iOS marketshare slipping?

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I can't really see how an Apple Smart (i)TV could offer anything particularly revolutionary. Apple have kept out of the Smart TV market to the point where the major TV producers all have robust Smart TV systems, some including technologies such as gesture control.

I suppose Apple could somehow integrate Siri into a Smart TV, but is it really worth their while?

When you consider how expensive some of the TVs at the 'premium' end of the market already are, I shudder to think how much Apple would end up charging for an iTV!
 
Apple's margin allow them to launch products profitably even when the yields are low, like the fingerprint sensor. It's part of their formula.

To achieve the margin, they innovate to combine components or do it themselves. It's not just favourable component contracts.

They are also rather thrifty in marketing spend.

When they have a large number of locations in China yet to sell their products, they are unlikely to adjust their strategy. After all, they sold even more units last fall.

I think if they want to fight a price war, they know they will lose to the Chinese manufacturers. Why start one ? They might as well stick to their high margin and innovate more.

One thing I am surprised is the move to US for manufacturing MacPro. I don't think they did all that just for show.

Edit:
For wearable devices like watches, Apple did it first with the iPod Nano. You can wear it like a watch. I think they realised that not many people use it that way. If they do release a watch, they would want to do differently from a regular watch, or iPhone companion.
 
Ah but they can't price the 5C lower, because they're Apple and they want to remain Apple, that is they want to maintain very high volumes and obscene margins. Their R&D budget has been steadily and rapidly increasing for years, up to almost $4.5 billion in 2013, from $1.8 billion in 2010.

$2.7B increase 2010-2013 is a big increase. I don't know what the inter-years where, but lets guess that cumulatively they spent around $11B in 2011,2012,2013.

$1.8B in 2010 got them $14 Billon profit... x7.7
$11B in the next 3 years, got them $104.5B profit.... x9.5

Seems like an excellent return on R&D costs to me.

They have a possible way out of their falling profits problem, however.

What falling profit problem ?
The last quarter was their joint highest pretax profit for a quarter in history, matching the same quarter a year ago, and just exceeding the same quarter from the year previous.

Last year in total, the profit was indeed down 10% compared to the prior year, but I think its too early to say if thats a trend or not. I'd certainly agree that the meteoric rise is gone.
 
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I was reading all the time on the web how much head to head android and ios were, all this while seeing ios diminish costantly in real life, then I realized that was reading american worldwide news...
At least in my country the iphone has been a luxury item to show as status symbol, when this halo vanished the sales shifted to bigger screens bigger numbers phones.
And in europe who buys a windows phone is simply buying a nokia phone, there's a faithfull group that would (and has) buy anything if nokia because of almost 20 happy years of products.
 
For wearable devices like watches, Apple did it first with the iPod Nano. You can wear it like a watch. I think they realised that not many people use it that way. If they do release a watch, they would want to do differently from a regular watch, or iPhone companion.

I think the phone watch wont catch on for many usability reasons but mainly because watches are worn for fashion/status purposes these days. I think its a real stretch that people will be replacing their Rolex,Patek, etc for a Samsung or Apple watch that gets replaced each product cycle.
 
ASP or average selling price of iOS devices is higher than that of other manufacturers.

The Windows Phone selling in Italy are not their flagship 920 or 1020 Lumias but something like the 520s, which go for under $100 these days.

Apple won't produce product for certain price segments. So even though their marketshare in computers is like 5% they have something like 80% or more marketshare for computers priced over $1000. So while Dell and HP ship in much greater volumes, their profitability lags the Mac business.

Similarly, in iOS devices, they have a high marketshare for devices above a certain price point, probably $500 or $550.

But who knows if they can sustain sales of tens of millions of devices per quarter. The 5S was a hit for the fingerprint and gold color (and people liked the camera too). How many more tentpole features can they deploy on phones?

Oh and sales of Galaxy S4 in the last quarter was lower than sales of Galaxy S3 in the Dec 2012 quarter, 9 million vs. 15 million.

As very competitive lower-priced devices like the Moto G are pushed out, sales of all flagship devices may come under pressure.
 
With "only" 1 billion smartphones being sold worldwide on an annual basis, there's a lot of headroom still to go.

But if high end smartphones today represent N% if the sales volume triples in the future it might not mean 3x times N% but definitely NOT a zero (0) increase either.

