Nevertheless, I find that the main point of the article is right. But Apple's China problem is also a very important problem for Google (actually, it's worse for Google).
When the owner of an iPhone wants a new phone, they overwhelmingly buy an iPhone. The author makes the point, and I agree, that it is because of the iOS software and not the iPhone hardware.
iOS users already have made investments in iOS apps, talk to their friends using iMessage, and are used to the look and feel of the OS. If these users could buy a Samsung phone with iOS on it, I suspect many would (say for phones with better battery life or other features).
So when in China a user spends the vast majority of their time in one app, that app kind of becomes the OS, and there are much lower switching costs between Android and iOS. Customers in China are in large part just choosing which hardware to run WeChat on.
That said, the history in desktop OS tells a less clear story.
In 1998, Windows was what almost everyone needed to buy, because they needed to run Windows software. Overtime the web browser (which works the same across operating systems) became where people spent most of their time, and ChromeOS and Mac were able to gain market share.
Apple laptops still have significant market share and pricing power. But when you compare the Samsung S8 vs iPhone 7, I see much fewer differences than the MacBook vs HP/Dell whatever.
It's the same for cars; I wouldn't be surprised if VW or Mercedes or even Toyota are able to keep more customers than Renault or Fiat, just because the "faithful Mercedes customer" is a thing that people talk about and the "faithful Renault customer" is not.
For me they are not. I've used Android on quite a few phones ranging from HTCs to various Nexus devices. It always had weird issues, the most annoying of which was some google process randomly spinning out of control and killing the battery in ~10 minutes.
I'm back on iOS now, and for the most part it works. I see some interesting HW from Samsung, et al, but then I'd be forced to use Android again. So yeah, I think the author has a point without being a fanatical about Apple.
For me they are not. I've used Android on quite a few phones ranging from HTCs to various Nexus devices. It always had weird issues
I ran into so many limitations of iOS, that I now run pure Android and have never been happier.
You can switch from a monopoly over a specific service/product to a similar but not identical one. MacOS has applications and features that Windows doesn't. It historically enabled features (sealed batteries) that Windows didn't, that provided better performance.
And MacOS can run linux and windows. For people who value those things, MacOS is a complete monopoly.
iOS is even more differentiated from Android. Android won't support all the music/movies/shows I've bought from iTunes, does't work with iCloud, etc. It doesn't airplay to my other Apple devices.
These "monopolies" are why Apple is successful. When they switched to Intel they didn't lower costs by adopting commoditized PC hardware designs and outsource OS development to MSFT by licensing windows. They used Intel to provide more powerful and more flexible Macs, and continued to differentiate themselves by adding value with aluminum bodies, retina screens, mag-safe adapters, thunderbolt, etc, etc, etc.
I think Apple understands much better than most of us geeks that their customers spend a lot of time with their devices and on their Macs. If I pay $1000 more for an "equivalent" Mac than Windows PC, it costs me about 50 cents more per work hour. Which means my payback needs less than a 1% increase in productive. And it's trivial to get far more than that because despite having similar processors/ram/storage, they are in no way equivalent in build quality, flexibility, and usability.
Where Apple's model fails is for the people who don't make much per hour, so building your own, or getting the cheapest, makes sense.
You are saying this as it was an undisputed fact. Which is the exact issue OP pointed at.
It wasn't just sealed batteries, but they offer better performance because they can better customized to fit available space in the laptop. To do that the OS has to have special drivers that condition the battery, or your battery will age rapidly and need replacement in a year or so. Apple put that into MacOS, which was a huge benefit in itself.
Sealed batteries also make devices lighter and sturdier. Fewer openings, more rigid enclosures.
These all seem like minor advantages, but they specifically led to me and others to became a Mac user.
I switched from a white MacBook to black Asus many years ago. The former lasted 6 hours while the replacable battery of the Asus lasted 9-11 hours.
Now I don't go around claiming Asus is better than apple, replacable is better than sealed or that black is better than white as it was a universal fact.
At the time I made my switch, a MacBook Pro lasted 7 hours, my Dell with very similar configuration lasted 4.5 hours. There were numerous technical discussions about how custom sealed batteries could provide more density in the same or smaller space. But their problem was they weren't usable because they typically lost capacity after a years worth of charge cycles, so no one could figure out why Apples didn't. Until they realized MacOS had special conditioning software in it.
And while today's laptops have roughly reached battery life parity, for years MacBooks were indisputably the best at it. Look it up, the facts are out there.
> iPhone users very rarely switch to Android, while a fair number of Android users switch to iPhone
> this is the point that was forgotten the last time Samsung was held up as an iPhone threat — a Samsung smartphone does not run iOS. That has always been Apple’s trump card
Considering this is a stats blog these bold claims are both made without any proof. And Android being a far cry from iOS is an antiquated position to take in 2017. They caught up quite some time ago.
The core difference is usually lock-in from using the Apple eco-system. But on a UX/hardware value level Apple doesn't have a significant advantage over companies like Samsung anymore.
But agreed re: the china problem, I wish he focused more on that over making sweeping statements about Apple's (imaginary) unmatched competitive advantage.
Also Apple usually says it themselves on their earnings calls.
That's true for most of the discussion on the internet: so much talk about how Apple's chips/apps/ui/build-quality/founders/etc are so much better.
But almost no talk at all about how modern brands get built, and what such brands give to users: for example, the ability to tell stories(implicitly or explicitly) to themselves and others, stories that make them feel good about themselves.
And i don't think it's fair to demand those users to forefit that right, after they paid so much for it.
