a domestic OS. Apple and Google (and the US economy and tech sector by extension) are the big losers from that, China the big gainer.
It's not quite Tin Foil Hat time, but I also wondered: if the chinese government had tried to ban foreign OSs and force a homegrown equivalent it would have been resisted at home and abroad it would have spurred (real) sanctions and possibly upset the (lucrative, strategically valuable) hardware supply chain.
Trump doing it was a great way for the Chinese government to get what it wanted without looking like the bad guy (it might even be able to play the victim, especially at home).
Given the predictability of these outcomes, one has to wonder: was Trump incompetent (he expected a different outcome) or was he serving a different agenda (maybe a trump hotel in Beijing is about to be approved?).
The US government was never primarily concerned about handsets sales or technical superiority.
The primary issue has always been a concern of supply-chain governance for critical infrastructure, i.e. carriers networks. The US doesn't have any of these concerns about European 5G equipment manufacturers because they are close allies. The US has a high degree of confidence that the governments of Sweden and Finland aren't going to pressure Nokia or Ericsson to compromise the support or supply-chain of US 5G infrastructure.
The future of high technology at this time does seem to be in the hands of China with the rest of the world contributing a bit.
I highly doubt this. So far, what China has done is producing lower cost equivalent to products already developed by other nations. I don't see how China is leading the pack in terms of innovation, here.
Beside, I don't think we can consider smart phones to be "high technology" anymore. The market is saturated with them and the innovation has slowed down massively since a couple of years ago.
I have heard this refrain from those in the west for decades about china. During those two decades China has exceeded every attempt to keep them at a certain level of development.
I use a Huawei - it takes surprisingly great photos and is generally well made. Some annoying software pop-ups, though. I guess the worst part is that I feel the need to loudly state that "I support the actions of the Chinese government" on a regular basis, just to be safe.
Huawei is just like Apple in my mind. An overly expensive premium phone with bells and whistles I don't need. I had a ZTE for many years that is finally bricking. After this I will probably get some $100 phone from one of those millions of unknown Shenzhen OEMs, UMIDIGI or something.
Huawei have long done good phones in the roughly £100 to £200 range. They tend to be arguably the best hardware for their price. But as mentioned, the software isn't perfect so you'll either need to put up with some annoyances or be willing to hack around it.
The last time I bought a phone, I consulted that list first and compared all recent entries without fixating on a specific manufacturer. I ended up with a Xiaomi Mi A1 that's been holding up well so far and already went through one major Android update without problem.
I have Maimang 5. I replaced the battery 2 times already, and did one screen replacement along with the usb connector. I think, I am about to replace the loudspeaker soon too.
The thing just keeps breaking.
Huawei does very well in a niche of quite pricey mid-range phones without anything special.
The quality is as you see, quite average. The screen and loudspeaker died from improper sealing, batteries died to safety triggering both times.
At least they come with sound mechanical engineering. Why I bought it? It's still the best option if you want to buy a moderately well built phone, but don't want to go for a "superphone."
Precisely.
When you can manufacture dirt cheap, steal the innovation of others, then work your white collar to the bone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system). It is not surprising they can afford to undercut competitors and dump goods onto the market.
Would you expect any developing country to not take advantage advantage in the same situation? At a state level, it would be stupid to attract manufacturing with cheap labor, materials, lax ambient laws and low taxes and not copy the technology.
Only an inept government would willingly stall the development of its own country to honorably respect those trade secrets. Everybody doing business with China knew, but the economical incentive was too great to pass.
It doesn't make sense to look at the absolute size of an economy to determine development status. A country full of subsistence farmers can be #1 economy if they're numerous enough. China's GDP per capita (PPP) is still less than a third of that of the US, somewhere between Azerbaijan and the Dominican Republic.
I couldn’t disagree more. We live on a finite planet with limited resources. It hardly matters what the PPP is if they destroy the oceans we all use. The planet is only capable of sustaining so much. Having more people doesn’t give a nation some sort ethical imperative to have a higher GDP.
That you think China achieving a standard of living like current developed countries wouldn't be sustainable doesn't change anything about the fact that they're still developing.
FWIW, polluting water ecosystems is more common in developing countries (because they don't have the money to care about luxuries like environmental protection) and they've been slowly regenerating in developed countries, so from that perspective you should hope for China to become developed faster rather than slower.
