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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

Apple is already in this position globally and has never been a majority even in the US. I think the difference is that the phone market is MUCH bigger, and combined with fragmentation issues across Android, that makes iPhone still a really attractive developer target.

But also remember that Apple has never cared about dominating market share. They think of themselves like BMW or similar, they don’t care that not everyone buys Apple, they just want to make the “best” devices and to have happy customers.

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Apple has always cared about dominating market share. It gives them extreme negotiation power when dealing with suppliers, giving them a good price and quality. Apple usually is the first to choose the best quality components from dealers and the rest of manufacturers have to live with the left overs.

In fact, Apple has dominated the portable music player for a long time.

They also dominate the laptops market, making the biggest seller models of all the world. They make them in Aluminum(extremely expensive to make for small productions) and the big quantity they sell make extremely hard for others to compete.

They dominate the smartphones also. Other manufacturers have more market share but divided in lots of models, and several manufacturers.

The Ipads had been selling fro hundreds of millions per year. There is no sophisticated product in the world that have been sold at those massive numbers in the entire history of mankind.

This is something that Steve Jobs understood very well. The current CEO was the boss of manufacturing for a long time, so he knows it.

But if they continue raising prices, they will lose the mass production.

From what I found around 160 mln laptops were sold last year. Apple sold around 18 mln, in other words around 11%. HP, Lenovo and Dell sold each around 2 to 3.5 times that. Can you say then that Apple dominates laptop market? Rather that they are a big player.

I understand that you said that they sold the most per a model. But does it count all that much when others sell PC hardware in such a big quantities? They sell more models, but they likely share many many parts.

> There is no sophisticated product in the world that have been sold at those massive numbers

PC sales peaked in 2011 at 365 million units.

They are still over 200 million per year.

> They are still over 200 million per year.

The argument, which you may be able to but have not refuted, is that “PC sales” is not a singular product or even a singular form factor like the iPad.

> Apple has always cared about dominating market share.

Apple dominates profits, but not market share. Occasionally, this happens to drive their competitors out of the market, as is what happened with iPod, iPad, and Apple Watch; however, Mac and iPhone, while quite profitable, are not even close to "dominating" the market.

> The Ipads had been selling fro hundreds of millions per year.

This is not true at all. Apple sells significantly fewer than a hundred million iPads each year.

> Apple sells significantly fewer than a hundred million iPads each year.

For those curious, here's their non computer sales by year (peak iPad was 2013, with 71 million units).

2002: 381k iPods | 2003: 939k iPods | 2004: 4.4m iPods | 2005: 22.5m iPods | 2006: 39.4m iPods

2007: 51.6m iPods, 1.4m iPhones | 2008: 54.8m iPods, 11.6m iPhones | 2009: 54.1m iPods, 20.7m iPhones

2010: 50.3m iPods, 40m iPhones, 7.5m iPads | 2011: 42.6m iPods, 72.3m iPhones, 32.3m iPads | 2012: 35m iPods, 125m iPhones, 58.3m iPads | 2013: 26m iPods, 150m iPhones, 71m iPads | 2014: 14m iPods, 169m iPhones, 68m iPads

2015: 231m iPhones, 54m iPads | 2016: 211m iPhones, 45.5m iPads | 2017: 216m iPhones, 43.7m iPads | 2018: 217m iPhones, 43.5m iPads

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