I really wish there was more competition in this space. Here's hoping someone like Canonical tries again now that the open-hardware world is starting to expand.
I don't think there is for premium devices. If I wanted to buy an upmarket car there are a lot of choices but for phones it's just Apple or possibly a high end Samsung.
there will be - but it will be in the form of a Chinese mandate to provide phones that do not use Western Operating systems or without western data privacy protections.
Ideas like what Canonical and Firefox tried to do were great, but didn't have enough in it for the powers that be to be successful.
There was also, to be frank, incompetence. Mozilla is paying their director, what, $2.4 million just this year while their browser becomes more irrelevant each year in the usage metrics? And Canonical thought releasing generally-crappy hardware and refusing to support Wayland and requiring a centralized App Store of their own (later the Snap Store) was a winning strategy for getting Linux enthusiasts.
Chinese actually just passed a bunch of data privacy protections. I'd say they're to protect chinese users from western and private companies, whereas the government is free to influence and access.
It's conceptually similar to the protections in the west. Protect users, but share data with the 5 eyes. It's just that they won't block you from searching for Uyghur or Winnie the Pooh or something similar in the process.
It's kinda interesting because this concept seems to work fine in China for the simple reason that they have so many domestic services. Other countries that just try to copy the China model without the domestic information services(i.e. Iran) have a huge mess on their hands.
Yea but kind of a dangerous game to continue playing - does China want to have factories and suppliers close down and relocate out of China? Where will those people work?
It may happen anyway but these scenarios are never easy or clean-cut.
Doesn't really work when the factories and suppliers supply companies located outside of China and who can make that happen without the consent of the CCP.
Either way, it's not clear-cut. Sure China can do that. Great now they can pay those workers since companies like Apple won't be paying them...
you can have the best phone ever. but if you can not talk the big phone companies into putting it on their shelves you are going to have a rough time. my suspicion is android is only as big as it is because verizon did not want to budge on that data thing with Steve jobs. at&t was willing to play ball and it was exclusive and verizon was caught with feature phones only and a couple of janky wince phones with terrible data plan costs.
Looks to me there’s plenty of competition. Apple just consistently wins. Consumers are willing to pay more per device and it flows through to profit. The others are competing on price and their margins reflect it.
I was talking with a MediaMarkt employee last week, we were talking smartphones and we both were dumbstruck about iphone prices. We agree it's good hardware/products but the price is insance. Yet people buy them in bulk. The brand is that strong. Apparently people also rush to replace their old models every year or two.
Anyway, it just popped into my mind that I dreamt about buying a phone last night and the shop's owner just found a box with 60 iphones 13 that a customer finally didn't buy. But he had opened each box and the cardboard was ripped for each box so it was a massive loss for him. Funny coincidence.
>and we both were dumbstruck about iphone prices. We agree it's good hardware/products but the price is insane.
I'm honestly dumbstruck that people like you are dumbstruck. It's not very hard, and whether you your self use powerful handheld computers/cameras much it's objectively obvious others do a lot. Just do the normal ROI calc. Apple makes a feature for this called "ScreenTime". How many hours a day is the average iPhone user on their phone? A quick google search indicates over two hours. So that's over 700 hours per year, with a life time of at least two years on average.
Do the math. What is so shocking about spending <$1/hour on something so heavily used and important? What price privacy/security focus and long term upgrades? Subtract too the resale value. What is surprising here?
> Do the math. What is so shocking about spending <$1/hour on something so heavily used and important? What price privacy/security focus and long term upgrades? Subtract too the resale value. What is surprising here?
What's surprising is that for the vast majority the same can be done for <20ç/hour.
Yes, but researching these alternatives takes time and energy. Personally, I rather spent a £1-2k more on my tech gadgets per year than leaving the Apple ecosystem, which works well for me.
Yes, I am also all for paying a bit more if it comes with the guarantee that it's less problem/questioning/time wasted researching or supporting the thing down the line.
I will grant that a small fraction of iPhone owners do a careful analysis similar to yours. And good for them.
But just look at Apple ads to see what their real market is. Their ads don't argue that they're a good value. Apple established themselves as a luxury good that indicates wealth and social status. Their ads look like other ads for wealthy people. The reason Apple doesn't make a cheap phone is the same reason Porche doesn't make a cheap car. They could, but it would drop total profit as the luxury premium evaporates.
The funny thing is, I've heard people make the exact same argument people are making here but for Louis Vuitton bags. It's something they use every day! They're so well made that they last a long time! They have great resale value! And all of those things are true, but people who spend $100 on a purse are still going to give side-eye to people who spend $1000 or $10,000, and I think that's fine. In my view status goods are a plague upon humanity.
>In my view status goods are a plague upon humanity.
Why? I'd argue that status goods have driven technological and artistic progress throughout time. So many innovations were the result of someone trying to make a new higher status good, or trying to make a status good cheaper(so they could have more wealth/power).
Living in the 21st century, almost every good you can buy would have been a status good to someone at a time in the past.
Violence and war have also driven technological and artistic progress. I don't think that makes them good.
I also think you're confusing "did contribute to the creation of" and "was the only possibly way we could get". E.g., it's true that early cellphones were status goods. But given the massive market for them today, it's clear that was not a necessary step toward their existence and perfection.
> Apparently people also rush to replace their old models every year or two.
The resale prices on used Apple hardware is pretty good. When you factor that in, an iPhone may very well be less expensive than a competing Android device.
> I was talking with a MediaMarkt employee last week, we were talking smartphones and we both were dumbstruck about iphone prices. We agree it's good hardware/products but the price is insance.
They start at $400, right? Only really, really budget Android phones come in much under that.
> Yet people buy them in bulk. The brand is that strong. Apparently people also rush to replace their old models every year or two.
I have encountered three major species of iPhone owner:
1) Breaks a screen every couple of years, just replaces the phone when it happens.
2) Upgrades every year or two but leverages iPhones having a much better used market than Android to recover half or more of the original price via resale or trade-in, so they only pay full price for the first phone. (some of these now simply lease their phones, for convenience)
3) Holds on to each phone 4+ years, since the phones receive updates for so long. Pays full price every time, but goes a long time between upgrades.
> > I was talking with a MediaMarkt employee last week, we were talking smartphones and we both were dumbstruck about iphone prices. We agree it's good hardware/products but the price is insance.
> They start at $400, right? Only really, really budget Android phones come in much under that.
More like 489€. I don't know what's apple most sold devices for this year though.
I have an old not-budget phone (z5c) from 6 years ago that is still going strong. Stuck on android 7.1, bought used for 250€ 4 years ago.
I am still living in a world where a 200/250 phone should be okay, things might have changed.
But we were talking about the whole offer, not the least expensive phone.
Might wanna take a look at the following. I had an z3c that had a better supported android version from xda than a more recent xz2c because of their camera DRM and kernel bugs. Sony dev community has mostly dried up ...
There isn't. Only first time smartphone buyers have a choice.. you'll lose all your appstore purchases when you switch and having repurchase everything is going to dissuade anyone from switching.
Even for the first time buyers, if all their friends are on iMessage, they practically have to buy an iPhone.
How many App Store purchases matter? I’ve bought hundreds of apps over the years, but really don’t care about them. Nobody uses a lot of paid apps, and a lot of them have moved to subscriptions anyway.
Why would you need iMessages? I don't find it more useful than old school sms messaging. If you want secure messaging perhaps whatsup or signal are better options anyway.
I to refuse to use other messaging apps but I find it hard to blame apple for creating a messaging app that people love/like enough to refuse using competing messaging apps. That's not lack of competition or lock in. That's just user preference, I prefer to keep it all in the same place. I don't need the extra feature of speed. Texting is async to me so speed it never noticeable. So I don't really care if you SMS me or iMessage me.
It's more reliable and faster than SMS, removes the size limits, far more secure, and supports a lot of modern features (non-terrible media quality, received/read notifications, threading, app embeds, etc.)
Signal tries to offer that but isn't as polished. The Facebook services like WhatsApp are good and cross-platform but that involves trusting Facebook heavily.
In the United States iMessage is almost the default messenger. I don't know anybody that uses WhatsApp, Telegram, or Signal. iMessage requires no extra setup its already there by default when you buy an iPhone. Asking somebody non-techy to switch messaging apps just isn't going to happen.
With iMessage you can send high resolution photos and videos, which may seem like not a big deal. But it is. Sending a message between Android and iOS uses mms and the photo/video is compressed to an unusable state. I can airdrop a 1GB+ file instantly to any Apple device. How do I transfer a 1GB file to somebody on Android or on a PC? Upload to google drive? then re-download it thru the App? That takes minutes and 5+ steps. When I've already Airdropped the file in seconds on my Apple device by tapping "send".
iMessage/Apple products are about convenience and ease of use. Apple is the best in both of those categories.
> Asking somebody non-techy to switch messaging apps just isn't going to happen.
It's happening everywhere in the world apart from the USA so that's clearly not where the blockage is. It has more to do with iMessage having a critical mass of users in the USA.
> I can airdrop a 1GB+ file instantly to any Apple device. How do I transfer a 1GB file to somebody on Android or on a PC? Upload to google drive? then re-download it thru the App? That takes minutes and 5+ steps.
Apple competitors have technology which are similar to airdrop notably Huawei and there are plenty of apps offering solutions to this issue. I like airdrop but generally speaking Android sharing options are superior to iOS. It is easier to send anything towards any apps on Android which makes your point about the 5+ steps kind of moot in my opinion.
> iMessage/Apple products are about convenience and ease of use. Apple is the best in both of those categories.
iMessage is mostly about captive markets and network effect. Then again, I like my iphone. It's well made and it somewhat works as a status symbol which I have nothing against. I just don't try to pretend that Apple wins by being the best.
>It's happening everywhere in the world apart from the USA so that's clearly not where the blockage is. It has more to do with iMessage having a critical mass of users in the USA.
Outside of the USA people are "switching" messaging Apps? Or just continuing to use what they have always used?
>Apple competitors have technology which are similar to airdrop notably Huawei.
Nobody uses Huawei here in the US so that point is moot.
>and there are plenty of apps offering solutions to this issue. I like airdrop but generally speaking Android sharing options are superior to iOS.
What are these Android sharing options that are superior to iOS? Do they have to be installed? iOS has Airdrop built in requiring no installation or configuration. If they have to be installed they are automatically not superior.
>It is easier to send anything towards any apps on Android which makes your point about the 5+ steps kind of moot in my opinion.
No it isn't? I have used both Samsung and Apple devices for 10+ years. It is always easier to share between iOS devices and Macs.
I don’t buy the lock in argument. Not because it’s false but because every thing has lock in to some extent. It’s just user preference, taste, and familiarity are stronger than losing app purchases. People used to completely repurchase their music collection every 10 years or so. Albums, 8 tracks, cassettes, CDs, etc. They value reliably that Apple is known for and the risk of changing and not liking another platform is large. New users look at their friends and think, “everyone seems to like iPhone. Seems like a safe bet even though it’s expensive”. I’d argue it’s still not expensive given how much utility they provide.
I find analogies useful. When I was young I started eating fries with ketchup. As an adult, I don’t get to say ketchup lacks competition because I don’t like other condiments. Even within the ketchup vertical, I have a brand preference. I could buy a store brand and save 50% but I don’t. I like what I like and I pay for it. Non iPhone users either don’t like iOS or just don’t want to pay the premium Apple charges, otherwise I’d argue many more people would be on iPhone.
Apple has lock-in to a much stronger extent. There is very little lock-in between Android phones; you can easily switch brands.
And the point about iMessage and the other iWhatevers is important. Apple intentionally avoided interoperability. This goes beyond lock-in to contagion. I know people who didn't really want to get their young kids iPhones, because they weren't really old enough to be responsible for something so expensive. But they felt they had to do it anyhow because of the lack of interoperability. So they ended up buying multiple kid iPhones as the phones were lost, smashed, etc. I get that's not very expensive for the kind of people who hang out on HN, but it's real money to most.
What are the conditions that should be fulfilled for you to see that there's competition in the market?
For me, it's the existence of a player that can squeeze the margin for others.
With only seller giving people access to iMessage and app store, I don't see this condition fulfilled. Even if there is a well made phone that offers better utility for half the price, most users would just wait for iPhone to catch up rather than switch.
I don't want to draw very bad comparisons: but this is very similar to the AWS lock-in with egress, except instead of data, you have iMessage and apps you've already bought..
> For me, it's the existence of a player that can squeeze the margin for others.
So you’re segmenting luxury phone market and saying Apple has no competition in that space except Samsung and others have tried for years to make luxury phones. iPhone users do not want them and it’s primarily due to preference. They don’t want to have to learn another os, they don’t like the look/feel, they don’t get a test drive option, etc. I just believe that’s their personal risk assessment that Apple benefits from but it’s not lock in because I just don’t think people really give a shit about iMessage that much. I have to believe the true perfect competitor you want them to have will have an acceptable solution as well.
Drawing this reasoning to AWS: People don't want to move away from AWS because they like AWS/don't want to train their engineers and not primarily because moving data out from AWS is going to bankrupt them?
Surely former reasons are valid and those people do exist.. but anecdotally most companies that I know are the latter.
Maybe most iPhone users would stick with iPhone even if there's no lock in, but we don't know that because there is a lock in.
