Apple was overtaken by Huawei in global smartphone sales
qz.com
qz.com
Factory resetting the device doesn't fix it (nor messing with APN settings), so I looked into flashing a ROM onto it to see if that'd do it, only to discover that Huawei has taken down the service which allowed customers to unlock their devices's bootloader. Now you have to contact support and wait for them to email you an unlock code. This is clearly a user hostile move: it makes it harder to load your own software on a device you purchased and, in my case, fix my own device.
I won't be buying from Huawei again.
Yes, US has that issue with NSA but at least Apple stands against abuse of data privacy and has a firm ethetical stance to protect consumers data. I don’t trust Google for that matter.
Edit: I feel like there is going to be what-about-tism responses. So, before you respond, ask yourself if you can criticize the Chinese government, protest against it and make a change in China. Last time that happened in Tiananmen square, there was massacre. That does not happen in US.
In old days (before the internet), if I buy a PC from Apple or IBM, you get what you pay for. Besides the cable companies / newspapers / magazines bombarding ads, everything back in the day was 1:1 - you pay for something, you get value for it.
Now a days, we have large companies losing money while killing competition (Uber), large companies in bed with government, and large companies in bed with advertisers and marketing agencies.
Fuck the world. I can't wait to see Dieter Rams' documentary premier this October. From the trailers, it looks like it is addressing the very fabric of today's society than talking about industrial design. [1]
I don't want to be a product. I want to be a loyal customer.
Here goes: it seems like that model doesn’t work anymore. People look for what it costs on paper. You already here people talking about Apple as if it’s some impossible luxury standard. Can you imagine if computers became £5,000 for the base model again? I can’t imagine anyone paying for email in this day and age. And I certainly can’t imagine people paying for operating systems. Windows only has market dominance because it comes pre-installed and is effectively free.
That’s the issue. If you’re competing in this market; then you’re competing with “free” from the consumers eyes.
Stopping invasive user tracking would make internet advertising less effective, sure, but it wouldn’t prevent it completely. Ad Words doesn’t fundamentally depend on user tracking to associate search terms to advertisements for example.
https://www.howtogeek.com/163303/how-computer-manufacturers-...
The cost of a pre-installed license is cost neutral in most cases due to the crapware they add.
My overarching point is that 99% of consumers are cost-conscious. They look at the price in paper and rarely weigh anything else, especially a fuzzy notion of privacy. We are the 1% and we should be mindful of the 99%
This is one side of the coin, the other side is that for economic activity to take place, advertising must be available. People need to be informed of services and consumption needs to be encouraged to grow economic activity. How would that happen if companies locked down their platforms altogether? Would P&G, J&J and all the other conglomerates just shrivel and die in a world where they can't access consumers?
As to Google--I'd pay $500 per year not to have it constantly barrage me with reminders to use Chrome instead of Edge (so it can steal my apparently valuable browsing data). But, 90% of everything is crap. Crap is what the market wants, whether it's pop music or USA Today or advertising-based software. Who am I to argue?
The Internet was built on an advertising monetization model, and you could argue that the penetration of computing devices to our lives wouldn't be nearly as far reaching without the Internet. In other words, non-tech people buy iPhones to access the ad-sponsored Google, YouTube and Instagram.
No, it wasn't; the internet was built long before that. The advertising monetisation model didn't become significant until the internet was established as a popular mass venue.
Which makes sense; the audience drew advertising, not the other way around.
Think I can get them to stop datamining/tracking me?
Tiananmen Square massacre, 1989.
Kent State massacre, 1970.
Try that with the Tiananmen Square massacre in China.
Another difference is that four civilians died in Kent state, while 1022 died in Tiananmen Square. That’s three orders of magnitude difference, and why Kent State is typically called “Kent State Shootings” while Tiananmen Square was a “Massacre”. In fact an order of magnitude more policemen and military died in Tiananmen than overall fatalities at Kent State.
They are not comparable. I’m fact more people died in Tiananmen than died protesting the entire Vietnam War in the US.
Hell no.
Tianamen was a massacre, but it was much more than that. If you think these incidents are comparable, you may find reading about them rewarding.
As such, you are getting blasted, and rightly so.
People are finally becoming tired of the "false equivalency" and the "well, just pointing it out" as these are the tools of the propaganda arms of the Chinese, the Russians, and, yes, the US governments in order to manipulate social media sites and people are striking back when they occur.
