Why Apple can’t be too worried about Android | Hacker News Reader

Why Apple can’t be too worried about Android

roughlydrafted.com

11 pointskgarten9 comments

    That effort in “market share voodoo,” being propagated by Garner and other
    corporate data flack firms, desperately attempts to hide the failure of 
    actual Android licensees, from Samsung’s disappointing profits to 
    the shaky position of Motorola and Sony Ericsson.

Hmm. Why did their list not include HTC, who make $65 profit per unit, mostly on Android phones? (cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2172598) It's quite true that most Android mfers are making wafer-thin wargins or even small losses, but ignoring the mfer who is raking it in?

Cherry-picking piece, lots of analytic problems, not really worth reading.

You're misreading that HTC stat, though it's understandable as it appears to be designed to be misread.

The utterly unsurprising fact that it demonstrates is that companies who only make smartphones, make more per any-kind-of-phone that they sell than companies that also sell millions of cheap dumbphones. What numbers would you get if you split Samsung and Nokia's smartphone business from their massive dumbphone businesses? Apparently that number isn't interesting.

Why don't we throw in Apple's lower-priced, lower-margin iPod nanos and shuffles and see if we can guess what kind of entirely unexpected, magical effect that might have on their profit per device? (Not that being in that business is any way bad for Apple, nor are they harmed by the profit or name recognition it generates.)

As for Mr Dilger's contention about Android vendors struggling: most folk seem to agree that Android saved Motorola. They may not be doing very well, but the fact that they are doing anything is an improvement.

ZTE and Huwai are two big winners (triple digit growth) from Android that he doesn't mention. They're big telecom firms more famous for being OEMs but they're getting into the branded smartphone game thanks to Android. (Oh and the growth figures often don't count the carrier branded Android handsets they also produce). They may be no-names now but so was HTC a few years ago, yet last year they won both smartphone of the year and tech brand of the year in the UK (again very much thanks to Android), two awards you would expect Apple to be walking away with.

Samsung are doing fine in smartphones. In the last 6 months they've overtaken HTC in sales, with devices of the same or higher calibre and price, and the advantage that the components are all Samsung made too.

Who does that leave? Sony Ericsson who say they were surprised by the high level of competition from other Android vendors and vow to up their game in response. Oh and LG who seem to be in a similar predicament and have strong home market competition from Samsung especially.

If the vast majority (all but one according your post--and I have no data to refute that claim) falls within the set and he leaves out the one--is that cherry-picking or simply discarding an outlier? I'd argue it's the latter.

Considering that on the other side of the argument is a single data point, Apple, I can't see how leaving out even a single company producing Android products makes sense.

Furthermore, I don't understand why so many people appear to have a desperate need to try to paint Apple as dominant and unable to fail. Wether there are more Apple handsets or Android handsets, the fact that you can even make the comparison clearly shows that Apple is no where close to dominant in the mobile market.

Everyone also forgets that RIM still has a large market share, despite their OS lagging Android and iOS in features. The market is anyones game at this point and we should all be happy for the competition that exists. That competition will create cheaper and better products for us all.

Which competitor should a front-running company be most worried about? The bunch of companies who are having trouble making their product profitable, or the next most profitable company in the industry?

The article purports to explain why Apple has nothing to worry about from Android mfers. Discarding this "outlier" certainly makes that task easier.

Gosh, I'm an Apple fanboy with the best of 'em, but I can't help reading Dilger like an autistic kid writing from his parents' basement: yes, much of what he's saying might be true (can't fact-check it all), but the spitefulness, anger and slant is so strong it's almost unreadable.

Why not just present the facts as you see 'em, and, if you're right, people will give you due respect for your vision.

exactly

ITT: mac4lifer loves mac

/not exactly breaking news

You know, often I see these long speeches, always in retrospect about how one technology won over the other with a myriad of reasons.

In almost all of these cases, the winners had one thing in common: They had better user interfaces. Not quality, not specifications, but user interface.

All the google vs altavista, facebook vs myspace, iphone vs android and so on, always seem to end up with the simpler and more effective user interface winning. The post-analysis always points to a huge confluence of things happening, but for now I'll stick to my simple rule:

Software that is easier to use and gives the user what he wants faster (and has the same feature-set and price) than another equivalent software will always become more popular, given enough time.

I almost agree about google. Yes google had a very very simple interface but surely pagerank must have played some part in its success. A page with a single text field doing altavista like search would not have gone far right?

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