It's amazing to me that any pundit would be stupid enough to claim that Android will eat Apple's lunch based on an analogy to Windows crushing Macintosh in the 90s.
Apple was a slowly sinking ship after Jobs left, coasting on old ideas and brand loyalty from the 80s. The Apple of the 90s was a different company, and there are no lessons there that are applicable to the Jobs era(s). To argue any differently belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the basis of Apple's success.
> It's amazing to me that any pundit would be stupid enough to claim that Android will eat Apple's lunch based on an analogy to Windows crushing Macintosh in the 90s.
It looks extremely relevant to me, so I'd love to hear a more substantiated rebuttal from you. The market seems to be poised to become a 70% Android lead and the rest split among Apple, Microsoft and Nokia in quantities to be determined.
I'm not even sure Apple will be able to get second place, to be honest, which makes the comparison to the Windows market even more relevant.
In the 90s Apple went for maximizing profits without any regards to market share, and they had bunch of CEOs who didn't understand computers.
Todays Apple has a fantastic production and supply chain, and a CEO who is way way better.
Instead of looking at Macs in the 90s, the pundits should look at the iPod domination in the last 10 years and how the iPad currently completely outsells the very few competitors.
Look at how MS tried to enter the mp3 player market, and have completely failed. Their latest phones failed too. Why do anybody expect them to be able to get anywhere when they have a CEO who doesn't understand consumers but only enterprise sales?
tl;dr: the pundits should talk with their kids and teenagers.
> Look at how MS tried to enter the mp3 player market, and have completely failed. Their latest phones failed too. Why do anybody expect them to be able to get anywhere when they have a CEO who doesn't understand consumers but only enterprise sales?
We're talking about Android, not Microsoft.
In terms of market share, all the numbers indicate that Android will most likely be #1 in the world (even passing Nokia) while Apple will struggle to be #4 or maybe #3 if they can keep ahead of Microsoft.
Again, I'm talking about market share, not profits (where Apple is the indisputable #1).
> The market seems to be poised to become a 70% Android lead and the rest split among Apple, Microsoft and Nokia in quantities to be determined.
How can you just throw this out there like a foregone conclusion? Mobile markets are still rapidly evolving. This is far more of a leap than my main point which is that Apple of the 90s and Apple of 00s are two completely different companies which do not have relevance to each other.
> I'm not even sure Apple will be able to get second place, to be honest, which makes the comparison to the Windows market even more relevant.
No, this is a legitmate question. Android will have the largest market share, but if Apple continues to own the profitable top of the market, then HTC et al will tear each other apart and destroy profitability until they are as worthless as commodity PC makers are today. And then it really will be a replay of Apple vs Microsoft - Apple is a profitable software/hardware company, Google is a profitable software company and the hardware-only companies are worth nothing.
It's embarassing that this not only went over your head, but enough people here for you to get more upvotes than me.
Alright, I'll spell it out for you:
Android marketshare is meaningless. How much money does anyone make per Android unit? I don't know offhand what Google's agreements with manufacturers are, but it's open source right? How much can they be collecting? What is the actual profit share of the mobile market? I could easily see a 99/1 unit split with the profits splitting 50/50.
I feel really sorry about you not getting upvotes, want a hug?
Maybe this has to do with the fact that you just don't understand what is being discussed here.
Market share is meaningful when we are talking about market share.
Nobody disputed that Apple is #1 in profits (I said so myself), but we're discussing what OS will be dominant in units in the next few years, and all the indicators point to Android at about 70% and Apple struggling to remain above 10%.
Which is what brought up this topic in the first place, since this market break down is reminiscent of the current Windows / Mac OS market.
A lot of the Mac vs. Windows scenario is more a myth than anything else. Look at the actual market shares in 1984 or 1985 and what they are now (hint: the C64 was a bigger player than the Mac).
If you care about Mac vs PC, then surely iPod vs Zune should be just as relevant. More so, given the consumer focus and iTunes being just as big a factor in both. The Apple that existed from 1985 to 1996 is long dead, what remains is NeXT part 2.
The massive economy of scale Apple can bring these days is pretty impressive and the iPod touch / iPad factors (as the article states) need to be taken into account.
> A lot of the Mac vs. Windows scenario is more a myth than anything else. Look at the actual market shares in 1984 or 1985 and what they are now (hint: the C64 was a bigger player than the Mac).
You are confused.
The Mac came out in 1984, and Windows 1 in 1985.
We are talking about the 90's, and Windows certainly crushed Mac during that era (and most of the early 2000's too).
And since Mac's world wide market share hovers around 6%, you can probably still argue that Windows continues to crush it today.
No, I am not confused. MS-DOS / PC-DOS already had a significant share. The Macintosh was never dominant in the market. Calling Windows something new ignores the relationship between MS-DOS and Windows (ask the DR-DOS people).
Please look at the situation on the computer market. Apple takes less than 10% of it, but an incredibly high part of the profits (about 80% of the hardware profit overall). Why? Because today an high-end computer is basically a Mac. Nobody spends money on a PC. And when you buy a 500$ PC, only Microsoft really makes a profit.
Now see the parallel to the phone market. Almost all high-end phones are iPhones. Really, who gives a damn of the overall market share? Apple takes all the money anyway. Other makers are in a cut-throat battle for market shares with razor thin margins, while Apple literally swims in cash.
Microsoft made plenty of money from PCs, and plenty more selling Office on the Mac (more than Apple made on the hardware at some points), and from leveraging that marketshare into browsers, corporate messaging, servers, Xboxes (well I don't think they've actually made any money on Xbox yet, but they probably will make some eventually) etc.
Google is making plenty of money from Android, and are making money from mobile search/ads on iPhone too. It seems likely that the growth of Android, and the fact that low end Anrdroids are expanding the market for mobile browsing/search/ads is only going to aid their bottom line going forward.
Do you view Apple as simply a hardware manufacturer? Why not calculate the margins that LG and Samsung are making on the components of the iPhone 4 and just pretend that the money Apple makes doesn't count, just like apparently Microsoft's profits don't count when a laptop gets sold?
I simply want to accentuate the fact that Apple doesn't need a big part of the overall phone market to grab most of the margin available to this market. It simply needs to stay at the top. When LG sells an android phone, LG makes a couple of bucks of margin at best; google gets pennies from advertising; in contrast when Apple sells an iPhone, they get quite a hefty global hardware and software profit.
Disagree. After the initial smartphone surge of the last 3 years, most of the growth, revenue, and profit in the cell phone market will come from poor consumers outside the first world. It's hard to sell a new iPhone every year to first world consumers who already have an iPhone: it's fast enough and has every HW feature under the sun already. Sooner or later people will stop paying for roughly the same electronics in a redesigned case (no matter how sexy).
Will Apple accept much lower margins to capture the emerging market? I doubt it, but we'll see. If they don't: they need to keep inventing new product categories like the iPad to keep the whole thing afloat, and that is definitely not sustainable. I think they are nearing a top.
IMO "poor consumer in the third world" aren't that different from us. As soon as they can they want Adidas sneakers, Mercedes cars, Louis Vuitton bags and they'll want iPhones too.
About the sustainability : I think that the whole capitalist thing is pretty much unsustainable anyway. So what applies to Apple applies to everything else the same. So consider I'm talking there "all other things equal".
Apple was a slowly sinking ship after Jobs left, coasting on old ideas and brand loyalty from the 80s. The Apple of the 90s was a different company, and there are no lessons there that are applicable to the Jobs era(s). To argue any differently belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the basis of Apple's success.