I find this a very useful form of social vaccination that has taken far too long to take root.
It doesn't actually, if you'd read the thread. Maybe you missed the edit? He was replying to someone who stated that there are no such massacres in the US. He pointed one out. That is all.
Parent
> Edit: I feel like there is going to be what-about-tism responses. So, before you respond, ask yourself if you can criticize the Chinese government, protest against it and make a change in China. Last time that happened in Tiananmen square, there was massacre. That does not happen in US.
That is completely different from state-directed killings intended to suppress political dissent, which the government then covers up and nobody ever talks about.
Now, how many of these things apply to Tiananmen Square?
Yet Kent State is a simple counter example to the grandparent’s claim that political protestors are not massacred in the US.
I’m not sure how much more clear I can be.
Where is Tiananmen taught in Chinese schools?
We shouldn't become desensitized to Kent State lest we enable the equivalent of Tiananmen in the US.
But equating the scope of the two is actually giving in to Chinese propaganda.
I can condemn the bad things that the US does while still realizing that China is orders of magnitude worse.
I have the opposite feeling. Apple gladly hands over iCloud storage management to the Chinese (gladly meaning they won't make a statement even about whether they are happy about it), whereas I trust Google to keep my data on servers they own and are subject to their rules. Be careful about "stands against abuse" when what you mean is "stands against abuse sometimes". Also be careful about "firm ethical stance" when they choose not to confirm that stance in places where it is at odds with the law...not very firm I'd say. At the very least, I'll take the consistent company even if I dislike their data collection practices.
I am mixing up ethics with business motivation.
Apple - Good ethics, but tied to business performance. They cannot and will not exit China or go against the grain with the Chinese authorities.
Google - Sells your data to advertisers, but has good ethical stance against authorities abusing data. Google doesn't operate in China since a decade or more I believe. They've somehow convinced the shareholders.
So far this is just a rumor....
https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/1/17638480/google-china-sear...
I had assumed the android phones probably were breached by the chinese government, rendering data access superfluous in most cases. But I'm not especially well informed on the latter point beyond seeing articles like this one.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/tech-news/million...
And before anyone said you could use iTunes to Backup, please consider 90% of users don't like touching their computer anymore. It is simply not an elegant solution.
In an ideal world Cloud would be everything we wished for, No More BitFlip, Error, Drive Failure, Software Failure, Power Failure, File System Failure etc. But then it is very uneasy that government has all the data. Via iCloud Social Engineering, or Chinese Government forcing companies to give away those Data.
> Just to add to your conclusion, I think Apple leads in privacy.
Its seems like a bit of a non-sequitor to go from an Android manufacturer that will (after an inconvenient interaction by email) allow you to run whatever code you want - to Apple - that doesn't allow anything of the kind?
Fwiw I do think ios is leading in terms of off the shelf security on a device. But not really in terms of privacy vis-à-vis a custom Android/Linux rom with telemetry etc turned off.
Google (Android) sell your data to the advertisers.
You are totally mixing up open/closed source projects and business models.
How do you know that? Unless you have some special access to see the source, you are just taking their word on that.
Next even if the source was published there’s no way to know of the published source is what is in the phones they sell. This is just as true of an AOSP or any open source phone unless you literally audit the source and compile the whole stack from source yourself.
However at least we have Apple on record and accountable, and it seems like their actual commercial interests align with their stated policies. Going with them seems like a reasonable risk to take, especially considering how poor we know for a fact most of their competition is in this regard.
I'd say it's highly contestable, especially since we have no actual direct proof that they do value privacy. Additionally, I don't care about brand perception, I care about reality.
> Next even if the source was published there’s no way to know of the published source is what is in the phones they sell.
So because they ship a poor OS that doesn't let you manage and control your own system means that there's no way to tell? Interesting, considering that a lot of other hardware works that way....
> This is just as true of an AOSP or any open source phone unless you literally audit the source and compile the whole stack from source yourself.
A) So? What if I want to do that?
B) The point of open-sourcing everything isn't so that everyone can audit everything everytime. It's so that we can audit when we need to. I would never buy a car that doens't let me pop the hood if I wanted to make modifications, why can't the same be true for Apple's products?
> However at least we have Apple on record and accountable, and it seems like their actual commercial interests align with their stated policies.