How many consumers are even paying more? iPhones start pretty cheap — not as low as the cheapest Android phones but they're starting with much better hardware and are supported considerably longer so this starts to feel more like Sam Vimes' boots[1] where someone buying cheap Android phones spends more than an iPhone SE over the service life. Flagship Android phones cost the same, often even more, than an iPhone despite the lower performance and still have a shorter service life.
What I think it's really showing is that the Android economic model creates different incentives: Apple gets money when you buy the phone, apps, purchases in apps, and things like music or movies through their services. They certainly like it if you buy a new phone every year but all of those different groups share a common leader who wants to keep you as an Apple customer.
When you buy an Android phone, the CPU manufacturer won't see another dime until you buy a new one. A vendor like Samsung may or may not depending on whether they have some other service you use or get kickbacks from the carriers. Google likely sees ongoing revenue but they don't care about the hardware as long as it doesn't make you switch to iOS. Each of those parties adds overhead which Apple doesn't have and they will make decisions which are rational for their business but perhaps not your satisfaction.
When you say "not as low", the cheapest iPhone I can find looks like the SE, at 389 pounds. I can find multiple Android phones for 50 pounds -- that's nearly an eigth of the price.
I don't deny the SE is a better phone than a 50 pound phone, but it's also in an entirely different bracket -- I wouldn't give a 10 year old a nearly 400 pound iPhone, I'd give them a 50 pound Android, for example.
While I get your argument, Apple probably just doesn't give a shit about competing in the ultra cheap phone market, they've found their "niche" (for lack of a better term) and will probably stay the way they are for the foreseeable future.
Also, nowadays, most people (the vast majority of which don't think the same way as people on HN do) see a $400 phone as a compelling budget option[0], maybe even "low-end" if you'd go so far as to say that.
0. from personal experience with the iPhone SE2, it's a genuinely amazing phone for the price (sporting the same processor as the iphone 11 pro!) and suffers only in the battery department. Touch ID is also a great selling point for it.
Most people in the developed world, sure. Here on the rest of the globe, as per [0], Androids are considered the compelling budget for 99.9%* of people.
I speak from my own point of reference in the USA, which is also for the most part Apple's main audience. It's well known how dominant android devices are overseas.
How many people are happily buying those really cheap phones, though? I've known a few, who bought a couple per year(!) because the hardware kept failing, but it seems like most people are buying in the iPhone SE range and the younger kids end up getting a hand-me-down when their parents upgrade (and since an iPhone is 6+ years of service, that's plenty).
> How many people are happily buying those really cheap phones, though? I've known a few, who bought a couple per year(!) because the hardware kept failing
This is my parents. Between the two of them I bet they average 3 new phones per year, because they keep buying cheap Android phones, but they just can't bring themselves to spend more, even though it'd actually be cheaper and then their phone wouldn't suck. Plus because they keep buying Android and all these cheap phones run on different major versions and with different vendor customizations, they're constantly having trouble with wildly different UI for even basic things like the phone "app".
As Apple only sell about 25% of handsets, as discussed in the article, most people are buying Android handsets.
I know lots of people who have bought a cheap Android handset and used it happily for a few years, myself among them. Most Apple owners I know keep the phones until they die, so don't have hand-me-downs. Obviously it depends greatly on the wealth of people as to how eager they are to upgrade their phone.
I know most people buy Android, but at least here in the U.S. that rarely seems like it’s much cheaper – comparable quality devices, and a fair number of people getting the phone their carrier subsidizes (usually the previous generation iPhone or Samsung flagship) so the cost is buried in their monthly charge.
Apple's answer to low end android phones is second hand iPhones. I bought my 10 year old a second hand original SE for the same price as a super low end Android and it's probably a better phone. It even runs the latest version of iOS, something that cannot be said for many of those cheap Android devices.
As a matter of full disclosure, my personal phone is an Android phone.
Let me be clear, I mean technological and software competition. A duopoly between Android and Apple isn't it. For comparison, see the dekstop/laptop market, where there are many totally usable open source software alternatives to Windows/OSX.
Define "competition". Apple has a minority of the actual handset market, but they have a majority of the profits.
You can speculate as to why they can wring so many extra dollars out of their customer base, but it's not clear to me that the overall handset market, itself, is structured in a way that gives Apple an unusual advantage.
I would like to try something different but the fact that almost all my family members and friends communicate through imessage & facetime keeps me locked to iphones. The network effects here in the US are really strong.
There's tons of competition in terms of products, but Apple wins on marketing every time. They are able to charge a massive markup by leveraging their market placement as a luxury brand.
Apple wins because of its software not because of its marketing.
It seems the competition still doesn't get that Android is not good enough to compete with Apple on the luxury/premium market. Most of the "extra" software developed by the competition is bloatware and spyware. The core design is developed only by Google who is weaker on design than Apple.
That's why Apple gets the bulk of the premium market and leaves the competition to battle on the cheap segment.
Maybe competition was the wrong word for what I meant - I meant software alternatives. I've recently owned laptops from Acer, Asus, Dell, and Apple, and I put various flavors of Linux on all of them (pre M1).
Globally Apple has a marketshare of about 26%. Even in the US, Apple has just over 50% marketshare.
The fact that they are capturing the majority of the profit is reflective of business strategy and priorities.
Apple makes a lot of money from the smartphone itself. Other providers are making their money by selling out their users.
You would either need to go head-to-head with Apple on price and quality of the device and OS and distribution, or compete with Google in terms of selling out your users. Or you would need to find a back-end monetization strategy based on paid services that, so far, seems elusive. Mostly, I think, because it requires a huge portfolio of services (e.g. a "Netflix phone" won't cut it).
As an aside, I've long felt that that latter strategy could be applied in the browser market. Make a browser with a subscription-based services package. ChromeOS+Workspace is mostly there, except for the focus on crap devices and poor distribution and the never ending customer exploitation (Google's product playbook: crap sold at flea markets with AI support).
The challenge folks like Canonical face is that they try to compete with Google on price and distribution, and compete with Apple on privacy alone. So they skip out on both proven ways of making money. That's just not going to scale. Such players will always be niche players, and there are plenty of them out there toiling away without a scalable business model. Which is fine, if you accept them for what they are.
A lot of people in tech like to say this but I'm never sure it's genuine. When Microsoft made a go of it there seemed to be a concerted effort to laugh them out of the room, and they had a genuinely decent product that should have been a third option in my opinion.
I think we've now reached a point where a third player is pretty much impossible
Apple will dominate the market until the market itself becomes irrelevant. Good news for Apple is that in the next 5 years I don’t see something in the horizon to challenge the market of smartphones.
Since 3D TV's never got to a glasses-less state, they were always an incredible compromise. AR already works better than 3D TV's ever did, in that regard.
I always said, back in the day - 'I'll invest in 3D when we don't need glasses for it' - and I guess enough people collectively said that at the same time that it shut down the industry and never matured to that level.
Every major tech vendor seems certain AR glasses are going to be the "next Smartphone", if you will, in terms of UI and market trends. Nothing else could explain their continued emphasis on AR tools & demos for platforms that suck to use for AR except as a novelty (i.e. all current platforms).
3D TVs were always a solution in search of problem. I've seen 3D movies before and it was always lackluster. I even have a 3D TV because that's all that was being sold when I bought mine, I never bought glasses for it or even cared to try it out.
AR is a whole other ballgame, it's a layer on top of reality whereas 3D was a super-niche format that could only be viewed with special glasses in front of a special screen. If you remove the need for the screen OR the glasses then you have something interesting and that's what AR is. If my TV could do 3D without glasses I might be slightly more interested in it.
I am absolutely sure that AR will one day be everywhere used by everyone. There's going to be so many useful applications opened up by people being able to have a wearable always available AR view.
How soon, I don't know -- probably not before the technology isn't an inconvenience to wear.
There's definitely something: Google, Microsoft or Amazon launching a sub $300 smartphone and an ad campaign making fun of people spending a thousand dollars for nothing extra.
It feels like FAAMG minus Google don't want to compete with each other on the consumer side.
It really feels like Google is losing interest in Android. What are the chances that they will sell it to somebody like Microsoft with the requirement that certain Google Services remain?
If it was that easy they would have already done it. You are drastically oversimplifying the market, network and ecosystem effects. The market has shown that it will gobble up $1000 phones, why sell one at $300? Apple has built a network that encourages people to stay in it (iMessage for example). They have also built an ecosystem of products that harmonize well. The market seems to enjoy this.
> Half the reason people buy iPhones is to show other people they aren't poor
While I'm pretty sure you jest here, this simply isn't true. iMessage, FaceTime, consistency with family and friends, and the (whether founded or not is up to you) trust in a machine that'll last you quite a few years and "just work" is the main reason people buy iPhones.
Not saying that this is my thought process (i have my own reasons for owning one) but it pretty much sums up what the majority of people think.
That's just accounting for people who actually care about what phone they own, which you'd be surprised to find is actually a quite small percentage...
I disagree, people will make up all sorts of smart-sounding rationales why they just need an iPhone. Just like they need that SUV, McMansion, or any other status good. And heck, they'll even believe their own reasoning. People typically aren't self-aware of their own status-seeking. But in the end that warm feeling from showing off their social status and rising above the unwashed Android masses is still half of the reason people buy them.
Oh please, no one's out here trying to "rise above the unwashed android masses" when they buy an iPhone, it's just what they are used to. It's not a status symbol, it's a fucking phone.
And despite what you believe, there are many legitimate reasons for choosing an iPhone over the competition, ones that don't revolve around "social status" or "flexing" or anything like that.
Even the anecdotes you hear of girls not dating android users and whatnot are comically blown out of proportion; look around you, who really gives a shit aside from nerds on HN?
Sure they do. Just like Gucci makes good bags, a large factor is that it is a luxury good that people recognize. Same for expensive watches, same for clothing brands. Nothing bad about that.
> look around you, who really gives a shit aside from nerds on HN?
Once again I don't really understand the comparison between a PHONE and a gucci bag/expensive watch.
Unlike the iPhone, the products you mention cost orders of magnitude more than their competition, I can buy a $30 bag from Ross and a $2000 bag from Gucci and get basically no extra functionality, they are both bags. Despite what people say, iPhones are priced relatively competitively with their competition and don't really have the same "Luxury Appeal" that a Rolex watch may have in comparison to a Casio one.
Right, the top two reasons to use an iPhone are iMessage and FaceTime. And those are the two apps that are still basically impossible to compete with with PWAs due to unimplemented functionality.
PWAs come with their own suite of functionality issues these days, but I'm sure they'll be able to compete with Apple's native solutions sooner or later.
FaceTime does support sharing links so far but it's something I have yet to test myself.
> an ad campaign making fun of people spending a thousand dollars for nothing extra
In the US, consumers don't usually see the full price tag. Carriers just put phones on payment plans (the iPhone 13 Pro Max 128GB is currently $36/month for 30 months on Verizon, for example), so it's a lot easier for consumers to buy expensive phones without ever having to think "wow, this thing is >$1k", especially since they'll probably trade it in after a year or two for a newer model.
I don't see such an ad campaign being very successful here unless carriers stopped financing devices (which they have no incentive to).
It’s “just” about profit not revenue. And that was while companies like Sony still did smartphones in earnest. I remember being rather shocked when I read that… but I’m also far too lazy to google for it so… make of that what you will
Correct, It was north of 100% for several quarters when HTC was flailing and Samsung was net burning money trying to establish the Galaxy as the dominant premium Android phone. I'll try to pull up the industry report that had those numbers.
Begs the question of if one would rather sell the most but make just a moderate amount money or sell moderately but make the most money? In the short-term I could see that being a good thing as you build up your war-chest and invest. But long-term your marketshare will erode and you'll be making a lot of profit on fewer sales. I'm no economist, so I have no idea which is the better position to be in.
That is, all other vendors together sold 87% of units, but earned only a combined 25% of industry-wide profit.
The vast majority of those other vendors are companies headquartered in Asian countries with a long history of promoting market share, access to information, and knowledge transfer at the expense of short-term profit. They might be making less money willingly to grow/maintain volume, grow/maintain access to a large volume of user data, and acquire/maintain expertise.
I expect it’s more about the competition than those companies willingly leaving that level of profit on the table. In the android market, people have the option of switching to a competitor if you’re not price competitive yourself. For IOS, apple is the only game in town on hardware.
Maybe. I'm not so sure. In theory, a company like, say, Samsung could stop making cheaper, money-losing phones and invest primarily on making increasingly better, premium, profitable phones like the Galaxy Fold, but they choose not to do that, year after year.
What differentiates those premium phones? It runs the same Android of which I rather have a stock version than the bloat-ware rubbish that phone makers install on there for me.
The iOS devices link into a web of ease-of-use, and come with a reasonably well make stock version of iOS.
And then there's trust. Whom does an average user trust more with their data? (Apple/USgov, or Google/USgov+Samsung/SouthKorea+...)
Regular users don't actually know anything about the difference. They look at how many megapixels the camera has and the resolution of the screen and things like that, because they're numbers you can compare. Regular users don't know what "stock Android" is. And then they come home with a phone full of bloatware and complain about it after.
Nobody actually buys the phone for the bloatware. These companies are wasting their money developing it. They just want the phone with the better camera.
The real problem is that techies can't improve Android because the hardware vendors are shipping custom kernels and their hardware can't use the stock kernel. So Android is "open source" but there is no ecosystem of people scratching that itch with the improvements flowing to the ordinary users because it's so hard to modify what came with your device. Especially when many of the techies still care about the better screen and camera.