I didn’t say that, but thanks for putting words in my mouth that make this somehow about nationality. I said that achieving a target PPP before expecting some restraint on the environment is a ludicrous goal in the face of the impending environmental cliff. You basically aren’t arguing, but telling me I’m just wrong and then making me out to really be on about keeping China down. Maybe try some intellectual honesty.
My point has everything to do with what the global ecosystem can take, and how much of an impact any nation has on it. As a species we need to figure out how to develop societies and countries without poisoning the planet.
The concept that because a country hasn’t reached PPP with the US it’s developing and can do what it pleases is patently insane. The Earth just doesn’t have the environmental resources for that, it’s already painfully apparent if you aren’t covering your eyes and ears. The human race can’t wait for countries to completely develop to play by the rules. Sucks.
Meanwhile China has demonstrably better infrastructure and more development in terms of cities than the US. I think by a lot of measures the US is still “developing”, we certainly lack the rail infrastructure of other “developed” countries for example, and our cities lack the dense, efficient urban cores of highly developed old world.
To boil my argument down, if China can build an extensive high speed rail network and capture the global electronics and PV markets they’ve moved beyond a “developing” economy, regardless of how well off or not the majority of their populace is.
Didn't the US "steal" the mechanisms behind the mechanical looms in the 19th century? I understand the concern that if no one is safe to invest in R&D without others immediately copying their tech (and therefore they won't receive a return on investment, which disincentivises future R&D), but aren't some phone manufacturers sitting on giant piles of money from their profit margins (Apple)? At the end of the day you end up with phones with more features being more affordable for the masses.
Who buys phones by their specs? I'm guessing most people have no idea even how much RAM is in their phone.
I bought a Pixel because it's from Google so it gets security patches and has a decent camera.
I've always wondered why none of these Chinese companies have tried to make something as good as an iPad. I had one of the venerable Nexus 7 tablets a long time ago and since then all the iPad competitors, with the exception of Amazon, haven't basically given up. I have a 10.5" iPad Pro and it's probably my favorite computer to use.
According to Counterpoint Research Samsung is #1, Second is BBK Electronics with 20% of the global smartphone market and is close to becoming the largest manufacturer in the near future. Brand comparisons ignore BBK Electronics because they sell multiple brands: One Plus, Oppo, Vivo and Realme.
Huawei is ahead of Apple because Huawei sells also HONOR branded smartphones.
Good info. Still I think that they're not making a lot of money and the market's contracting too. Looks a bit like the situation with laptops about 10 years ago. They were dirt cheap and abundant.
66% to Apple, 17% to Samsung and the rest is fighting for the scraps. Which is actually better than a while ago where Apple + Samsung > 100% because the rest was losing money. Already quite a few brands have left the market.
When people ask me if they should buy Apple, I tell them it's overpriced for the hardware you get. Your linked article proves my point quite nicely. But then I follow that up with the value is in the software, if you like/are familiar with Apple software, then buy Apple despite the cost.
I prefer Android and Linux, so I avoid Apple products for myself.
Some of it is the price premium, but Apple also enjoys some efficiencies that the Android clone makers don't. The more efficient iOS and smaller variation in hardware over their more limited number of models means they can lower costs while still putting out a top shelf product.
Tight control of the supply chain from top to bottom pays dividends over the years.
Are you living in the dream California? There are lots of places out of California they can't afford iPhone, or can't afford any phone more than $200, and that's the reality world. So, let Apple make money from those rich consumers, and let Chinese manufactures to make money from the other non-rich consumers.
The value is the fact that anyone can click on anything in iOS and not have to worry about malware or anything other than restarting the phone. Yes, the functionality may be limited, but my mom was never going to use the extra functions.
Indeed. Familiarity with the environment, features, and such is the biggest selling point when I give recommendations.
Plus, iOS across all your devices tends to "just work" way better than trying to stitch together things across environments via 3rd party apps or web widgets. So if you're already in the iOS ecosystem, just keep extending it.
Of course, the opposite is sorta true too. If you're heavily invested in Android, Android devices will tend to work well together. But with a bit more manual massaging sometimes.
Windows actually had the best across device seemless integrations out of all the offerings. Too bad they didn't make enough market share to make a dent.
That's only a problem when you view a product as just a bunch of discrete parts' summed value. A MacBook Pro is a macOS dongle that also happens to be one of the - if not the - best ultrabooks you can get.
“
Huawei announced on Tuesday its revenue hit 611 billion yuan, approximately $86 billion, for the third quarter, a jump of 24.4% over the same period last year.