Their commercial interests actually align to look like they care about privacy, while actually double-dipping. Additionally, they still cater to governments.
> Going with them seems like a reasonable risk to take, especially considering how poor we know for a fact most of their competition is in this regard.
I completely agree that their competition is awful, but that doesn't in any way mean that Apple is good.
In the end, none of what you said refutes my point: You are still reliant on Apple being honest.
So what if you do ? You can't.
Android isn't really open source. They let you look at some unimportant parts of it, that's all. It's a token gesture at best, or deliberately deceptive at worst.
> The point of open-sourcing everything isn't so that everyone can audit everything everytime. It's so that we can audit when we need to
But you can't audit the most important parts of Android, as they are closed-source. Hell, even Google doesn't have access to the source of the most important bits such as the baseband firmware.
That is my complaint. There are plenty of other operating systems where I can. The fact that Apple won't let me implies that they are hiding something.
> Android isn't really open source. They let you look at some unimportant parts of it, that's all. It's a token gesture at best, or deliberately deceptive at worst.
I agree, but this is whataboutism. Android being shitty doesn't give Apple the right to be shitty.
Name 1 OS + hardware combination where you have the ability to fully audit every part of security-sensitive software. I'll wait...
> Android being shitty doesn't give Apple the right to be shitty.
No, but you can whine about stuff you're never ever going to get, or you can just pick the least problematic option available. Currently that's Apple.
https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/systems + any open source os
That aside: Just because we have shitty foss offerings doesn't mean Apple has a good offering.
> No, but you can whine about stuff you're never ever going to get, or you can just pick the least problematic option available. Currently that's Apple.
A) Currently that is not Apple. There are many other systems that do a much better job of protecting your privacy that Apple.
B) I'll choose to whine about things that I'm "never going to get". I'm in the business of reality, not wishful thinking. Just because Apple is more convenient when it comes to privacy, doesn't mean it solves the privacy problem, and sweeping that lie under the rug doesn't make it any less of a lie.
OMG, I don't even.... You do realise none of those are phones right?
>That aside: Just because we have shitty foss offerings doesn't mean Apple has a good offering.
The contention was that they lead, not that they are perfect.
>A) Currently that is not Apple. There are many other systems that do a much better job of protecting your privacy that Apple.
Name one. I really don't know of any. Android is a security car crash. The MS offering is effectively nonexistent.
The fact is there is a very consistent consensus among security professionals that iOs is the only platform that's even close to being secure.
>B) I'll choose to whine about things that I'm "never going to get". I'm in the business of reality, not wishful thinking.
And yet in a thread about phones where you're asked what systems you can compile your own stack on you give a list of OS friendly laptops and servers; you reframe a thread on which is the best option to one about whether that option is 'good'; then invoke vague assertions about 'other systems' without backing that up in the slightest. Bearing in mind the last time you were asked to back up a statement you changed the subject completely, I hold out little hope.
In regards to phones:
Just because we don't have a good alternative doesn't make Apple a good one. It is a fact that we don't know what they do with your private data. You can't say that their system is the best if you don't actually know what it does. All you can do is guess.
But that's true for everything.
It's simply impossible to have a computing device where you can be sure of every part being safe without trusting other people's judgement. You'd have to start by studying the VHDL of every chip in your computer, that's going to take you a while. Then check the software and hardware that turns that into a photomask and verify that the actual silicon produced doesn't have any hidden backdoors (that's difficult enough). You'd have to own your own equipment for producing the chips (can't trust the manufacturers)
Once you'd have the hardware completed, you'd have to check every single line of code, not just the OS kernel, but every compiler used (you've got a bootstrapping problem here, do you trust the compiler that compiled the compiler ?), every bit of userland software. Hundreds of millions of lines of code.
And even after you've done all of this, all you've proven is that you didn't find a backdoor, not that there isn't one. If you want to be really sure, you'd need formal proof of everything, which is going to add at least a couple of thousand additional years to the whole exercise.
Basically, what you want is a pipe dream. You can't do this alone, you have to trust other people at some point. So then the question becomes: who do you trust ?
Definitely not a multinational corporation who has lied to it's users in the past, and has compromised their privacy and security.
I trust companies who put their money where their mouth is, and provide me access to inspect the systems that they have built.