Think about it this way. There is no reason every Android phone on the market shouldn't come with the option of stock Android. Even if you think the majority of "regular users" wouldn't want it, the availability of it would get them a few sales from techies, right? And then we would really find out what people want, because they get the choice without it being tied to the rest of the hardware.
The vendor's Android is going to be 99% stock Android and 1% things that will have higher rather than lower support costs than stock Android because it will have a smaller user base and be less likely to have the bugs already discovered and patched. Support costs would, if anything, go down.
> Regular users don't actually know anything about the difference. They look at how many megapixels the camera has and the resolution of the screen and things like that, because they're numbers you can compare.
> Nobody actually buys the phone for the bloatware.
Often the bloatware is half of the silly stuff listed in the marketing specs on the box. The features might be junk, but they're bulletpoints in a list of features that people are looking at on the shelf. I see these kinds of "specs" listed all the time: digital zoom, "optimizers" of various sorts, social media "integrations", etc.
Most regular users want as many features as they can get, for a reasonable price point. And Samsung is king in that market – their A series phones have a huge sales volume.
Some users can afford real premium phones. And Samsung's offerings mostly just kinda suck software wise, even when the hardware is decent. Techies know this and have a huge variety of stock Android alternatives to choose from (which, somehow, continue to exist…), and even non-techies very quickly figure out that Apple or Google Pixel phones just work, unlike Samsung's.
Everything I've heard about Pixels tells me you're not right. They have a ton of bugs, besides the mediocre to bad hardware.
And Samsung moves more premium phones (aka S-series) each year than all Pixel phones ever sold.
You probably live in the US, but Pixel phones are also almost impossible to get outside the US (though things are getting slightly better) and their market share where they're available is minuscule in whichever market segment you're looking.
Outside of the US Chinese phones, besides Samsung A-series, dominate. And in many countries flagship Chinese models are sold more than Apple phones. And BTW, if you thought Samsung adds bloatware, you should see what Xiaomi or Huawei add :-))
Regular users don't care about bloatware. It's a techie fetish.
I've been around the block a ton of time and this discussion is so old and boring it's not even worth having. "Big binaries suck" -> Electron apps winning everywhere. "Lean operating systems" -> Windows never budging on the desktop and Android, which is kind of a mobile device pig winning the mobile battle.
It's actually somewhat rare that techie (early adopter) interests align with regular user (late adopter or laggard) interests.
This is just... wrong. I mean, I don't know what bubble you're living in, but my bubble is not like this.
Every single person I've ever met, except one, uses either an iPhone or a Galaxy. Probably a sample size of 100 people. The one exception uses a Pixel, and he's a software engineer.
The reason why I'm confident enough in saying you're wrong, is because my experience tracks with US smartphone shipment metrics. Apple and Samsung are the leaders in the US. Pixel isn't even in view of the finish line. Bluntly: Nerds use Pixel devices. Legacy from the Nexus days. Most people wouldn't even know what a Pixel is.
Modern Samsung devices are absolutely fantastic phones. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't used one since TouchWiz.
>Bluntly: Nerds use Pixel devices. Legacy from the Nexus days. Most people wouldn't even know what a Pixel is.
I don't know about that. At least in my city, I know more people with Pixels than Galaxy phones. Granted, I can count the Android users on one hand and about 90 percent of my phonebook is iPhones so who knows.
I have a similar experience to you but with one difference. I do know a handful of people who have an Android phone which isn't a Samsung Galaxy or Pixel. When I ask why they chose that device, the response makes it clear that they have absolutely zero interest in mobile phones aside from what we'd consider the absolute basics.
And everyone I know who has a Pixel is the sort of person who is passionately anti-Apple. I'm not saying this is a universal experience, but it's certainly true for the three people I know who have a Google Pixel. I'm serious when I say I've never met a more passionate Apple fanboy than those people are passionately anti-Apple.
Is your bubble only physically local or constrained in some other way?
My bubble is mostly white collar college educated people, but spanning across the western world. I would have thought the same about Pixels but just the other day i found out someone I know in the US has an older Pixel device.
Most people won’t know what a pixel phone is, is true for sure.
I guess I'm a techie, because I don't want vendor crapware and I do want more than 2 years of software updates and security patches (though it has gotten better over the past few years - probably partially due to Android One, which is closer to stock Android!)
And last I checked, Google's Pixel (5/6/etc.) phones seemed pretty decent.
I was responding primarily to the "only techies care" part.
Although Pixel phones are at the top of "best stock Android phone" lists, they're not technically stock Android.
"Granted, Pixel UI is very, very close to stock. However, it is not technically stock as Google adds in tons of Pixel-exclusive features and pre-installs apps here and there."
I suspect o called "average user" would probably trust anything. Non average: I have no idea but I personally just simply do not trust. Do not care what is the company name.
> focus primarily on making premium, profitable phones like the Galaxy Fold
believe it or not, apple's supply chain and verticals and operations are much more efficient than samsungs'. Tim cook did wonders during steve job's era to scale out their operations. So much so that samsung cannot really compete at the same quality.
If they did they would be dead in a year. They sell a fraction of the >$1000 phones apple sells by the shipload. Their bread and butter is the cheap stuff.
The same way nobody wants to spent $35k on a honda when they could have a tesla.
Looks like Honda Accord is approaching $32k on average[0].
200k Honda Accords sold in the U.S. 2020[1].
450k Tesla Model 3 + Y sold globally[2].
Though Model 3 and Y average price closer to $49k and $65k respectively[3].
If I have a point, it's that if you have $35k to spend, you're probably getting a high trim level Honda Accord. Because you need another $15k to get an "average" Tesla Model 3.
(Obviously the Model 3 is worth spending $50k for lots and lots of buyers!)
The Y is a much more expensive car with a discontinued standard range version and the base model 3 is by far and away the best selling version of the vehicle.
Averages can be misleading. Id like to see the median prices given that the base tesla model 3 is VERY premium vs the base model accord which is not.
>"The same way nobody wants to spent $35k on a honda when they could have a tesla."
Depends on who's that nobody is. The only things I personally value in cars are:
1) It *reliably* gets me from A to B
2) It accommodates my vacation stuff so I always get van.
I would not pay one single penny for car's "coolness". If I was getting car instead of van Tesla would not be in the picture despite the fact that I could buy it if I valued different things in car.
If that is all you care about. You aren’t spending $35K for a car. Even if you plan on keeping it for 15 years. Unless perhaps vans that accommodate your vacations cost more. Which still means you aren’t getting a sedan-ish vehicle.
I don’t think you’re refuting the point since you’re not one of the people that fits in the hypothetical scenario the OP presented.
I saw one in the flesh (a friend had one) and it was surprisingly good, I expected the screen to be crap but it was not. You could legitimately get a big screen on a device that fit in your pocket. It also has a screen on the “outside” so you can use it without opening it — as a convenience or to reduce the number of flexes of the screen?
The thing is, android tablets suck (I know, and it appears the market does too) so the experience of the larger screen is meh. I’m happy with a small phone when walking around and an iPad (or hell just a laptop) when I’m at home.
Folding tech/gimmick itself isn't what people want (I believe). It makes possible tablet can be folded so fit on my pocket. There's no switching cost from smartphone to tablet. It changes my digital life. I no longer use narrower smartphone to read web/books in everywhere.
Personally I don't know how Flip3 useful, but it seems to sold well, maybe cool for some people.
You’re saying a foldable tablet fitting in your pocket would be good for you? Then why call folding a gimmick at the beginning? The iPhone was called a gimmick when it was new. Same with the iPad, less so but still with the Apple Watch.
I'm not a native so maybe used wrong word. Flexible OLED was also used for smartphone like LG G Flex, Galaxy Note Edge/S6 edge and its successor, but those aren't welcomed well. Samsung widely used the edge "gimmick" but it's not welcomed by majority from what I see because it shows curved content, makes accidental touch, and makes (a bit) hard to put screen protector.
Finally they advanced to foldable OLED and developed game changing Galaxy Fold. Fold3 is really good but I think final product is important than the tech itself. But maybe, without Galaxy Edge phones, Fold won't be developed.
Ah yes. That is actually what I was thinking — Edge. When it comes to Samsung and gimmicks the Edge was definitely one of them. Though on the other hand. It was a cool thing to try. It just didn’t end up working so well. I’m not sure how long they kept the Edge series up for.
Good point. Maybe if they didn’t try different things like the Edge, the Fold wouldn’t happen.
> Fold3 is really good but I think final product is important than the tech itself
You said you’re not a native speaker. I’m looking for clarification here, respectfully. Your writing is really good.
Do you think the Fold3 specifically is important or folding in general/overall?
I like the idea of foldable tablets because currently it's the only way to bring and use bigger screen everywhere. In my experience, reading text on small screen is significantly bad to understand things. Fold3 looks really well made for both software (but we miss tablet support by some 3rd party apps) and hardware, but maybe other manufacturers catch up before long.
I love my Fold3 but I don't know much the point of Flip/Razr foldable series. It looks cool, a bit compact, and maybe great for selfies because it don't need any stands to use outer cameras but seems to not good tradeoff to weak points. Still, it's good thing that Samsung can sell such products other than just boring smartphones.
Having a spectrum of phones helps sell the premium phones. If you decide to buy a premium phone to replace your current phone, and you're happy with the one you have, you may shop the same brand. Without the lower end phones, you won't get those customers.
Windows Mobile 10 was a trainwreck for a lot of reasons, but Microsoft only sold upper mid tier and premium phones for it, and the sales numbers were terrible. If they had commited to low end phones (which they did well for WP7 and WP8), it might have gone differently. (Of course, that would have required a much more polished OS release)
This also likely doesn't account for post-sale profit, ie. other manufacturers might have spyware/"sponsored content" baked into the OS to recoup some margin.
Can confirm this is how a lot of the Xiamo Co.'s cheaper phones (brands like Poco/Vivo i think?) are able to sell hardware that competes way above its weight at such unbelievable low prices.
This is seems in the right ballpark. Vertical integration means not only that Apple has sufficient control to make a “luxury” product (I use quotes bc the iPhone doesn’t really fit into the “luxury” category as it’s conventionally understood), but that it can build a value proposition around the notion that customers who buy into the apple ecosystem know their data isn’t going anywhere else. This sort of concern seems to be getting more media traction now.
I did a spell working on homicide investigations in the US, and I was consistently amazed by the gulf of difficulty between obtaining legally solicited data from Apple vs. any other company. Most companies drag their feet with subpoenas and search warrants to some degree, but most will just accept it and eventually send what you’ve requested. Apple wouldn’t give you shit unless you had it signed by a judge in your state, a judge in Cupertino, and the prosecutors office in Cupertino. You then had to serve the subpoena/SW in-person at their Cupertino HQ. Say what you want about Apple, but there’s no question that they go above and beyond their competitors when it comes to their users’ privacy.
The spat playing out in the news between Cook and Zuck might seem like posturing on both sides, but I think Apple’s argument is genuine. They believe that people should be able to pay more for more control over their data. Facebook believe that the harvesting data is necessary to keep the internet cheap or free to maintain low access barriers. Both are valid points. But it seems to me that the more aware you are of what Google and FB do with your data, the more willing you will be to shell out for devices and services which not only promise not to give your info to every Tom, Dick, and Harry but also have NO INCENTIVE to do so. The median consumer isn’t dumb: they know there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The bulk of the price difference between Android and Apple phones isn’t down to operational efficiencies or technology, it’s down to the vastly different business models.
With Apple devices, you know how the sausage is made (i.e. your hard earned cash). With Android, you don’t—-but most people figure it out sooner or later. The more tech savvy the consumer becomes, the more they’ll realise what the real “price” of an Android phone is, and the more attractive Apple devices (or any product which doesn’t make consumers pay for stuff in ways they don’t fully control, consent to, or understand) become.
Of course, one could argue that emphasis on privacy differs from culture to culture, but the data privacy piece also bears on rapidly changing understandings of healthy tech use. In lots of places, people just don’t care as much about privacy as the average American does. London is one of the most heavily surveilled cities in the world, and the vast majority of Londoners couldn’t care less. But consumers are increasingly learning how technology can not only add but detract from their lives. There was that Netflix doc (which I didn’t see) about why social media is addictive and makes a bunch of people unhappy etc., then there’s this latest report about how FB is bad for lots of people, but there’s a larger trend there and it is catching up with those areas within the tech industry.
To varying degrees of obviousness, Apple exudes alignment with what its customers actually want for themselves. Apple compiles data on your phone usage; if you want to use your phone less, Apple helps you do that by letting you put time limits on your usage of whatever apps you want to use less. The power of these subtle features at ensconcing product loyalty is often overlooked. Your average punter’s market macro analysis tends to view consumers as crude neoclassical utility functions, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that consumers notice thiede little tells on some level or another. We’ve evolved to be able to judge whether someone can be trusted based on their actions. Phones aren’t people, but t...
> Say what you want about Apple, but there’s no question that they go above and beyond their competitors when it comes to their users’ privacy.
that's not what Snowden's leaks showed us. Apple inc. is a very willing participant in all sorts of shady NSA projects. in fact, you could even argue that the reason that Apple and other SV monopolies have evaded being broken up is exactly because of their full participation in these programs; programs that have deeply undemocratic rules (e.g. FISA courts are the reason Snowden still cannot return to his homeland). similarly, the Crypto AG news was unfortunately ‘forgotten' by the media in no time. it further showed us the extreme lengths the NSA, CIA, etc. will go to in order to dominate and exploit the working class in the US and abroad (as well as the media's role in helping us quickly forget about it with new ‘news' headlines).
