iPhone market share grows 6.4% in USA, takes share from Android in most markets
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
- New generation haptic feedback
- Improved camera system and dual cameras for the Plus
- Stereo speakers
- A10 Fusion SoC makes the 7 the fastest phone on the market by a wide margin
- New solid state home button
- IPX67 water resistance and dust proofing
- Bigger battery without increasing thickness
- Wide color gamut display that's up to 25% brighter
- OIS for the smaller model
I personally consider this a reduction, not an addition. I prefer the old button.
Just as moving from a physical keyboard to touchscreen reduces moving parts and therefore many points of failure, moving to a solid state home button eliminates a very common and critical point of failure.
So the main drawback is you are not getting a realistic click.
I think it's greatest advantage and disadvantage is that it's a sterile environment. No third parties can mess with it. Unfortunately at times those third parties include me, the user.
Overall, I miss my Windows tablet for web browsing which is what I do mostly on my iPad. However, I am waiting for the next round of Windows tablets to see if I can find a 10 inch that is worth my money. I also miss having a (Android) back button on my phone.
I find I much prefer the swipe from the left to go back, it feels a lot more natural.
Also I find swiping very imprecise compared to a statically located back-button near the bottom of the screen. Apps implement swiping differently. For some of them we have to go all the way to the edge of the screen to swipe and for others you do not. Swiping is also a completely different experience on the iPad compared to an iPhone.
I remember the days when Apple completely dominated the smartphone market, competing favorably with Android, and eclipsing any single Android manufacturer. I was surprised to hear that Apple has now dropped to 31% market share. This means that Android now has almost double the market share of Apple, and Samsung alone is going head-to-head with Apple.
I think we've just witnessed the end of Apple's golden era.
We haven't witnessed the end of Apple's golden era, we've witnessed the end of the smart-phone adoption curve. Everyone who has ever wanted a smart phone has got one. Or two. Or probably three or four by now. They're buying fewer phones because the differences from one generation to the next are more incremental.
If there's a fundamental shift in how phones are used that demands a new kind of hardware or some kind of vastly more powerful software there will be an impetus to upgrade again. Until then it's more steady-state.
There's still tons of opportunity to innovate in the watch space, and the tablet market, while having cooled off, might continue to nibble away at notebook sales.
We're in a bit of a lull technology wise. Consoles, phones, laptops, they're all "good enough" for now.
Maybe at the very beginning and even at that time, Blackberry and Windows had a strong presence.
Android very quickly grew into an unstoppable force market share wise.
Apple can't compete on this metric. There are just too many variants of Android phones at all price points.
They do reap most of the profit of the industry though, which is unfortunate for everybody that is not Apple, including consumers.
OEMs are trapped in the same low margin point than pc makers have been for a while.
Google might be able to compete if they can focus for more than 2 minutes.