In a statement short on numbers, the company also said its net profit margin for the period was 8.7%.
The company added its smartphone business had shipped 185 million units over the three quarters for the year to date, an increase of 26% year on year.
On 5G, the company said it had signed 60 commercial contracts and shipped over 400,000 5G Massive MIMO antennas.
”
Hard to give an answer for this type of question. Do you mean to say, like the device altogether with the parts that make up the phone isn't China sourced? Or do you mean to say the device is from a non Chinese company and is manufactured outside China? The answer could be a big NO as China sourced parts or process are involved in pretty much everything that the world consumes in this age.
Not quite 40 percent of the market. According to [1], where there are 6.4 billion people and 2.7 billion smartphone users in the top 50 countries, Chinese represent 29% of smartphone owners. In the very long term, assuming use in every country stabilizes at 80% of the population, they're looking at 22%.
I think the more interesting metric to watch is India. With 27% of their population in 2018 owning a smartphone (compared to 55% in China and ~80% in more wealthy Western nations like the US) they're likely to demonstrate meteoric rise in the next few years while Chinese adoption tapers off asymptotically towards the limit. The current 13% representation will rise towards 21%, causing the effective market share of Chinese smartphone owners to drop towards 22%.
Lego is the world's No 1 wheel maker. Michelin is far behind Lego in counts. But when you need a wheel for your car, you look for Michelin. Same here. Huawei phone and Apple phone are for different market. You shouldn't compare like that.
That's a very clever but insulting comparison. iPhone and Android (and etc) are both clearly smartphones with the same general features. I have to use an iPhone for work. I try to get the most out of it, but am constantly surprised how primitive and clunky it is compared to the Android experience.
What I mean is, excluding add-ons (especially Google ones), the default mail program, photo managing, synchronization, smart assistant, as well as small but important features like being able to search in settings all seem so much less developed. Apple has been ahead of Android in some cases, and takes a safer path, but especially having to use a locked-down iPhone (we have Android-based Samsung as an option, but I like to contrast) I'm constantly surprised at the experience.
Never had an Apple product so no personal experience - colleague recently bought an Apple flagship phone (I think previous gen before current gen came). After few days he was hugely disappointed how little he can tweak the device. What is there works fine, but that can be also said about phones for 20% of the price. For him, there was nothing more that would justify the price.
When he sees how much horsepower I have with my Xiaomi mi 9 for 1/3rd of the price, he wants to cry. It makes better photos too. His biggest regret in electronics shopping so far.
That comparison must obviously disregard privacy concerns, but I find it foolish to expect any kind of privacy, on any phone, Apple included. Hence no critical, single point of failure apps there.
>disappointed how little he can tweak the device. What is there works fine
So.... if it works fine why do you need to tweak it?
As someone who is moving from android to iphone shortly, I am highly excited to have a device that "just works" and will stay updated. The last thing I want in a phone is to have to manage it. I have my PC for that part of my life.
I guess (as someone else pointed out) it comes down to a difference in requirements and expectations.
I've mostly used Android for phones since they do the same general things as iPhones, they work fine out of the box, and stay updated since I only buy phones with good update policies.
The main difference isn't in how well they succeed, but in how they "fail". It's true that current iPhones have added most of the features I found lacking in the past, but there are still a few that have no real workaround. Changing default apps is still limited, browser restrictions are annoying, and there's no easy way I know of to enable system-wide ad blocking.
When a phone "just works" as I want 98% of the time, the difference to me is how able I am to get it working as I want the other 2% of the time. Obviously this is only based on my needs and expectations so I don't expect anyone else to share them.
I just bought a new phone for my partner and she has always used iPhones so that's what I bought for her. She prefers them and that's fine. Only real annoyance there was paying $750 for a phone with a 828x1792 LCD and 64GB storage when I paid $550 for my phone a year ago and it has a 1080x2280 AMOLED display and 128GB storage.
I know "specs don't matter" but it was still surprising. Even with Apple's market cachet and whatnot, I expected the higher price but also expected a bit more parity with a year-old phone. It's no surprise that some buyers are looking toward Chinese and other OEMs.