> The spat playing out in the news between Cook and Zuck might seem like posturing on both sides, but I think Apple’s argument is genuine. They believe that people should be able to pay more for more control over their data.
shaming undereducated working class people for not being able to buy the more expensive iGizmo is the height of hypocrisy. encryption and zero knowledge systems should be the norm, not a 'luxury' good/service (the etymological root of which is 'excess' btw).
> Phones aren’t people, but they are devices we have intimate relationships with, and they are demonstrating increasing levels of sentience and intersubjective-like responsiveness.
> I know this sounds far-fetched, but it makes sense when you recall that the shift to AI is not a 0-to-perfect AGI but a more gradual shift through which machines will appear more sentient as they develop.
genuine question: do you seriously believe what you write here?
> that's not what Snowden's leaks showed us. Apple inc. is a very willing participant in all sorts of shady NSA projects.
I see people making similar claims but to my recollection the leaks were ambiguous and could easily be interpreted as the NSA having developed exploits, not as any kind of active participation. Where is this certainty coming from?
> Asian countries with a long history of promoting market share, access to information, and knowledge transfer at the expense of short-term profit.
Apple is the king of parasitic technological and scientific knowledge rentierism and obfuscation, as well as king in exploitation. it's neo-imperialism at it's most 'refined'.
profits are surplus value extracted from workers, including the intellectual property extracted by knowledge workers [1], [2]. monopolistic 'vertical integration' means zero interoperability and maximum alienation (through the division of labor, and the creation of systematic knowledge hierarchies): 'designed in California, made in China' is supposed to modestly signal American intellectual 'talent', yet which instead just shows the insane level of manufactured consent achieved by SV and the US in their science and tech monopolization [3].
don't think it's so bad? Vijay Prashad: "iPhone workers today are 25 times more exploited than textile workers in 19th Century England" [4]
the criticism of underpaid foreign labor is entirely fair, but that’s largely a government failure to rein in labor exploitation and to regulate markets for fairness and competitiveness. in a well-functioning market, you’d have competition (slowly) drive profits down as the many competitors figure out ways to attract and retain customers through price and differentiation.
that’s not to underplay apple’s role in exploiting labor and international legal differences. however, it’s telling that apple employees are protesting going into the office rather than global labor exploitation, while patting themselves on the back for being green (removing chargers ‘for the planet’).
> that’s largely a government failure to rein in labor exploitation and to regulate markets for fairness and competitiveness
do you mean governments in the global south? if yes, you might be a victim to the (racist, white-supremacist) myth that countries in the global south are in some ways 'backward', and that through opening their countries to foreign direct investment they can somehow catch up with global north, despite the fact that the global north propertied class makes this impossible by commoditizing scientific knowledge and technology.
in other words: the global north propertied class continually 'kicks away the ladder' and offers technology transfers through parasitic debt, and then pretends they also climbed up/ascended using those strategies (which they didn't) [1]. the global south countries aren't 'behind' (and thus a 'developing' country): the global north propertied class makes and keeps them poor in the first place.
"Corruption, superpower style
According to the World Bank, corruption in the form of bribery and theft by government officials, the main target of the UN Convention, costs developing countries between $20bn and $40bn each year. That’s a lot of money. But it’s an extremely small proportion – only about 3 percent – of the total illicit flows that leak out of public coffers. On the other hand, multinational companies steal more than $900bn from developing countries each year through tax evasion and other illicit practices.
This enormous outflow of wealth is facilitated by a shadowy financial system that includes tax havens, paper companies, anonymous accounts, and fake foundations, with the City of London at the very heart of it. Over 30 percent of global foreign direct investment is booked through tax havens, which now collectively hide one-sixth of the world’s total private wealth.
This is a massive – indeed, fundamental – cause of poverty in the developing world, yet it does not register in the mainstream definition of corruption, absent from the UN Convention, and rarely, if ever, appears on the agenda of international development organisations." [2]
on top of the tax evasion, there is also the (ecologically) unequal exchange between the global north and global south:
"Imperial powers finally withdrew most of their flags and armies from the South in the mid-20th century. But over the following decades, economists and historians associated with “dependency theory” argued that the underlying patterns of colonial appropriation remained in place and continued to define the global economy. Imperialism never ended, they argued – it just changed form.
They were right. Recent research demonstrates that rich countries continue to rely on a large net appropriation from the global South, including tens of billions of tonnes of raw materials and hundreds of billions of hours of human labour per year – embodied not only in primary commodities, but also in high-tech industrial goods like smartphones, laptops, computer chips and cars, which over the past few decades have come to be overwhelmingly manufactured in the South.
This flow of net appropriation occurs because prices are systematically lower in the South than in the North. For instance, wages paid to Southern workers are on average one-fifth the level of Northern wages. This means that for every unit of embodied labour and resources that the South imports from the North, they have to export many more units to pay for it.
Economists Samir Amin and Arghiri Emmanuel described this as a “hidden transfer of value” from the South, which sustains high levels of income and consumption in the North. The drain takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt violence of colonial occupation and therefore without provoking protest and moral outrage.
In a recent paper published in the journal New Political Economy, we built on the work of Amin and others to quantify the scale of drain through unequal exchange...
no, i mean all governments, north, south, east, and west. globalization policies the world over favored capital over labor. it's not just one geographical set of governments.
But if you did you couldn't. The ratio of wages to profit made on the item is way higher for iPhones. The quote is literally true. Textile mills in 19th century England operated with comparatively pedestrian profit margins and factory wages were a much higher proportion of expenses. It's estimated that the assembly costs of an iPhone are in the 20-50 dollar range, the profit margin is in the 300+ dollar range, clearly the ratio is much higher than in any textile mill.
Conflating the Marxian economic concept of “rate of exploitation” and the modern usage of the word “exploitation” is disingenuous. You could similarly say that a FAANG engineer earning $400k is several hundred percent more exploited than a millworker two hundred years ago - which sounds preposterous of course.
It's not really the Marxian concept at play here. There's no measure of the organic composition of capital and of returns on capital to measure the exploitation rate that a Marxian economist would use. A Marxian economist would rather find that the rate of profit per unit of capital which is equal to the average rate of exploitation is relatively within norms. A Marxian economist would probably consider that Google at a 20% overall profit margin with the vast majority of expenses being labour or themselves mostly a labour cost in their production to be, while exploitative, much less exploitative than paying 20$ in wages to make a product then sold at a 400$ profit. Certainly the Apple hardware divisions are much more exploitative.
Certainly not even close to the level of exploitation that there was in 19th century England when the rate of return on capital was of around 30%, and where the most profitable mills often had over 50% profit margins, well ahead of even Google on their best years.
Instead I'm using the common, modern usage of exploitation, which is to pay someone very little to make a lot of profit from them.
No, I'm sorry, the "rate of exploitation" is purely a Marxian economic concept, and it is a simple ratio: that of the total amount of surplus-value to the total amount of wages paid. The article we are discussing here clearly refers to the Marxian concept and not anything else. You are conflating so many different things (gross profit margin, net profit margin, rate of return on capital, rate of exploitation) that I do not even know where to start. I would recommend a primer on economics.
Do you suggest another way of quantifying exploitation? How do you judge who is more or less exploited? It stands to reason that if you're getting paid less but your employer is making a lot of money, you're more exploited than otherwise.
There is no good way of approximating the rate of exploitation of Google. All we know is that it is lower or close to the gross profit margin unless cost of raw resources are significant.
We also know that the rate of exploitation is necessary higher than the rate of return on capital for capital heavy industries, which was the case of the mills in 19th century England. So despite low quality data on the rate of exploitation we know that it's higher than for Google.
Also net income is closely related to the rate of exploitation. I'm not confusing them, they're just the closest proxy. If you take the "non-labour costs" as themselves a sum of indirect labour costs and ultimately rents, you will understand why.
Apple certainly was the winner of Huawei being pushed out of the USA market. Now they can continue slowly issuing premium features their competition had years ago, like the macro lens in the new iPhone 13.
IMO, if Huawei had remained, high-end hardware would have entered a race to the bottom, and Apple would have been the biggest loser, we can't have that.
Apple (a company that never publishes or leads with their tech specs) would be the biggest loser if Huawei stayed in the market. That Huawei that never reached 2% (or even 1%) mobile marketshare in the US
Huawei was never in the US market. They were pretty dominant in Europe and certain Asian markets and Apple+Samsung probably gained most of the share they lost there.
it’s been like this for a long time (in fact, they used to have ~90% of profits on ~10% of share), which is why apple has the market cap it does.
apple has a differentiation strategy, which explicitly goes after fatter profits rather than volume. the handset market is so large however, that apple can still have plenty of volume (100 million units/year) to drive down cost with economies of scale.
Yes. It has been like that since the day iPhone was launched. Arguably the whole (modern) Smartphone Market history.
So I am kinda surprised to see some of the reaction here. And it was easy in the old days when iPhone was in Financial Segment with ASP and unit volume. Now it is hard to judge without those Data. And no where on the site do they mention how they calculated the profits.
Also worth mentioning Apple used to make 95%+ if not more than 100% profits because other vendors were losing money.
Yes, I remember back then there was an article about Apple making more than 100% of the profits in the smartphone market, because most of other competitors are losing money trying to increase market share.
>>So I am kinda surprised to see some of the reaction here.
Because people are starting to wake up to the idea that simply defining the market as "Mobile Handsets" for Anti-Trust purposes is flawed.
The only way a company can achieve this level of profitability is by excluding competition from their market, The idea that apple "Competes" with other Handset manufacturers is clearly flawed, as these statics show.
Apple is a monopoly and should be treated as such, to the point they should be required to open up their ecosystem to competition
I wonder if that 13% of units might actually account for 75% of mobile computing power. Apple’s budget iPhone SE has over 41% higher single core performance than Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S21. And the vast majority of Android sales worldwide are not flagship devices.
In the US their unit share is now greater than 50%.
It's too bad that they're taking all of our money and not exporting much.
And for a country that loves "freedom" so much, it's also too bad that we don't make Apple sell us devices that we can actually own and control, by simply voting with our dollars.
Yes this is more problem than importing phones (anyway actually we import from China mostly). Our freedom is censored by foreign US company because we buy Apple.
I was in a discussion the other day how every other attempt at bringing computing to underdeveloped parts of the world has more or less failed (OLPC for example), yet cheap Android phones have managed to become ubiquitous in places without stable electricity, running water, and stable or repressive governments.
Scale is the easiest way to make something cheap, and having a device targeted at every human rather than just school kids is going to be the best way to achieve scale.
But as far as education goes, phones aren’t as good as a laptop as far as form factor. But better than nothing I suppose!
More likely is that cell phones all have mobile data, whereas laptops have not historically had that except on high end business models. Devices are pretty useless to the average person without the internet, so in places with poor connectivity laptops end up being useless.
OLPC also suffered from durability issues (repairs required sending the laptop back to the US, IIRC?) and cost issues (they never did hit the $100/unit price point)
Even Raspberry Pi leverages the scale of Broadcom chips, which also get used in Android phones
OLPC was a really cool idea, but it turned out to be yet another in a long line of "good-idea fairy visits a wealthy first-worlder with yet another way to fix the third world", like What Three Words, etc.
That’s a pretty revisionist history that ignores a lot of how it was done. It required local partnerships, used a lot of local educational material, and had a huge amount of involvement on the ground during deployments.
It also ignores that the very cell phone penetration we see earlier also comes from wealthy countries in creation — the main OS is still supplied by Google.
You can get a usb-c hub for 10$ with hdmi and usb ports.
That's essentially a desktop computer from the early 2010s in even the weakest Android phones.
More than enough to develop web apps on, I think a kid in Kenya was able to develop an entire website on a feature phone.
Samsung is trying to push Dex , so we'll see. It is worth noting many cheaper phones don't support HDMI out, but you could still figure out a way to project your phone to a monitor and have a desktop .
I think that's how it goes with any distribution problem. If you make it cheap enough then it becomes ubiquitous and even spreads into impoverished areas. I believe this is the only way to eliminate world hunger for example.
About 50% of Apple’s profits are from the App Store by my calculations[1], although Apple makes it hard to split out App Store profits versus handset profits[2].
Low cost competitors generally only know how do do just that: make things cheaply. That's their competitive advantage, and they leverage it.
Apple is a marketing and tech company, and they're good at keeping prices up.
Both of them think they are doing better in the long-term.
There is no notion of 'sharing' etc. among the low cost competitors, if they could use some kind of IP-rights to hold out their competitors, they would.
That said, it should be noted that 'making stuff' is still where the bulk of the money is, even if it's not raw surplus.
> They might be making less money willingly to grow/maintain volume, grow/maintain access to a large volume of user data, and acquire/maintain expertise.
“We got them were we want them champ, let’s finish them in last round”
> In Q2 2021, it captured 75% of the overall handset market operating profit and 40% of the revenue despite contributing a relatively moderate 13% to global handset shipments
So they charge a premium for their phones, that's all. Android completely obliterates Apple if you count number of units shipped.