Brands become powerful only when they are true. All the marketing in the world can't successfully position your products as valuable and unique, if they aren't. You can't fool people for long. The gods of the advertising industry want you to believe they can sell ice to eskimos, but they are merely selling their book.
As for the general power of branding: many commodity like products make lots of money through branding, be in the fields of luxury or fashion.
Example: Coca-Cola. People don't buy Coke because advertising tells them to, people buy Coke because advertising reminds them to. Coke has a strong brand because Coke consumers prefer it's taste.
Numerous taste tests have shown this. Sam Walton spent millions on a better tasting drink than Coke, proved it was better in every taste test, and Walmart's coke bombed when it was released despite a heavy marketing push and excellent product placement. It bombed because despite the results of taste-tests, customers had developed an affinity for Coca-Cola. It was always good, they could trust it's consistency and flavor, and they really weren't motivated to gamble on something new.
In the cases of luxury or fashion, their unique benefits may be subtle, so subtle you don't even notice them. But their customers do and once they experience them they continue to buy from the same vendors. It can be as simple as a purse that is extremely attractive, yet durable, yet useful with the perfect number of pockets for your needs. Once you have that pleasing experience you are far more willing to buy future products from the same vendor, thinking, they know what they are doing, they think like I do, etc.
In smartphones and Macs, Apple has consistently provided high quality hardware with innovative features, and powerful but easy to use software. That's built up a brand where Apple customers have high expectations for their Apple product experiences, and that brand can only remain strong if Apple doesn't disappoint them.
Wait... this seems like evidence for the exact inverse of your thesis. If a better-tasting product comes on the market, for cheaper, with reasonable marketing, and still bombs, it sure seems like the value of the brand has become disconnected from the innate quality of the product.
Obviously, branding alone won't sustain a terrible product. But no one here was arguing that.
There is a significant difference between Apple and Coke. You always buy Macs because they are better for your workflow and find the experience delightful. That makes you usually want to replace one with another. You then have a bad experience with a Mac purchase. You now are far less likely to trust Apple and the Mac when you make your next of purchase.
Coke doesn't suffer the same problem. The joy of its purchase is the consistency of the experience, it's always the same. You know it will never disappoint that taste desire. That's why Coke never ever allows its bottlers to vary the formula even minutely. That way They can never lose your trust. If you drink it from fountain dispensers, your experience is less consistent, making that a more challenging market fir them.
So yes Apple is helped by branding. But like all great brands, Apples brand was built from product excellence, not advertising. Advertising is just a reminder or purchase trigger for the good feelings you already have for the brand.
"Yea, those AirPods look cool, that reminds me I wanted a pair because I expect them to work really well. I should do that now"
This is NOT true for questions where there is a bigger consequence. I feel one is much more rational in those decisions (you carefully consider multiple choices when purchasing a phone, car, etc.) This means there is a greater opportunity of disruption because your brand, while still very important, is not the main differentiation anymore and is not the "rule of thumb".
Some people will be willing to look past it, but it's still a huge advantage for Apple. When I'm choosing my next laptop, though the Surface and the Dell XPS might seem nice, neither of them run macOS, and that's probably a dealbreaker for me unless Apple's laptops get really far away from my needs.
I strongly suggest that you give Linux a shot. Depending on the distro, it can be very nice, and it means that you get to keep both your money and your freedom, which I really appreciate.
I switched to OS X after having switched back and forth between Windows and Linux for several years, always getting upset with each other's deficiencies.
Same thing happened to me in the early 2000's. I also just bought a Windows gaming laptop with a GTX 1070 GPU to do VR development, but I find I still find my non-VR experience as a dev and a user superior with my 2012 Macbook Pro!
- emacs
- vi
- zsh
- st
- SBCL
- tmux
- Inkscape
- sxiv
- Firefox
- Gnucash
- GraphicsMagick
- Nethack
- Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
- Minecraft
Of those, only Minecraft isn't developed on Linux first (and maybe Firefox, depending on how you define that condition).
I can be productive. I can read email (in emacs, of course!). I can play games. I can read documents. I can browse the Web. I feel as though my needs have been met.
I've spent part of a career writing software for people whose daily workflows required Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXPress, and a dozen other supporting applications, and they always ran much better on MacOS and were far easier to use and train people to use.
But even those people are still a tiny minority, where most of the world revolves around MSFT Office and hundreds of applications on Windows.
Every time I post this on HN I get a bunch of people telling me you can deregister your phone number, or start a new thread, but iMessage won't convert its own threads to MMS automatically. Every participant in every thread has to delete it. This is considered expected behavior by Apple.
If you want uninterrupted communication with your contacts, and you can't afford a few missed messages, you have no choice but to stay on iPhone forever. SMS is dead. Apple owns your messaging identity now, and it's platform locked.
I'm confident that this isn't true. Economic mobility and movement goes down more often than up, and EVERY single person who has changed their phone plan goes cheaper (eventually into Android). Every vendor (ask anywhere from Sprint to ATT) knows this downgrading (into a superior android ecosystem) is close to 100% of the time, that his statement is an indication of how utterly ignorant or purposefully misleading the whole article is.
Ironically, the link embedded in that quoted sentence links to STOP DOUBTING THE IPHONE, THE MACINTOSH COMPANY Posted onWednesday, October 28, 2015, not any attempt to display the contradictory data to support the statement.
Is it? I like iOS and have no desire to switch, so I would never consider an S8 or a Google Pixel for my next phone. It really does matter. Even if Android is just as good there is friction in switching and people often like to stay with what is comfortable until some issue becomes too much to bare.