Either way it would be interesting to see how the smartphone sales segragate according to device prices.
 
With "only" 1 billion smartphones being sold worldwide on an annual basis, there's a lot of headroom still to go.

Excuse me?

You don't really think there are 7B - or even 4B - people capable of purchasing a smartphone, do you?
Assuming it's 3B (unlikely), do you think they will buy a new smartphone every single year?!

Even in the countries that spend the largest amount of money per-capita in smartphones (USA, UK, etc.), people do 2-year contracts for a new phone.

You could assume there will be some 300 million new customers for smartphones in the developing countries, but those will sure as hell not buy a new iphone.
 
Is it 1 billion smart phones or 1 billion phones of all types sold per year?

I know smart phones were replacing a lot of dumb phones every year but a lot of people can't even afford $50 phones.

About 10 years ago, when Nokia dominated, they were on the verge of reaching 1 billion installed base but a lot of that was cheap phones.
 
Excuse me?

You don't really think there are 7B - or even 4B - people capable of purchasing a smartphone, do you?
Assuming it's 3B (unlikely), do you think they will buy a new smartphone every single year?!

Re-read the entire post (and not just hand picked sentence) as often as it takes you to understand the quite simple statistical reasoning. I didn't mention any specific numbers and yes the smartphone market is in general expected to continue to grow. If you think that the half the world's population is too much for some time in the future (oh yes it'll take time) you might want to reconsider.

Let's try the middle sentence once more:

But if high end smartphones today represent N% if the sales volume triples in the future it might not mean 3x times N% but definitely NOT a zero (0) increase either.
Triple in that case is rather to serve the example. With a hypothetical three times higher volume I DO NOT EXPECT 3x times N%, but I DO NOT EXPECT no increase either.

Does that help so far or should I try greek possibly as an alternative?

Even in the countries that spend the largest amount of money per-capita in smartphones (USA, UK, etc.), people do 2-year contracts for a new phone.

You could assume there will be some 300 million new customers for smartphones in the developing countries, but those will sure as hell not buy a new iphone.
I didn't and don't assume any specific numbers. Read again.
 
I think the phone watch wont catch on for many usability reasons but mainly because watches are worn for fashion/status purposes these days. I think its a real stretch that people will be replacing their Rolex,Patek, etc for a Samsung or Apple watch that gets replaced each product cycle.

Use of the wrist as a way of carrying a useful piece of equipment is a given. The fact that no one does so any more is totally to do with the fact that all the functionality of a watch has been overtaken by the phone that everyone carries with them these days, and thus, as you rightly say, the watch is for the most part now, a purely decorative/style item.

However, if a new device can be invented that provides useful functionality, either over and above what a phone can do, or that compliments it in an effective way, I have no hesitation in believing that the use of the wrist will quickly return.
 
Well this fall should be interesting.

Does iPhone 6S continue the momentum of the 6?

Or was it all the pent-up demand that the 6 fulfilled? Not that the 6 greatly expanded marketshare but it cemented Apple's dominance of smart phone profits.
 
Turns out 6S sales hasn't met the expectations raised by 6 sales. China slowdown was a big factor.

Now though, there are rumors that iPhone 7 will have the same form factor as 6 or 6S but they will get rid of the analog headphone jack for some digital port. That's already raising complaints before Apple confirms it.

Meanwhile at WWDC, Apple touted image recognition features for iOS 10 which would do the processing for identifying objects in photos locally instead of using the cloud processing. Turns out Apple is going to tap into the GPUs of their devices to do these local processing workloads. The Apple SOCs have always had beefy GPUs so maybe they'll make better use of that silicon.
 
I can understand wanting to move from a 3.5mm jack to a single port that can charge and use head phones even though I don't like dongles if I need to do both at the same time.

I just hope they don't make the phones thinner. Batter life on all phones already is a problem. Going thinner will only make it worse
 
Well the more interesting rumor is that they might finally raise the base unit to 32 GB. Then if they do 128 GB for $100 more, that might tempt more people to upgrade.
 
You really think that the base unit storage is a driver for sales?

To me, its not the sole reason to buy one, but its a definitive added bonus for people opting for the base model.
 
September 7 event confirmed, next Wednesday.

Widely assumed to be the intro of the iPhone 7 but all their products are overdue for updates.

Will the no headphone jack overshadow everything? No huge gains to be made in the A10? Dual camera not a big deal?
 
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