Android is an operating system. Apple is a company.
“That’s all” is disingenuous. If Samsung could charge a similar premium for their phones, and capture a similar profit, I’m fairly confident they would.
It's hard to say Apple is some kind of king of the hill when 9 in 10 people around the globe have an Android. Congrats to them on extracting more money from their customers though, I don't see how that helps in general (unless you hold Apple stock).
I think one of the smartest things Apple did was open physical stores and not depend on carrier stores and Best Buy.
I've often wondered why their competitors don't do the same thing? Why isn't there a Samsung store a block away from every Apple store? Having a physical location for purchases, repairs, and support is why I always recommend Apple devices when somebody who isn't super technical asks me what to buy.
Microsoft made a half-hearted effort, Sony was there too soon with their stores, Dell had crappy little mall kiosks. Apple has shown you can make pretty great revenue-per-sq-ft with a store. Samsung copies everything else Apple, why not the stores?
The most expensive (non-novelty) phones sold right now are from Samsung. At every price point that Apple sells at, Samsung has a similar product.
Apple also sells their handsets through carriers, big box stores, and online through places like Amazon. You can often buy their stuff for less at these places yet the stores are still packed because people will pay more if it's a better experience.
> People will pay more if it’s a better experience
Luxury does not mean expensive, though $ can be a proxy. It often is much more about feeling (relaxed, comforted), experience (end-to-end, straightforward), and status (“high-class”).
Samsung sells better phones for more $. Apple is much more about “if you don’t mind the price, we’ll take care of everything and it’ll be simple, comprehensive, and your friends will respect our product.”
In The Olde Days you could schedule a return; when the fedex driver stopped by you could ask them to wait and pop your laptop into the box and hand it back, and have the repaired machine the next day. No more.
I’ve heard that Dell does this for business. Good for them for looking after their gaming customers too!
Apple makes you jump through hoops these days. I am sure it’s because they are bigger and because they are no longer the underdog. But mix this change because “things no longer scale at their size” or “we are so big we don’t care as much”?
yep. Brazil too. AFAIK there is only one Apple store in Sao Paulo (though there are Apple resellers too) but Samsung has stores in virtually all high end malls. Xiaomi had a pilot store here too.
The context is that Brazil has high import duties on manufactured goods. Apple doesn't manufacture domestically. Samsung does.
Opening retail stores is a huge commitment and takes years of investment before you "might" see any returns. Samsung doesn't seem to want to take that risk. But I do agree, I recently switched most of my devices over to Apple products because they take care of their customers. And if I ever have an issue, there are 3 Apple stores within 25 miles of me.
I was recently on the Galaxy Fold subreddit and there was a user who had his $2,000 device fail. Samsung had him mail it in. It had then been two weeks with no communication at that point. Other users had the same experience with Samsung denying repairs for some of them after keeping the device for several weeks. That is completely unacceptable and slightly terrifying.
A lot of those stores will also do some iPhone repairs.
If you are having trouble with your email or want help connecting some accessory, how many of those shops will help with that kind of stuff? When it's an issue that can't be fixed and your phone is still under warranty, how many of those shops give you a replacement on the spot? A few will for sure, but it's not a lot of them.
Apple is capturing 75% of profits, and sees the stores as instrumental to that. Every other company seems to see retail as an additional cost.
Apple started with kiosks inside of Best Buy, too, and it took many years before their stores reached the level of ubiquity they have today. Any competitor trying to make the same level of investment would lead to Apple's share of profits inching closer to 100%, as their competitors would be spending a ton on retail buildouts.
Apple makes more per square foot of retail than anyone else[0]. It's not even really close. Each of the other companies you've mentioned has opened stores, albeit not on the same scale. None of them have seen anything like similar results, so why would they keep expanding to match scale?
Apple Stores are valuable because Apple products are valuable. Apple products are valuable in part because Apple Stores are valuable. It's a virtuous circle that doesn't work for any of their competitors, at least not any so far.
Apple products are also valuable because they build in user-centric dark-pattern limiters that HN hates but consumers happily value and pay for.
These threads keep saying the profits are sales and marketing as if artificial. On the contrary, user-centricity even to point of dev-hostility is a specific product market fit tradeoff Apple pursues, giving the whole brand a halo effect and premium.
Devs need to roll with that or will continually find themselves misaligned.
You say Microsoft was half-hearted, but their stores came closest to demoing the premium devices of the Windows ecosystem, whereas Samsung stores were actually pretty lame. I'm not surprised Samsung stopped their build-out.
The only time I ever saw people in them was after school when kids were playing Xbox.
I went in once because they weren’t crowded…to ask directions to the Apple store. I felt kinda bad but they were just standing around with no customers anyway. I did apologize, and I remember the person I asked being very nice.
Apple was derided when they started opening stores. Gateway had tried it and it killed the company. Dell tried it, but we’re killing it with the computers-by-mail business and it’s opportunities for financial engineering.
What did apple bring to the game? With a tired product line in a maturing market, the last thing they needed was another expensive effort in a domain they had no experience in (retail) while simultaneously killing their retail channel.
It’s my understanding that the popular understanding turned out not to be completely accurate.
Apple wasn't selling commodity PCs and had the profit margin to operate stores on extremely expensive real estate. The stores themselves ended up being advertisements.
That was not the analysis at the time. Also back then they didn’t have the fat margins. But the dealer network was thin so the risk of losing the channel wasn’t the risk people thought it was.
I’m actually surprised they did as well as they did.
Apple's gross margin was always pretty high even if their fixed costs made them highly unprofitable. I'll grant that the Apple Store concept was a hail mary but they weren't a company losing money on every computer and hoping to make it up in volume as Dell and Gateway ended up being at the time. They had the cashflows to make the concept work.
We're talking about 2001 when apple's revenues were declining and it was losing money, though it had been in even worse shape a few years before. The stores were part of a Hail Mary.
Really in us it's Samsung and apple, and Samsung is content just matching Apple's price for it's flagship. Wonder why we don't have a phone market like China with all these phone makers.
I think we might be missing the big picture here. Apple captures 75% of the profit from handset market share. The rest is split between high end Android devices from say Samsung and low-end commodity Shanzhan android devices.
But in the Android sphere Google is clearly capturing the profits from Android devices on software.
This is an excellent point. If "operating profit" also includes app store revenues, payment revenues (remember, Apple requires apps use their payment platform), and content revenues, the likes of Samsung, et al, are at a serious disadvantage and can only compete on device margins as they can't tap into any of those revenue streams.
Apple devices claim to be "luxury" -- something I find hilarious, but the marketers certainly believe. It makes the clicks from an Apple device more valuable than a click from an Android device. Therefore, there's just going to be more sales to click farm companies. And they buy in bulk: https://www.equedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/clickfarm...
The entire mobile phone ecosystem is a hilarious ouroboros of marketing nonesense in the end. I would be laughing if the environmental and human costs weren't so extreme.
Apple has brand loyalty, and apparently, they earned it.
In buying an Android handset, your options shift over time. Samsung has the most brand loyalty, and some high-end handsets, as well as some lower end ones. The rest of the brands seem to waffle between trying to be high-end, and being the best value.
For example, OnePlus set out to be compete against the high-end with really low prices, but over time, the prices caught up to the competition.
Google has made affordable Nexus handsets, moved towards high-end Pixels, but then backed off and started selling mainstream handsets.
It's hard, as a consumer, to know what to replace your handset with when the time comes, because what was good might still not be good. And maybe a newer brand offers a better deal that sways you.
While competition is mostly a good thing in the Android handset market, it also makes for some unpredictability, and few companies figure out where to position themselves, and maintain excellence.
Were they taking sales from Apple, to any major extent? Or just shifting around the Android market? If the latter, I can't imagine Apple'd care. Samsung's been doing the same thing (being the Apple of Android) for quite a while, and it hasn't mattered much.
Isn't it pretty easy to to get a good phone? If people buy line A from brand B and are happy with it, I'd expect that 2-3 years later when they buy the latest A from B, they'd get a phone that's as good or better.
I mention this because most people are satisficers, not maximizers. [1] They want a good phone, not the best phone. So I suspect that for most consumers, this isn't particularly a hard choice. They're going to buy the same one or ask a friend or see a review or get the one the phone store person recommends.
The Android market is particularly hard for maximizers, though, because there are a bunch of companies working hard to have the best phone for a given niche.
>Isn't it pretty easy to to get a good phone? If people buy line A from brand B and are happy with it, I'd expect that 2-3 years later when they buy the latest A from B, they'd get a phone that's as good or better.
I'd argue that there hasn't been a single phone released since the Galaxy S10 that is an improvement on that phone. Sure it might have better specifications on paper, but they are all worse products due to the features that all flagship phones have removed over time (removable storage, headphone jacks, going down to pentile 1080p screens to name a few). For my needs, the entire phone industry has turned to utter crap while prices have continued to climb to pay for ever more camera modules, increasing Qualcomm prices (with the same crappy upgrade support), and marketing costs.
Dang, that's a bummer to hear. I used to do a pretty thorough dive into the whole market (including iPhones) every time I needed to switch phones, but just kept ending up buying the latest Galaxy S, sometimes by a hair. This got me from the original Galaxy S to my current S10e, but it sounds like you're saying that that approach may have tapped out
Same here. I still think the tiles interface with vertical scroll was the best one for phones. I don’t dislike either Android or iPhone, but I still miss my Windows phone.
They're _still_ not caught up and don't have the clean design it had. Unbelievable. I still can't align my phone correctly on my wireless charger like I could with my Palm Pre.
As others have said, Apple does this with only 13% share. The important point is Apple has to make money selling phones, that is their business model. Android's is making money in a number of other ways, mainly user's data.
Services (App store, Music, TV, ...) accounted for 21% of revenue last quarter. The rest is hardware. App store is some fraction of that 17 billion services revenue. Hardware was 64 billion. So yes they could make billions in services, but it pales in comparison to their hardware revenue. Also, services revenue doesn't happen without selling a huge amount of hardware first, and building the ecosystem, ... All of that had to happen for years before services revenue started to become significant.
Among plenty of competition, consumers voted with their wallet. Consumer preferences remain clear. That’s not a monopoly.
If one doesn’t like consumers’ choice, one can try to understand why the value one thing over another and out deliver that. But first one must really grok it.
HN threads show that’s hard as supporting the non-tech user-centric approach requires an atypical world view among Makers.
Numbers show it’s hard as a majority of the competitors are not engineered or marketed with that understanding.
Can you name 2 other OSes that compete meaningfully against Ios? Keep in mind I'm not talking about ecosystems that make less than half of the profit Ios makes for Apple. Hence the "meaningful".
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 294 ms ] threadIdeas like what Canonical and Firefox tried to do were great, but didn't have enough in it for the powers that be to be successful.
It's conceptually similar to the protections in the west. Protect users, but share data with the 5 eyes. It's just that they won't block you from searching for Uyghur or Winnie the Pooh or something similar in the process.
It's kinda interesting because this concept seems to work fine in China for the simple reason that they have so many domestic services. Other countries that just try to copy the China model without the domestic information services(i.e. Iran) have a huge mess on their hands.
It may happen anyway but these scenarios are never easy or clean-cut.
Either way, it's not clear-cut. Sure China can do that. Great now they can pay those workers since companies like Apple won't be paying them...
Anyway, it just popped into my mind that I dreamt about buying a phone last night and the shop's owner just found a box with 60 iphones 13 that a customer finally didn't buy. But he had opened each box and the cardboard was ripped for each box so it was a massive loss for him. Funny coincidence.
I'm honestly dumbstruck that people like you are dumbstruck. It's not very hard, and whether you your self use powerful handheld computers/cameras much it's objectively obvious others do a lot. Just do the normal ROI calc. Apple makes a feature for this called "ScreenTime". How many hours a day is the average iPhone user on their phone? A quick google search indicates over two hours. So that's over 700 hours per year, with a life time of at least two years on average.
Do the math. What is so shocking about spending <$1/hour on something so heavily used and important? What price privacy/security focus and long term upgrades? Subtract too the resale value. What is surprising here?
What's surprising is that for the vast majority the same can be done for <20ç/hour.
If you're spending that much time with a device, you would probably prefer the experience to be _nice_, not shoddy.
To be fair, the reality distortion field rarely works on me.
But just look at Apple ads to see what their real market is. Their ads don't argue that they're a good value. Apple established themselves as a luxury good that indicates wealth and social status. Their ads look like other ads for wealthy people. The reason Apple doesn't make a cheap phone is the same reason Porche doesn't make a cheap car. They could, but it would drop total profit as the luxury premium evaporates.
The funny thing is, I've heard people make the exact same argument people are making here but for Louis Vuitton bags. It's something they use every day! They're so well made that they last a long time! They have great resale value! And all of those things are true, but people who spend $100 on a purse are still going to give side-eye to people who spend $1000 or $10,000, and I think that's fine. In my view status goods are a plague upon humanity.
Why? I'd argue that status goods have driven technological and artistic progress throughout time. So many innovations were the result of someone trying to make a new higher status good, or trying to make a status good cheaper(so they could have more wealth/power).
Living in the 21st century, almost every good you can buy would have been a status good to someone at a time in the past.
I also think you're confusing "did contribute to the creation of" and "was the only possibly way we could get". E.g., it's true that early cellphones were status goods. But given the massive market for them today, it's clear that was not a necessary step toward their existence and perfection.