It sounds like he didn't do enough research. Customizability is one of the largest downfalls of iOS compared to Android, and that fact should show up on nearly every comparison article written about the two.
iOS is definitely not for those who want to highly customize their mobile device. It's kind of like renting a home vs owning one -- you can do light decoration but you can't knock down any walls. There are pros and cons to that. You can't customize as much, but you also skirt some of the responsibilities that come with property ownership. Some people prefer one set of responsibilities and freedoms over the other. Neither one is right for everyone.
I myself is an Android user and Mac as desktop. But my daughter prefer an iPhone for all her classmates are using it. So I bought one. Then, I found myself a dumb when I borrow her phone to do anything. Primitive? Not my case. I can't even transfer my desktop experience to iphone where both are backed by the same Cupertino company.
It's not overly insulting. The phones both Samsung and Huawei sell in BRIC and African markets are very different than what Americans are seeing from both, and I wouldn't be surprised if those phones make up a large bulk of their profits on Android.
Regarding Apple vs. Android, I have no interest in "tweaking" my phone. I used to like tweaking things when I was in my 20s and 30s and satisfied that need by hacking on Linux. I may have loved Android back then. Nowadays, I just want to finish what I need to get done as quickly as possible and spend all my free time with my family. Tweaking anything is a waste of time for me and I don't want to do it at any level. So, I ditched Linux for macOS and my Samsung phones for iOS. Both work exceptionally well for me and my purposes. I'm glad you found something that works for you.
I don't want to tweak things either, but find for both Android and Linux (Ubuntu and anything with a packaging system) they more "just work" the way I want, with pretty much out of the box settings. It really depends what you want to do, of course, but I find the Apple programs to be basic in ways that prevents them from being as helpful. The organizing features in Gmail alone; being able to easily manage and snooze mail, etc, make a huge difference.
The good things in Chinese smartphones are their price and that they sometimes have clean Android version without bloatware. Why do vendors like Samsung make their ugly buggy shells and pre-install software I don't need? Do they think they have better designers and developers that Google has? They are horribly wrong. Stop pretending that you are making something unique and maybe I will consider buying a non-chinese phone next time.
They do it do differentiate their phones. If all phones look the same and basically have the same hardware - why bother buying Samsung, when a cheap Oppo is the exact same phone?
Then Samsung won't make lots of money. This way you can have Samsung fanboys that'll swear that Samsung stuff is better and will keep buying it.
"Why do vendors like Samsung make their ugly buggy shells and pre-install software I don't need? Do they think they have better designers and developers that Google has?" They have to be VALUE provider, not just maker a rather common and brick-looking gadget
My experience with Android One phones from Xiaomi is that they have no bloat when they are released (probably because they have to have no bloat for them to be certified by Google) but then they keep sneaking bloat with every little update they make.
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[ 7.0 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadThe future of high technology at this time does seem to be in the hands of China with the rest of the world contributing a bit. I suspect OSes and architectural chip designs are one of the last things that China hasn't really developed home grown in a successful way, but it is likely next. Thus taking on directly Microsoft Windows, Android, ARM and Intel.
https://cntechpost.com/2019/12/13/china-made-operating-syste...
Sounds flawless...
It would by now be more worrying if he didn't.
But I guess "chinese spies eat telecoms babies" is a much more dramatic headline...
I don't think the US is innocent either, of course tech that we use internally and export is probably backdoored out the wazoo.
I would rather assume almost everything I use is backdoored one way or another, and operate that assumption, rather than assume the opposite to be true and be wrong.
It's not a dramatic headline. Governments spying on each other and their citizens is the boring default state of the things.
Even if you believe the worst about China and Huawei, it wouldn't make the slightest bit of strategic sense for them to implant backdoors into products now, when marketshare is still small and growing rapidly. You'd add the backdoors once you had network dominance, like the US did.
Those tests have usually identified several issues, and Huawei has been slow to address them. For example, one of the conclusions of the 2019 report [1] was that "No material progress has been made on the issues raised in the previous 2018 report" Some of these issues are known vulnerabilities in old versions of dependencies like OpenSSL that Huawei has forked and then neglected to update.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/huawei-cyber-secu...
Of course they had only a minor effect, since they were always postponed to some future date. [1] The sanctions weren't intended to be crippling and harsh, but to threaten becoming crippling and harsh unless China makes certain concessions. So long as the concessions remain on the table, the sanctions remain off the table.
[1] Currently February 16, 2020 apparently: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/us-government-postpo...
It's not quite Tin Foil Hat time, but I also wondered: if the chinese government had tried to ban foreign OSs and force a homegrown equivalent it would have been resisted at home and abroad it would have spurred (real) sanctions and possibly upset the (lucrative, strategically valuable) hardware supply chain.