Yes, you can't ever really know for sure if there is a back door or not. There's no way to prove a negative. But blindly trusting someone who is clearly hiding something seems naive at best.
I won't say that it is a good option, as it clearly isn't. But at least they give you some control of your data. Apple doesn't really give you any.
I just switched to an iPhone after 8 years of Android and I'm loving this aspect. And generally the phone seems to be more designed for humans compared to android. Also, the automatic do not disturb mode when I'm driving is great and I don't think I could go back to not having it. It's making me a better driver. Not that I was texting during driving, but not receiving notifications takes the phone out of my mind completely.
The issue with unlocked bootloader is that Huawei doesn't provide their images online for download. If you put custom rom on it there is no way to go back to stock.
Their devices seem to be incredible values compared to the US domestic market.
!) they led the pack, their brand has value (stores waiting line) 2) they push the price as high as it can be (cold but smart) 3) their products often have higher level of finish <= this is worth a lot, very often you have lower priced product with almost the same specs.. but a ton of 'almosts' create a shitty product. It's surprisingly costly to push a few percent above the pack.
I think it’s a lower margin than luxury watches or clothes, say, where you’re mostly paying for the label, and more comparable to something like luxury cars, where they clearly have to invest a lot in design, materials and manufacturing to make a decent product.
(Having said that, a quick google suggests Rolex’s margin is only about 30%, so maybe all these businesses are more similar than I realized.)
Apple's operating margin hovers around 22%, but their gross margin on iPhones is well over 50%. A lot of the difference is tax trickery - Apple funnel a large proportion of profits to offshore companies, which doesn't appear on their balance sheet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_erosion_and_profit_shifti...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/world/apple-taxes-jersey....
Compare to others, Google subsidise Android development with Ads from Search Engine, Huawei cover most of the R&D expense via their Industry leading telecom infrastructure market, Sony has lot of business to cover for their every losing money Mobile handset, Samsung Electronics, has NAND / DRAM and Semi Fab for their bottom line as well as being a group of larger Samsung.
It is not that Apple made lots of money covering the industry 90% of profits, it is that everyone else aren't making money at all. And in the long run, those who cant get enough cash flow will die out. In 2017 the top 5 brand manage 60% of market shares, nearly 10% higher then last year. We are looking at 65% this year, and very likely in a few years time, Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Vivo / OPPO, Xiaomi will cover 80%+ of market.
You pay a lot for a 500G or 1TB SSD from Apple, vastly more than competitors. I always assumed their margin was higher on the higher tiers.
There is a reason why those brands stay in the high end price brackets over decades. It's not an accident and it's not just a trend. Companies like that have more than one expertise - their core competence like watch making - and top notch marketing departments. That stuff costs a lot of money.
It's interesting to think that luxury brands still have such comparable margins. I guess one could say that marketing is their commodity.
The margins on flagship phones are substantial; most Chinese brands are happy to make fairly slim profits on hardware, or none at all in the case of Xiaomi. Most of the cost of the components in a flagship represents the R&D and infrastructure costs incurred at the cutting edge. Mid-priced handsets from Chinese brands use slightly older components, which aren't drastically lower in performance but are drastically cheaper.
There's an odd sort of trickle-down effect - people who buy $800 flagships are effectively subsidising the price of $200 mid-range handsets.
Edit: I went and looked it up, as far as the DoD is concerned, they're both verboten from usage in official DoD capacities it seems, and from being sold on military bases.
https://www.cnet.com/news/pentagon-reportedly-bans-sale-of-h...
Also notable you got two quick replies, that both left out the Huawei part of the ban. I'm curious if you also get downvotes. Probably just my imagination tho here.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/2/17310870/pentagon-ban-huaw...
1: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/huawei-cyber-secu...
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2110960/nsa-hacked-into-serv...
Does anyone have evidence that Huawei's "hardware has been found with advanced roots" ?
Yes, Huawei's products are known to be compromised [1]. Which shouldn't be surprising, given the founder's PLA roots.
In the end it doesn't really matter. Huawei delivers tremendous value for the money and so they are growing fast in Europe, Asia and Africa. The free market is stronger than even the most devoted propagandists.