The resale prices on used Apple hardware is pretty good. When you factor that in, an iPhone may very well be less expensive than a competing Android device.
They start at $400, right? Only really, really budget Android phones come in much under that.
> Yet people buy them in bulk. The brand is that strong. Apparently people also rush to replace their old models every year or two.
I have encountered three major species of iPhone owner:
1) Breaks a screen every couple of years, just replaces the phone when it happens.
2) Upgrades every year or two but leverages iPhones having a much better used market than Android to recover half or more of the original price via resale or trade-in, so they only pay full price for the first phone. (some of these now simply lease their phones, for convenience)
3) Holds on to each phone 4+ years, since the phones receive updates for so long. Pays full price every time, but goes a long time between upgrades.
> They start at $400, right? Only really, really budget Android phones come in much under that.
More like 489€. I don't know what's apple most sold devices for this year though.
I have an old not-budget phone (z5c) from 6 years ago that is still going strong. Stuck on android 7.1, bought used for 250€ 4 years ago.
I am still living in a world where a 200/250 phone should be okay, things might have changed.
But we were talking about the whole offer, not the least expensive phone.
https://forum.xda-developers.com/f/xperia-z5-compact-android...
Even for the first time buyers, if all their friends are on iMessage, they practically have to buy an iPhone.
Signal tries to offer that but isn't as polished. The Facebook services like WhatsApp are good and cross-platform but that involves trusting Facebook heavily.
I don't use an iPhone. This is the reason I heard from iphone users.
With iMessage you can send high resolution photos and videos, which may seem like not a big deal. But it is. Sending a message between Android and iOS uses mms and the photo/video is compressed to an unusable state. I can airdrop a 1GB+ file instantly to any Apple device. How do I transfer a 1GB file to somebody on Android or on a PC? Upload to google drive? then re-download it thru the App? That takes minutes and 5+ steps. When I've already Airdropped the file in seconds on my Apple device by tapping "send".
iMessage/Apple products are about convenience and ease of use. Apple is the best in both of those categories.
It's happening everywhere in the world apart from the USA so that's clearly not where the blockage is. It has more to do with iMessage having a critical mass of users in the USA.
> I can airdrop a 1GB+ file instantly to any Apple device. How do I transfer a 1GB file to somebody on Android or on a PC? Upload to google drive? then re-download it thru the App? That takes minutes and 5+ steps.
Apple competitors have technology which are similar to airdrop notably Huawei and there are plenty of apps offering solutions to this issue. I like airdrop but generally speaking Android sharing options are superior to iOS. It is easier to send anything towards any apps on Android which makes your point about the 5+ steps kind of moot in my opinion.
> iMessage/Apple products are about convenience and ease of use. Apple is the best in both of those categories.
iMessage is mostly about captive markets and network effect. Then again, I like my iphone. It's well made and it somewhat works as a status symbol which I have nothing against. I just don't try to pretend that Apple wins by being the best.
Outside of the USA people are "switching" messaging Apps? Or just continuing to use what they have always used?
>Apple competitors have technology which are similar to airdrop notably Huawei.
Nobody uses Huawei here in the US so that point is moot.
>and there are plenty of apps offering solutions to this issue. I like airdrop but generally speaking Android sharing options are superior to iOS.
What are these Android sharing options that are superior to iOS? Do they have to be installed? iOS has Airdrop built in requiring no installation or configuration. If they have to be installed they are automatically not superior.
>It is easier to send anything towards any apps on Android which makes your point about the 5+ steps kind of moot in my opinion.
No it isn't? I have used both Samsung and Apple devices for 10+ years. It is always easier to share between iOS devices and Macs.
I find analogies useful. When I was young I started eating fries with ketchup. As an adult, I don’t get to say ketchup lacks competition because I don’t like other condiments. Even within the ketchup vertical, I have a brand preference. I could buy a store brand and save 50% but I don’t. I like what I like and I pay for it. Non iPhone users either don’t like iOS or just don’t want to pay the premium Apple charges, otherwise I’d argue many more people would be on iPhone.
And the point about iMessage and the other iWhatevers is important. Apple intentionally avoided interoperability. This goes beyond lock-in to contagion. I know people who didn't really want to get their young kids iPhones, because they weren't really old enough to be responsible for something so expensive. But they felt they had to do it anyhow because of the lack of interoperability. So they ended up buying multiple kid iPhones as the phones were lost, smashed, etc. I get that's not very expensive for the kind of people who hang out on HN, but it's real money to most.
For me, it's the existence of a player that can squeeze the margin for others.
With only seller giving people access to iMessage and app store, I don't see this condition fulfilled. Even if there is a well made phone that offers better utility for half the price, most users would just wait for iPhone to catch up rather than switch.
I don't want to draw very bad comparisons: but this is very similar to the AWS lock-in with egress, except instead of data, you have iMessage and apps you've already bought..
So you’re segmenting luxury phone market and saying Apple has no competition in that space except Samsung and others have tried for years to make luxury phones. iPhone users do not want them and it’s primarily due to preference. They don’t want to have to learn another os, they don’t like the look/feel, they don’t get a test drive option, etc. I just believe that’s their personal risk assessment that Apple benefits from but it’s not lock in because I just don’t think people really give a shit about iMessage that much. I have to believe the true perfect competitor you want them to have will have an acceptable solution as well.
Surely former reasons are valid and those people do exist.. but anecdotally most companies that I know are the latter.
Maybe most iPhone users would stick with iPhone even if there's no lock in, but we don't know that because there is a lock in.
What I think it's really showing is that the Android economic model creates different incentives: Apple gets money when you buy the phone, apps, purchases in apps, and things like music or movies through their services. They certainly like it if you buy a new phone every year but all of those different groups share a common leader who wants to keep you as an Apple customer.
When you buy an Android phone, the CPU manufacturer won't see another dime until you buy a new one. A vendor like Samsung may or may not depending on whether they have some other service you use or get kickbacks from the carriers. Google likely sees ongoing revenue but they don't care about the hardware as long as it doesn't make you switch to iOS. Each of those parties adds overhead which Apple doesn't have and they will make decisions which are rational for their business but perhaps not your satisfaction.
1. https://samvimesbootstheory.com/
I don't deny the SE is a better phone than a 50 pound phone, but it's also in an entirely different bracket -- I wouldn't give a 10 year old a nearly 400 pound iPhone, I'd give them a 50 pound Android, for example.
Also, nowadays, most people (the vast majority of which don't think the same way as people on HN do) see a $400 phone as a compelling budget option[0], maybe even "low-end" if you'd go so far as to say that.
0. from personal experience with the iPhone SE2, it's a genuinely amazing phone for the price (sporting the same processor as the iphone 11 pro!) and suffers only in the battery department. Touch ID is also a great selling point for it.
* yes, it is an hyperbole
[0] https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/how-much-iphone-1...
This is my parents. Between the two of them I bet they average 3 new phones per year, because they keep buying cheap Android phones, but they just can't bring themselves to spend more, even though it'd actually be cheaper and then their phone wouldn't suck. Plus because they keep buying Android and all these cheap phones run on different major versions and with different vendor customizations, they're constantly having trouble with wildly different UI for even basic things like the phone "app".
I know lots of people who have bought a cheap Android handset and used it happily for a few years, myself among them. Most Apple owners I know keep the phones until they die, so don't have hand-me-downs. Obviously it depends greatly on the wealth of people as to how eager they are to upgrade their phone.
As a matter of full disclosure, my personal phone is an Android phone.
You can speculate as to why they can wring so many extra dollars out of their customer base, but it's not clear to me that the overall handset market, itself, is structured in a way that gives Apple an unusual advantage.
It seems the competition still doesn't get that Android is not good enough to compete with Apple on the luxury/premium market. Most of the "extra" software developed by the competition is bloatware and spyware. The core design is developed only by Google who is weaker on design than Apple.
That's why Apple gets the bulk of the premium market and leaves the competition to battle on the cheap segment.
Agree that many manufacturers stuff bloatware onto their devices, but the Pixels don't have that problem.
Globally Apple has a marketshare of about 26%. Even in the US, Apple has just over 50% marketshare.
The fact that they are capturing the majority of the profit is reflective of business strategy and priorities.
Apple makes a lot of money from the smartphone itself. Other providers are making their money by selling out their users.
You would either need to go head-to-head with Apple on price and quality of the device and OS and distribution, or compete with Google in terms of selling out your users. Or you would need to find a back-end monetization strategy based on paid services that, so far, seems elusive. Mostly, I think, because it requires a huge portfolio of services (e.g. a "Netflix phone" won't cut it).
As an aside, I've long felt that that latter strategy could be applied in the browser market. Make a browser with a subscription-based services package. ChromeOS+Workspace is mostly there, except for the focus on crap devices and poor distribution and the never ending customer exploitation (Google's product playbook: crap sold at flea markets with AI support).
The challenge folks like Canonical face is that they try to compete with Google on price and distribution, and compete with Apple on privacy alone. So they skip out on both proven ways of making money. That's just not going to scale. Such players will always be niche players, and there are plenty of them out there toiling away without a scalable business model. Which is fine, if you accept them for what they are.
I think we've now reached a point where a third player is pretty much impossible
WebOS had some real potential, too.
I always said, back in the day - 'I'll invest in 3D when we don't need glasses for it' - and I guess enough people collectively said that at the same time that it shut down the industry and never matured to that level.
AR will quickly devolve into an advertising hellscape, if it takes off at all.
AR is a whole other ballgame, it's a layer on top of reality whereas 3D was a super-niche format that could only be viewed with special glasses in front of a special screen. If you remove the need for the screen OR the glasses then you have something interesting and that's what AR is. If my TV could do 3D without glasses I might be slightly more interested in it.
How soon, I don't know -- probably not before the technology isn't an inconvenience to wear.
It feels like FAAMG minus Google don't want to compete with each other on the consumer side.
While I'm pretty sure you jest here, this simply isn't true. iMessage, FaceTime, consistency with family and friends, and the (whether founded or not is up to you) trust in a machine that'll last you quite a few years and "just work" is the main reason people buy iPhones.
Not saying that this is my thought process (i have my own reasons for owning one) but it pretty much sums up what the majority of people think.
That's just accounting for people who actually care about what phone they own, which you'd be surprised to find is actually a quite small percentage...
And despite what you believe, there are many legitimate reasons for choosing an iPhone over the competition, ones that don't revolve around "social status" or "flexing" or anything like that.
Even the anecdotes you hear of girls not dating android users and whatnot are comically blown out of proportion; look around you, who really gives a shit aside from nerds on HN?
> look around you, who really gives a shit aside from nerds on HN?
You to an unhealthy degree, apparently.
Unlike the iPhone, the products you mention cost orders of magnitude more than their competition, I can buy a $30 bag from Ross and a $2000 bag from Gucci and get basically no extra functionality, they are both bags. Despite what people say, iPhones are priced relatively competitively with their competition and don't really have the same "Luxury Appeal" that a Rolex watch may have in comparison to a Casio one.
> You to an unhealthy degree, apparently.
?
Right, the top two reasons to use an iPhone are iMessage and FaceTime. And those are the two apps that are still basically impossible to compete with with PWAs due to unimplemented functionality.
They have seemed to make more progress on this over the past couple years after getting called out with very astute questions from Rep. Cicilline: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20190716/109793/HHRG...
getUserMedia has now been implemented in WebViews, so WebRTC calls in Chrome for iOS are now possible, that was big.
Web push is key too, looks like now code complete in WebKit: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=182566
No progress yet on the Fullscreen API: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206854
And issues remain with expiring permissions, e.g.: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=228317
FaceTime does support sharing links so far but it's something I have yet to test myself.
In the US, consumers don't usually see the full price tag. Carriers just put phones on payment plans (the iPhone 13 Pro Max 128GB is currently $36/month for 30 months on Verizon, for example), so it's a lot easier for consumers to buy expensive phones without ever having to think "wow, this thing is >$1k", especially since they'll probably trade it in after a year or two for a newer model.
I don't see such an ad campaign being very successful here unless carriers stopped financing devices (which they have no incentive to).
Example: because your childs first step matters, after which it cuts to a good video shut in a hurry on an iPhone, or a terrible one on $CHEAP_PHONE)
Quick link while I look: https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2016/11/04/apple-gra...
That is, all other vendors together sold 87% of units, but earned only a combined 25% of industry-wide profit.
The vast majority of those other vendors are companies headquartered in Asian countries with a long history of promoting market share, access to information, and knowledge transfer at the expense of short-term profit. They might be making less money willingly to grow/maintain volume, grow/maintain access to a large volume of user data, and acquire/maintain expertise.
The iOS devices link into a web of ease-of-use, and come with a reasonably well make stock version of iOS.
And then there's trust. Whom does an average user trust more with their data? (Apple/USgov, or Google/USgov+Samsung/SouthKorea+...)
Regular users want a ton of features.
Edit: Sales numbers tell you all you need to know about "stock Android" success :-)
Nobody actually buys the phone for the bloatware. These companies are wasting their money developing it. They just want the phone with the better camera.
The real problem is that techies can't improve Android because the hardware vendors are shipping custom kernels and their hardware can't use the stock kernel. So Android is "open source" but there is no ecosystem of people scratching that itch with the improvements flowing to the ordinary users because it's so hard to modify what came with your device. Especially when many of the techies still care about the better screen and camera.