Trump doing it was a great way for the Chinese government to get what it wanted without looking like the bad guy (it might even be able to play the victim, especially at home).
Given the predictability of these outcomes, one has to wonder: was Trump incompetent (he expected a different outcome) or was he serving a different agenda (maybe a trump hotel in Beijing is about to be approved?).
The primary issue has always been a concern of supply-chain governance for critical infrastructure, i.e. carriers networks. The US doesn't have any of these concerns about European 5G equipment manufacturers because they are close allies. The US has a high degree of confidence that the governments of Sweden and Finland aren't going to pressure Nokia or Ericsson to compromise the support or supply-chain of US 5G infrastructure.
The "National Security" concern (economically, technologically, capability and integrity-wise) is at the carrier level. Think Cisco, not iPhone.
The US outspends the next 7 countries in defense, combined.
Regarding actual economic sanctions are a very effective weapon in US Foreign policy.
Aside from it's military might, the US is one of the biggest players in the global economic market. That allows it to wield incredible leverage.
I highly doubt this. So far, what China has done is producing lower cost equivalent to products already developed by other nations. I don't see how China is leading the pack in terms of innovation, here.
Beside, I don't think we can consider smart phones to be "high technology" anymore. The market is saturated with them and the innovation has slowed down massively since a couple of years ago.
I do not see that stopping.
It seems like if you want updates after a couple of years you'd best make sure your phone isn't locked out from aftermarket ROMs.
The last time I bought a phone, I consulted that list first and compared all recent entries without fixating on a specific manufacturer. I ended up with a Xiaomi Mi A1 that's been holding up well so far and already went through one major Android update without problem.
Have you noticed that the battery was going up when you do that?
The thing just keeps breaking.
Huawei does very well in a niche of quite pricey mid-range phones without anything special.
The quality is as you see, quite average. The screen and loudspeaker died from improper sealing, batteries died to safety triggering both times.
At least they come with sound mechanical engineering. Why I bought it? It's still the best option if you want to buy a moderately well built phone, but don't want to go for a "superphone."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/huaweis-yearslong-rise-is-litte...
Only an inept government would willingly stall the development of its own country to honorably respect those trade secrets. Everybody doing business with China knew, but the economical incentive was too great to pass.
FWIW, polluting water ecosystems is more common in developing countries (because they don't have the money to care about luxuries like environmental protection) and they've been slowly regenerating in developed countries, so from that perspective you should hope for China to become developed faster rather than slower.
My point has everything to do with what the global ecosystem can take, and how much of an impact any nation has on it. As a species we need to figure out how to develop societies and countries without poisoning the planet.
The concept that because a country hasn’t reached PPP with the US it’s developing and can do what it pleases is patently insane. The Earth just doesn’t have the environmental resources for that, it’s already painfully apparent if you aren’t covering your eyes and ears. The human race can’t wait for countries to completely develop to play by the rules. Sucks.
Meanwhile China has demonstrably better infrastructure and more development in terms of cities than the US. I think by a lot of measures the US is still “developing”, we certainly lack the rail infrastructure of other “developed” countries for example, and our cities lack the dense, efficient urban cores of highly developed old world.
To boil my argument down, if China can build an extensive high speed rail network and capture the global electronics and PV markets they’ve moved beyond a “developing” economy, regardless of how well off or not the majority of their populace is.
I bought a Pixel because it's from Google so it gets security patches and has a decent camera.
I've always wondered why none of these Chinese companies have tried to make something as good as an iPad. I had one of the venerable Nexus 7 tablets a long time ago and since then all the iPad competitors, with the exception of Amazon, haven't basically given up. I have a 10.5" iPad Pro and it's probably my favorite computer to use.
Here is more information on that report: https://finitestate.io/2019/06/26/report-finds-cybersecurity....
And here is a video of our CEO talking more about it: https://finitestate.io/2019/10/03/security-weekly-podcast
Huawei is ahead of Apple because Huawei sells also HONOR branded smartphones.
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share...Chinese brands have almost 50% global market share.
--- edit ---
https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/12/19/apple-earned-66-o...
66% to Apple, 17% to Samsung and the rest is fighting for the scraps. Which is actually better than a while ago where Apple + Samsung > 100% because the rest was losing money. Already quite a few brands have left the market.