I find samsung quality medium at best. They charge top of the line prices and have really bright phones and TVs... However their hardware has broken multiple times and their smart TVs are annoying slow for something you pay 1,000 USD for. (my grandpa bought said TV)
Then Apple, oh boy, either Apple has a marketing team that patrols HN or they have rabid fanboys. It is never good for consumers or developers to have proprietary hardware and development kits. I dont understand the relationship between Customer and Apple. Customer constantly gets screwed and they love it. I dont understand it, maybe its a comfort/reliable thing, but in 2018 use-ability seems pretty standard in every phone/app.
Maybe this is true because profit feeds itself, a company gets big and uses that to get bigger. The bigger the margin between revenue and profit, the more successful=more TV ads=more profit.
I find this a very frustrating situation for everyone who has Apple or Samsung products. But it looks like there is no end in sight, and Samsung has a very active Reddit marketing team that will downvote/destroy anything negative.
Your opinion that "it is never good for consumers or developers to have proprietary hardware and development kits" isn't much of an argument, it's just an opinion.
I recall once owning a Verizon phone where you had to both buy it outright and pay $10 per month to use the gps. Only partners were allowed to make apps so it was impossible for someone to just turn around and make a mapping app for less money.
You can just not provide updates to drivers ensuring that people are stuck buying new devices to use a newer OS.
You can make it increasingly hard to get official parts/services by using non standard parts and controlling access to such.
I don't think its some much an opinion as pretty obvious.
That has nothing to do with being “proprietary”
Apple is releasing OS 12 later this year for the iPhone 5S released in 2012. How many Android phones from 2015 let alone 2012 are still supported by the manufacturer?
To go even further back with proprietary operating systems, my 2009 era Dell laptop is currently running Windows 10.
All while Apple is putting out laptops that people don't want.
They dont know what they want.
BTW, all you have to do is look st their quarterly results and see what their volume of iPhone and iPad sales were year over year to see that neither is “sucking wind”.
By that standard so is literally every consumer product ever created. Take the comparison out of the picture though, and The iPad alone is a solid Fortune 500 company that didn’t even exist 9 years ago.
Huawei makes somewhat pricey, but boring mid-range products.
They sell so well around the world because they caught on consumer trends that are near invisible to most American marketing people, let alone SV based ones.
They target the rapidly growing global middle class.
There is mandatory bloatware that you can't remove for services that not many westerners know about. Even the microphone and cameras are usually crappy on these. I switched from using a xiaomi redmi 5 to an old Galaxy S4, and the S4 is so much better. Even though the specs are A LOT lower, the S4 had better Microphone processing, better Camera (although not as many mega pixels), and believe it or not less restrictive bloatware.
I realize all these products are made in China, I just want to tell a cautionary tale. The PRICE is right but I think the manufactures don't really understand QUALITY and CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE the way Apple does.
The cameras do tend to be worse than on a flagship, but what do you expect for 1/3 of the price? They have to save money somewhere. An older flagship can be good value for money, but you're getting a phone with several years of wear-and-tear rather than something brand new.
I also read that Huawei's new Mate Pro notebook is getting rave reviews, it comes with a 3:2 ratio screen, hate the wide screen format most manufactures use nowadays
This makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Apple puts almost no effort towards building low end phones with thin profit margins. It's a huge market that has to be filled by other vendors.
> BMO Capital Markets analyst Tim Long estimates that Apple accounted for 103.6% of smartphone industry operating profits in the third quarter. Its share is over 100% because other vendors lost money in the business, resulting in Apple having more smartphone profit than the industry netted overall. In the year-earlier period, Apple grabbed 90% of smartphone profits, Long said in a research report Thursday.
https://www.investors.com/news/technology/click/apple-iphone...
It makes even more sense when you realize it's volume that triggers anti-competitive laws.
http://knowledge.ckgsb.edu.cn/2017/03/27/china-business-stra...
they wanted to top the smartphone market, and just over a year later, here they are.
I put Nova launcher on it though.
Some people don't like the aggressive power saving though.
Lots of great items from Huawei, even if Xiaomi gets most of the press, and Huawei could be more "open"
https://freeswitch.org/confluence/display/FREESWITCH/mod_gsm...
Looks like it's about 20 usd/dongle - if that's with voice that's pretty cheap for setting up a national pop for incoming calls/sms (which are usually free) - for routing to voip.
I love Huawei products, because as you said it is very cheap. The alternatives are several hundreds to get a working gsm pop.