Think about it this way. There is no reason every Android phone on the market shouldn't come with the option of stock Android. Even if you think the majority of "regular users" wouldn't want it, the availability of it would get them a few sales from techies, right? And then we would really find out what people want, because they get the choice without it being tied to the rest of the hardware.
Umm...there is a very solid reason: support costs. Nobody wants to double the support matrix.
> Nobody actually buys the phone for the bloatware.
Often the bloatware is half of the silly stuff listed in the marketing specs on the box. The features might be junk, but they're bulletpoints in a list of features that people are looking at on the shelf. I see these kinds of "specs" listed all the time: digital zoom, "optimizers" of various sorts, social media "integrations", etc.
Some users can afford real premium phones. And Samsung's offerings mostly just kinda suck software wise, even when the hardware is decent. Techies know this and have a huge variety of stock Android alternatives to choose from (which, somehow, continue to exist…), and even non-techies very quickly figure out that Apple or Google Pixel phones just work, unlike Samsung's.
Everything I've heard about Pixels tells me you're not right. They have a ton of bugs, besides the mediocre to bad hardware.
And Samsung moves more premium phones (aka S-series) each year than all Pixel phones ever sold.
You probably live in the US, but Pixel phones are also almost impossible to get outside the US (though things are getting slightly better) and their market share where they're available is minuscule in whichever market segment you're looking.
Outside of the US Chinese phones, besides Samsung A-series, dominate. And in many countries flagship Chinese models are sold more than Apple phones. And BTW, if you thought Samsung adds bloatware, you should see what Xiaomi or Huawei add :-))
Regular users don't care about bloatware. It's a techie fetish.
I've been around the block a ton of time and this discussion is so old and boring it's not even worth having. "Big binaries suck" -> Electron apps winning everywhere. "Lean operating systems" -> Windows never budging on the desktop and Android, which is kind of a mobile device pig winning the mobile battle.
It's actually somewhat rare that techie (early adopter) interests align with regular user (late adopter or laggard) interests.
Is any one disputing this? The OP of this thread is about iPhones being 13% market share.
Every single person I've ever met, except one, uses either an iPhone or a Galaxy. Probably a sample size of 100 people. The one exception uses a Pixel, and he's a software engineer.
The reason why I'm confident enough in saying you're wrong, is because my experience tracks with US smartphone shipment metrics. Apple and Samsung are the leaders in the US. Pixel isn't even in view of the finish line. Bluntly: Nerds use Pixel devices. Legacy from the Nexus days. Most people wouldn't even know what a Pixel is.
Modern Samsung devices are absolutely fantastic phones. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't used one since TouchWiz.
I don't know about that. At least in my city, I know more people with Pixels than Galaxy phones. Granted, I can count the Android users on one hand and about 90 percent of my phonebook is iPhones so who knows.
And everyone I know who has a Pixel is the sort of person who is passionately anti-Apple. I'm not saying this is a universal experience, but it's certainly true for the three people I know who have a Google Pixel. I'm serious when I say I've never met a more passionate Apple fanboy than those people are passionately anti-Apple.
My bubble is mostly white collar college educated people, but spanning across the western world. I would have thought the same about Pixels but just the other day i found out someone I know in the US has an older Pixel device.
Most people won’t know what a pixel phone is, is true for sure.
And last I checked, Google's Pixel (5/6/etc.) phones seemed pretty decent.
Although Pixel phones are at the top of "best stock Android phone" lists, they're not technically stock Android.
"Granted, Pixel UI is very, very close to stock. However, it is not technically stock as Google adds in tons of Pixel-exclusive features and pre-installs apps here and there."
https://www.androidauthority.com/what-is-stock-android-84562...
iPhones also (mostly) meet my criteria and are pretty good smartphones, and they don't run Android at all. ;-)
believe it or not, apple's supply chain and verticals and operations are much more efficient than samsungs'. Tim cook did wonders during steve job's era to scale out their operations. So much so that samsung cannot really compete at the same quality.
The same way nobody wants to spent $35k on a honda when they could have a tesla.
200k Honda Accords sold in the U.S. 2020[1]. 450k Tesla Model 3 + Y sold globally[2].
Though Model 3 and Y average price closer to $49k and $65k respectively[3].
If I have a point, it's that if you have $35k to spend, you're probably getting a high trim level Honda Accord. Because you need another $15k to get an "average" Tesla Model 3.
(Obviously the Model 3 is worth spending $50k for lots and lots of buyers!)
[0] https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/price-trends/Honda-Accord-d585
[1] https://www.best-selling-cars.com/usa/2020-full-year-usa-hon...
[2] https://www.best-selling-cars.com/brands/2020-full-year-glob...
[3] https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/price-trends/Tesla-m112
Averages can be misleading. Id like to see the median prices given that the base tesla model 3 is VERY premium vs the base model accord which is not.
Hondas and Toyotas are tried and true with a few decades of reputation built up. And routine maintenance on those does not cost much.
Depends on who's that nobody is. The only things I personally value in cars are:
1) It *reliably* gets me from A to B
2) It accommodates my vacation stuff so I always get van.
I would not pay one single penny for car's "coolness". If I was getting car instead of van Tesla would not be in the picture despite the fact that I could buy it if I valued different things in car.
I don’t think you’re refuting the point since you’re not one of the people that fits in the hypothetical scenario the OP presented.
The thing is, android tablets suck (I know, and it appears the market does too) so the experience of the larger screen is meh. I’m happy with a small phone when walking around and an iPad (or hell just a laptop) when I’m at home.
Personally I don't know how Flip3 useful, but it seems to sold well, maybe cool for some people.
Finally they advanced to foldable OLED and developed game changing Galaxy Fold. Fold3 is really good but I think final product is important than the tech itself. But maybe, without Galaxy Edge phones, Fold won't be developed.
Good point. Maybe if they didn’t try different things like the Edge, the Fold wouldn’t happen.
> Fold3 is really good but I think final product is important than the tech itself
You said you’re not a native speaker. I’m looking for clarification here, respectfully. Your writing is really good.
Do you think the Fold3 specifically is important or folding in general/overall?
I love my Fold3 but I don't know much the point of Flip/Razr foldable series. It looks cool, a bit compact, and maybe great for selfies because it don't need any stands to use outer cameras but seems to not good tradeoff to weak points. Still, it's good thing that Samsung can sell such products other than just boring smartphones.
Because they could not simply take the profit that Apple is making. Surely they're not dumb enough to throw out profit for giggles.
Android phones face lots of competition from Android phones.
Windows Mobile 10 was a trainwreck for a lot of reasons, but Microsoft only sold upper mid tier and premium phones for it, and the sales numbers were terrible. If they had commited to low end phones (which they did well for WP7 and WP8), it might have gone differently. (Of course, that would have required a much more polished OS release)
I did a spell working on homicide investigations in the US, and I was consistently amazed by the gulf of difficulty between obtaining legally solicited data from Apple vs. any other company. Most companies drag their feet with subpoenas and search warrants to some degree, but most will just accept it and eventually send what you’ve requested. Apple wouldn’t give you shit unless you had it signed by a judge in your state, a judge in Cupertino, and the prosecutors office in Cupertino. You then had to serve the subpoena/SW in-person at their Cupertino HQ. Say what you want about Apple, but there’s no question that they go above and beyond their competitors when it comes to their users’ privacy.
The spat playing out in the news between Cook and Zuck might seem like posturing on both sides, but I think Apple’s argument is genuine. They believe that people should be able to pay more for more control over their data. Facebook believe that the harvesting data is necessary to keep the internet cheap or free to maintain low access barriers. Both are valid points. But it seems to me that the more aware you are of what Google and FB do with your data, the more willing you will be to shell out for devices and services which not only promise not to give your info to every Tom, Dick, and Harry but also have NO INCENTIVE to do so. The median consumer isn’t dumb: they know there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The bulk of the price difference between Android and Apple phones isn’t down to operational efficiencies or technology, it’s down to the vastly different business models.
With Apple devices, you know how the sausage is made (i.e. your hard earned cash). With Android, you don’t—-but most people figure it out sooner or later. The more tech savvy the consumer becomes, the more they’ll realise what the real “price” of an Android phone is, and the more attractive Apple devices (or any product which doesn’t make consumers pay for stuff in ways they don’t fully control, consent to, or understand) become.
Of course, one could argue that emphasis on privacy differs from culture to culture, but the data privacy piece also bears on rapidly changing understandings of healthy tech use. In lots of places, people just don’t care as much about privacy as the average American does. London is one of the most heavily surveilled cities in the world, and the vast majority of Londoners couldn’t care less. But consumers are increasingly learning how technology can not only add but detract from their lives. There was that Netflix doc (which I didn’t see) about why social media is addictive and makes a bunch of people unhappy etc., then there’s this latest report about how FB is bad for lots of people, but there’s a larger trend there and it is catching up with those areas within the tech industry.
To varying degrees of obviousness, Apple exudes alignment with what its customers actually want for themselves. Apple compiles data on your phone usage; if you want to use your phone less, Apple helps you do that by letting you put time limits on your usage of whatever apps you want to use less. The power of these subtle features at ensconcing product loyalty is often overlooked. Your average punter’s market macro analysis tends to view consumers as crude neoclassical utility functions, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that consumers notice thiede little tells on some level or another. We’ve evolved to be able to judge whether someone can be trusted based on their actions. Phones aren’t people, but t...
that's not what Snowden's leaks showed us. Apple inc. is a very willing participant in all sorts of shady NSA projects. in fact, you could even argue that the reason that Apple and other SV monopolies have evaded being broken up is exactly because of their full participation in these programs; programs that have deeply undemocratic rules (e.g. FISA courts are the reason Snowden still cannot return to his homeland). similarly, the Crypto AG news was unfortunately ‘forgotten' by the media in no time. it further showed us the extreme lengths the NSA, CIA, etc. will go to in order to dominate and exploit the working class in the US and abroad (as well as the media's role in helping us quickly forget about it with new ‘news' headlines).
> The spat playing out in the news between Cook and Zuck might seem like posturing on both sides, but I think Apple’s argument is genuine. They believe that people should be able to pay more for more control over their data.
shaming undereducated working class people for not being able to buy the more expensive iGizmo is the height of hypocrisy. encryption and zero knowledge systems should be the norm, not a 'luxury' good/service (the etymological root of which is 'excess' btw).
> Phones aren’t people, but they are devices we have intimate relationships with, and they are demonstrating increasing levels of sentience and intersubjective-like responsiveness.
> I know this sounds far-fetched, but it makes sense when you recall that the shift to AI is not a 0-to-perfect AGI but a more gradual shift through which machines will appear more sentient as they develop.
genuine question: do you seriously believe what you write here?
I see people making similar claims but to my recollection the leaks were ambiguous and could easily be interpreted as the NSA having developed exploits, not as any kind of active participation. Where is this certainty coming from?
Apple doesn't transfer anything right?
> Asian countries with a long history of promoting market share, access to information, and knowledge transfer at the expense of short-term profit.
Apple is the king of parasitic technological and scientific knowledge rentierism and obfuscation, as well as king in exploitation. it's neo-imperialism at it's most 'refined'.
profits are surplus value extracted from workers, including the intellectual property extracted by knowledge workers [1], [2]. monopolistic 'vertical integration' means zero interoperability and maximum alienation (through the division of labor, and the creation of systematic knowledge hierarchies): 'designed in California, made in China' is supposed to modestly signal American intellectual 'talent', yet which instead just shows the insane level of manufactured consent achieved by SV and the US in their science and tech monopolization [3].
don't think it's so bad? Vijay Prashad: "iPhone workers today are 25 times more exploited than textile workers in 19th Century England" [4]
[1] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley
[2] https://venturecommune.substack.com/p/go-where-workers-are-a...
[3] Marianna Mazzucato, https://web.archive.org/web/20160204223931/https://nybooks.c... + https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state
[4] https://mronline.org/2019/09/29/iphone-workers-today-are-25-...
that’s not to underplay apple’s role in exploiting labor and international legal differences. however, it’s telling that apple employees are protesting going into the office rather than global labor exploitation, while patting themselves on the back for being green (removing chargers ‘for the planet’).
do you mean governments in the global south? if yes, you might be a victim to the (racist, white-supremacist) myth that countries in the global south are in some ways 'backward', and that through opening their countries to foreign direct investment they can somehow catch up with global north, despite the fact that the global north propertied class makes this impossible by commoditizing scientific knowledge and technology.
in other words: the global north propertied class continually 'kicks away the ladder' and offers technology transfers through parasitic debt, and then pretends they also climbed up/ascended using those strategies (which they didn't) [1]. the global south countries aren't 'behind' (and thus a 'developing' country): the global north propertied class makes and keeps them poor in the first place.
"Corruption, superpower style
According to the World Bank, corruption in the form of bribery and theft by government officials, the main target of the UN Convention, costs developing countries between $20bn and $40bn each year. That’s a lot of money. But it’s an extremely small proportion – only about 3 percent – of the total illicit flows that leak out of public coffers. On the other hand, multinational companies steal more than $900bn from developing countries each year through tax evasion and other illicit practices.
This enormous outflow of wealth is facilitated by a shadowy financial system that includes tax havens, paper companies, anonymous accounts, and fake foundations, with the City of London at the very heart of it. Over 30 percent of global foreign direct investment is booked through tax havens, which now collectively hide one-sixth of the world’s total private wealth.