I prefer Android and Linux, so I avoid Apple products for myself.
Tight control of the supply chain from top to bottom pays dividends over the years.
Plus, iOS across all your devices tends to "just work" way better than trying to stitch together things across environments via 3rd party apps or web widgets. So if you're already in the iOS ecosystem, just keep extending it.
Of course, the opposite is sorta true too. If you're heavily invested in Android, Android devices will tend to work well together. But with a bit more manual massaging sometimes.
Windows actually had the best across device seemless integrations out of all the offerings. Too bad they didn't make enough market share to make a dent.
I'd love to take a look at non-apple options.
That's only a problem when you view a product as just a bunch of discrete parts' summed value. A MacBook Pro is a macOS dongle that also happens to be one of the - if not the - best ultrabooks you can get.
“ Huawei announced on Tuesday its revenue hit 611 billion yuan, approximately $86 billion, for the third quarter, a jump of 24.4% over the same period last year.
In a statement short on numbers, the company also said its net profit margin for the period was 8.7%.
The company added its smartphone business had shipped 185 million units over the three quarters for the year to date, an increase of 26% year on year.
On 5G, the company said it had signed 60 commercial contracts and shipped over 400,000 5G Massive MIMO antennas. ”
https://www.zdnet.com/article/huawei-revenue-up-by-almost-on...
I suspect they could run large losses for a long time because their value to China isn't entirely contained in their P&L statement.
You can say that Chinese phones have 90%+ of global market.
Samsung still manufactures in China, it just closed its own factories there. OEMs and CMs took over manufacturing for them.
Only their cheapest models are made in Hanoi and Seremban. Some of their domestic market models are still made in Gumi.
I think the more interesting metric to watch is India. With 27% of their population in 2018 owning a smartphone (compared to 55% in China and ~80% in more wealthy Western nations like the US) they're likely to demonstrate meteoric rise in the next few years while Chinese adoption tapers off asymptotically towards the limit. The current 13% representation will rise towards 21%, causing the effective market share of Chinese smartphone owners to drop towards 22%.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_smartphon...
if I read it correctly, they counted number of units sold, and not actual sales amount in USD.
When he sees how much horsepower I have with my Xiaomi mi 9 for 1/3rd of the price, he wants to cry. It makes better photos too. His biggest regret in electronics shopping so far.
That comparison must obviously disregard privacy concerns, but I find it foolish to expect any kind of privacy, on any phone, Apple included. Hence no critical, single point of failure apps there.
So.... if it works fine why do you need to tweak it?
As someone who is moving from android to iphone shortly, I am highly excited to have a device that "just works" and will stay updated. The last thing I want in a phone is to have to manage it. I have my PC for that part of my life.
I've mostly used Android for phones since they do the same general things as iPhones, they work fine out of the box, and stay updated since I only buy phones with good update policies.
The main difference isn't in how well they succeed, but in how they "fail". It's true that current iPhones have added most of the features I found lacking in the past, but there are still a few that have no real workaround. Changing default apps is still limited, browser restrictions are annoying, and there's no easy way I know of to enable system-wide ad blocking.
When a phone "just works" as I want 98% of the time, the difference to me is how able I am to get it working as I want the other 2% of the time. Obviously this is only based on my needs and expectations so I don't expect anyone else to share them.
I just bought a new phone for my partner and she has always used iPhones so that's what I bought for her. She prefers them and that's fine. Only real annoyance there was paying $750 for a phone with a 828x1792 LCD and 64GB storage when I paid $550 for my phone a year ago and it has a 1080x2280 AMOLED display and 128GB storage.
I know "specs don't matter" but it was still surprising. Even with Apple's market cachet and whatnot, I expected the higher price but also expected a bit more parity with a year-old phone. It's no surprise that some buyers are looking toward Chinese and other OEMs.
iOS is definitely not for those who want to highly customize their mobile device. It's kind of like renting a home vs owning one -- you can do light decoration but you can't knock down any walls. There are pros and cons to that. You can't customize as much, but you also skirt some of the responsibilities that come with property ownership. Some people prefer one set of responsibilities and freedoms over the other. Neither one is right for everyone.
There can ocean in terms of specs between the lowest end phones they sell here vs models they only sell in other countries.
Then Samsung won't make lots of money. This way you can have Samsung fanboys that'll swear that Samsung stuff is better and will keep buying it.
Because Samsung is made outside of China and will not be tariffed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_One