This is a massive – indeed, fundamental – cause of poverty in the developing world, yet it does not register in the mainstream definition of corruption, absent from the UN Convention, and rarely, if ever, appears on the agenda of international development organisations." [2]
on top of the tax evasion, there is also the (ecologically) unequal exchange between the global north and global south:
"Imperial powers finally withdrew most of their flags and armies from the South in the mid-20th century. But over the following decades, economists and historians associated with “dependency theory” argued that the underlying patterns of colonial appropriation remained in place and continued to define the global economy. Imperialism never ended, they argued – it just changed form.
They were right. Recent research demonstrates that rich countries continue to rely on a large net appropriation from the global South, including tens of billions of tonnes of raw materials and hundreds of billions of hours of human labour per year – embodied not only in primary commodities, but also in high-tech industrial goods like smartphones, laptops, computer chips and cars, which over the past few decades have come to be overwhelmingly manufactured in the South.
This flow of net appropriation occurs because prices are systematically lower in the South than in the North. For instance, wages paid to Southern workers are on average one-fifth the level of Northern wages. This means that for every unit of embodied labour and resources that the South imports from the North, they have to export many more units to pay for it.
Economists Samir Amin and Arghiri Emmanuel described this as a “hidden transfer of value” from the South, which sustains high levels of income and consumption in the North. The drain takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt violence of colonial occupation and therefore without provoking protest and moral outrage.
In a recent paper published in the journal New Political Economy, we built on the work of Amin and others to quantify the scale of drain through unequal exchange...
no, i mean all governments, north, south, east, and west. globalization policies the world over favored capital over labor. it's not just one geographical set of governments.
One thing I love about studying history is that you can dismiss claims like that immediately.
Certainly not even close to the level of exploitation that there was in 19th century England when the rate of return on capital was of around 30%, and where the most profitable mills often had over 50% profit margins, well ahead of even Google on their best years.
Instead I'm using the common, modern usage of exploitation, which is to pay someone very little to make a lot of profit from them.
There is no good way of approximating the rate of exploitation of Google. All we know is that it is lower or close to the gross profit margin unless cost of raw resources are significant.
We also know that the rate of exploitation is necessary higher than the rate of return on capital for capital heavy industries, which was the case of the mills in 19th century England. So despite low quality data on the rate of exploitation we know that it's higher than for Google.
Also net income is closely related to the rate of exploitation. I'm not confusing them, they're just the closest proxy. If you take the "non-labour costs" as themselves a sum of indirect labour costs and ultimately rents, you will understand why.
IMO, if Huawei had remained, high-end hardware would have entered a race to the bottom, and Apple would have been the biggest loser, we can't have that.
Apple (a company that never publishes or leads with their tech specs) would be the biggest loser if Huawei stayed in the market. That Huawei that never reached 2% (or even 1%) mobile marketshare in the US
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-wh...
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
apple has a differentiation strategy, which explicitly goes after fatter profits rather than volume. the handset market is so large however, that apple can still have plenty of volume (100 million units/year) to drive down cost with economies of scale.
Yes. It has been like that since the day iPhone was launched. Arguably the whole (modern) Smartphone Market history.
So I am kinda surprised to see some of the reaction here. And it was easy in the old days when iPhone was in Financial Segment with ASP and unit volume. Now it is hard to judge without those Data. And no where on the site do they mention how they calculated the profits.
Also worth mentioning Apple used to make 95%+ if not more than 100% profits because other vendors were losing money.
Edit: here it is
https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2016/11/04/apple-gra...
Because people are starting to wake up to the idea that simply defining the market as "Mobile Handsets" for Anti-Trust purposes is flawed.
The only way a company can achieve this level of profitability is by excluding competition from their market, The idea that apple "Competes" with other Handset manufacturers is clearly flawed, as these statics show.
Apple is a monopoly and should be treated as such, to the point they should be required to open up their ecosystem to competition
It's too bad that they're taking all of our money and not exporting much.
And for a country that loves "freedom" so much, it's also too bad that we don't make Apple sell us devices that we can actually own and control, by simply voting with our dollars.
But as far as education goes, phones aren’t as good as a laptop as far as form factor. But better than nothing I suppose!
Even Raspberry Pi leverages the scale of Broadcom chips, which also get used in Android phones
It also ignores that the very cell phone penetration we see earlier also comes from wealthy countries in creation — the main OS is still supplied by Google.
edit: Oh , spelled it incorrectly, but a better way to spell it would be Fecalbook for the amounts of shit posted there.
That's essentially a desktop computer from the early 2010s in even the weakest Android phones.
More than enough to develop web apps on, I think a kid in Kenya was able to develop an entire website on a feature phone.
Samsung is trying to push Dex , so we'll see. It is worth noting many cheaper phones don't support HDMI out, but you could still figure out a way to project your phone to a monitor and have a desktop .
Can you back this up? Because last time I checked Hauwei was bent on supplying phones and phone tech for the entire planet.
Are the numbers here broken down by hardware vs software profits?
If not, it would seem obvious to me that Apple makes more because they can include all App Store profits after each device sale.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28638939
[2] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-profitable-is-apples-a...
App Store revenue is the gross sales of the App Store. Apple takes at most 30% of that as their revenue; the rest goes to the app developers.
So to calculate Apple’s profit margin for the App Store, you would compare only that Apple revenue to Apple’s actual costs of running the App Store.
So their App Store profits are not 78% of $64 billion. They are 78% of at most 30% of $64 billion. So no more than $15 billion, not $50 billion.
Note, I think this was the source for the gross profit figure I quoted: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/08/apples-app-store-had-gross-s...
Apple is a marketing and tech company, and they're good at keeping prices up.
Both of them think they are doing better in the long-term.
There is no notion of 'sharing' etc. among the low cost competitors, if they could use some kind of IP-rights to hold out their competitors, they would.
That said, it should be noted that 'making stuff' is still where the bulk of the money is, even if it's not raw surplus.
“We got them were we want them champ, let’s finish them in last round”
So they charge a premium for their phones, that's all. Android completely obliterates Apple if you count number of units shipped.
“That’s all” is disingenuous. If Samsung could charge a similar premium for their phones, and capture a similar profit, I’m fairly confident they would.
I've often wondered why their competitors don't do the same thing? Why isn't there a Samsung store a block away from every Apple store? Having a physical location for purchases, repairs, and support is why I always recommend Apple devices when somebody who isn't super technical asks me what to buy.
Microsoft made a half-hearted effort, Sony was there too soon with their stores, Dell had crappy little mall kiosks. Apple has shown you can make pretty great revenue-per-sq-ft with a store. Samsung copies everything else Apple, why not the stores?
You can buy basic macarons at the grocery store, or go to Laduree for the luxury version. Same deal.
Apple also sells their handsets through carriers, big box stores, and online through places like Amazon. You can often buy their stuff for less at these places yet the stores are still packed because people will pay more if it's a better experience.
Luxury does not mean expensive, though $ can be a proxy. It often is much more about feeling (relaxed, comforted), experience (end-to-end, straightforward), and status (“high-class”).
Samsung sells better phones for more $. Apple is much more about “if you don’t mind the price, we’ll take care of everything and it’ll be simple, comprehensive, and your friends will respect our product.”
Lots of people only use the Apple store to get things fixed.
The store is just a physical extension of apples drive to put the customer experience first.
They could learn a thing or two from Dell and Lenovo about repair turnarounds.
Apple makes you jump through hoops these days. I am sure it’s because they are bigger and because they are no longer the underdog. But mix this change because “things no longer scale at their size” or “we are so big we don’t care as much”?
The context is that Brazil has high import duties on manufactured goods. Apple doesn't manufacture domestically. Samsung does.
Apple has shown that Apple can make amazing revenue-per-sq-ft.
https://www.samsung.com/us/samsung-experience-shop/index.htm...
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung-store/samsung-experienc...
Opening retail stores is a huge commitment and takes years of investment before you "might" see any returns. Samsung doesn't seem to want to take that risk. But I do agree, I recently switched most of my devices over to Apple products because they take care of their customers. And if I ever have an issue, there are 3 Apple stores within 25 miles of me.
I was recently on the Galaxy Fold subreddit and there was a user who had his $2,000 device fail. Samsung had him mail it in. It had then been two weeks with no communication at that point. Other users had the same experience with Samsung denying repairs for some of them after keeping the device for several weeks. That is completely unacceptable and slightly terrifying.
I am in Toronto and if we are talking 25 miles radius there are like hundreds of shops that can sell/replace/fix android based phones.
If you are having trouble with your email or want help connecting some accessory, how many of those shops will help with that kind of stuff? When it's an issue that can't be fixed and your phone is still under warranty, how many of those shops give you a replacement on the spot? A few will for sure, but it's not a lot of them.
Yes they will. They do not start their day by praising almighty Samsung / Apple and do whatever gets them money.
>"If you are having trouble with your email or want help connecting some accessory, how many of those shops will help with that kind of stuff?"
I do not know "how many" exactly but they do help customers with many things, not just repairs.
Apple started with kiosks inside of Best Buy, too, and it took many years before their stores reached the level of ubiquity they have today. Any competitor trying to make the same level of investment would lead to Apple's share of profits inching closer to 100%, as their competitors would be spending a ton on retail buildouts.
Apple makes more per square foot of retail than anyone else[0]. It's not even really close. Each of the other companies you've mentioned has opened stores, albeit not on the same scale. None of them have seen anything like similar results, so why would they keep expanding to match scale?
Apple Stores are valuable because Apple products are valuable. Apple products are valuable in part because Apple Stores are valuable. It's a virtuous circle that doesn't work for any of their competitors, at least not any so far.
0. https://news.retailsphere.com/how-apple-became-the-worlds-hi...
These threads keep saying the profits are sales and marketing as if artificial. On the contrary, user-centricity even to point of dev-hostility is a specific product market fit tradeoff Apple pursues, giving the whole brand a halo effect and premium.
Devs need to roll with that or will continually find themselves misaligned.
That's true, but it was still a half-hearted effort.
I went in once because they weren’t crowded…to ask directions to the Apple store. I felt kinda bad but they were just standing around with no customers anyway. I did apologize, and I remember the person I asked being very nice.
What did apple bring to the game? With a tired product line in a maturing market, the last thing they needed was another expensive effort in a domain they had no experience in (retail) while simultaneously killing their retail channel.
It’s my understanding that the popular understanding turned out not to be completely accurate.
I’m actually surprised they did as well as they did.
2. 4G / 5G as well as other Patent arrangement.
3. All of that along with higher operation cost means their current selling price are not sustainable in the US market without some adjustment.
But in the Android sphere Google is clearly capturing the profits from Android devices on software.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...
In addition to profits, Google does not have to pay for the search bar to be highlighted and their apps to be installed:
https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/25/analysts-google-to-pay-apple-...
Android OEM are (almost) commodity product makers.
Apple devices claim to be "luxury" -- something I find hilarious, but the marketers certainly believe. It makes the clicks from an Apple device more valuable than a click from an Android device. Therefore, there's just going to be more sales to click farm companies. And they buy in bulk: https://www.equedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/clickfarm...
The entire mobile phone ecosystem is a hilarious ouroboros of marketing nonesense in the end. I would be laughing if the environmental and human costs weren't so extreme.
In buying an Android handset, your options shift over time. Samsung has the most brand loyalty, and some high-end handsets, as well as some lower end ones. The rest of the brands seem to waffle between trying to be high-end, and being the best value.
For example, OnePlus set out to be compete against the high-end with really low prices, but over time, the prices caught up to the competition.
Google has made affordable Nexus handsets, moved towards high-end Pixels, but then backed off and started selling mainstream handsets.
It's hard, as a consumer, to know what to replace your handset with when the time comes, because what was good might still not be good. And maybe a newer brand offers a better deal that sways you.
While competition is mostly a good thing in the Android handset market, it also makes for some unpredictability, and few companies figure out where to position themselves, and maintain excellence.
I can't speak for China, but in Europe everybody I know who bought a Hauwei phone did so because they wanted a 'cheaper Samsung'.
I mention this because most people are satisficers, not maximizers. [1] They want a good phone, not the best phone. So I suspect that for most consumers, this isn't particularly a hard choice. They're going to buy the same one or ask a friend or see a review or get the one the phone store person recommends.
The Android market is particularly hard for maximizers, though, because there are a bunch of companies working hard to have the best phone for a given niche.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/science-choice/20150...
I'd argue that there hasn't been a single phone released since the Galaxy S10 that is an improvement on that phone. Sure it might have better specifications on paper, but they are all worse products due to the features that all flagship phones have removed over time (removable storage, headphone jacks, going down to pentile 1080p screens to name a few). For my needs, the entire phone industry has turned to utter crap while prices have continued to climb to pay for ever more camera modules, increasing Qualcomm prices (with the same crappy upgrade support), and marketing costs.
If one doesn’t like consumers’ choice, one can try to understand why the value one thing over another and out deliver that. But first one must really grok it.
HN threads show that’s hard as supporting the non-tech user-centric approach requires an atypical world view among Makers.
Numbers show it’s hard as a majority of the competitors are not engineered or marketed with that understanding.
There’s likely a connection.
Can you name 2 other OSes that compete meaningfully against Ios? Keep in mind I'm not talking about ecosystems that make less than half of the profit Ios makes for Apple. Hence the "meaningful".