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Comment by archgrove | Hacker News Reader

"The overwhelming success of Apple’s iPhone 4S has finally hit a lull" - about 2 weeks before it's due to be replaced as the flagship iPhone. The iPhone purchasing cycle is very cyclical - huge sales after the new model is introduced, gradually declining up to the next model (which repeats the cycle). It would surprise me if the S3 hadn't taken the lead over the summer.

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Yeah, the article is nonsense.

The linked chart is still intersting though. I'm surprised that the Galaxy S2 is still #3 on T-Mobile.

I don't find the lede here unreasonable. However a couple of nitpicks:

The linked chart and article both imply these are only for sales at carrier stores. i.e. not including Apple Store sales which are significant and Samsung has no equivalent for.

Accurately weighting ranked charts with no numbers attached can be unreliable. Further the people on commission at carrier stores have an incentive in promoting devices that put more money in their pockets, making verbal sources like this even less reliable.

The chart is derived from nonsense too. The article is sourced from an "Analyst". Analyst is a fancy title for a pundit who is paid to have an opinion by some industry figure. In this case, most likely Samsung.

These analysts post "reports" that show the company is winning, and the company uses those reports to try and drum up sales.

Meanwhile the "analysts" send press releases to blogs who then report the results as if they were fact like this.

It is usually only years later (if ever) that the real results come out.

Only Apple reports its iPhone unit sales. Samsung, for instance, does not.

It wasn't until the lawsuit with Apple that they were forced to give up these numbers, and they were very anemic. (while at the time "analysts" were saying they were kicking butt.)

This is just hype being spread by a blog that is trying to make it look like android is "winning". None of the android makers report real sales numbers, including Amazon (so we don't know how many fires have been sold, whether it is a success or not.)

Keep telling yourself that. Yes, the industry plays number games, but when the multiple different indicators from many different analysts and direct numbers from retailers and actual usage numbers all point in the same direction, you can go ahead and call the trend.

The trend of many people with a deep vested interest is to lie?

It would explain why Jim Cramer is so consistently wrong.

Has this ever happened in previous years (before new iPhone releases)?

I'm not certain if a single handset has outsold the flagship iPhone previously (certainly Android as a whole has). However, I believe this is the first time a flagship quality handset from a competitor that is basically eating the Android market has come out in the few months preceding an iPhone.

This is true, mostly because only one company in this space lumps all their phones under one name even when they are on different carriers with different radios and firmwares... until the GSIII that is.

I could be wrong, but I remember reading that there is only 1 hardware model for the iPhone 4s. It supports both GSM and CDMA networks. The wikipedia article seems to support this claim: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_4S#Hardware

That is correct - all 4s devices have both CDMA and GSM support; the difference between the AT&T and Verizon "versions" is just one of activation, basically.

Yes. Every year.

Edit: archgrove speaks of the pre-release lull, not the competitor's sales figures. By 'this' MatthewPhillips can only be referring to the lull. If MatthewPhillips had meant SIII sales numbers, he should have clarified the antecedent of his pronoun. Ergo, sp332 is still correct that this is the first time a competitor has outsold iPhone and I am still correct that this lull happens every year - these facts are not mutually exclusive.

The 'this' I was referring to was the subject of the article (which was iPhone being outsold by a single handset).

Being correct shouldn't always be the goal in discussion, by the way.

A good friend of mine once told me:

Don't just defend your right to be wrong, EXERCISE IT!!

Truly words to live by.

This person says otherwise: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4479366

Not sure who to believe, anyone have some old links by chance?

Really?

Yes. Really.

Nope.

There is a lull before the announcement every year. That said, this is the first time a competitor has outsold them.

As long as the new iPhone will have a pretty tiny screen as the leaks say, the large screen Android phones will keep outselling it even more.

Agreed. It's occurred to me that the only way that Apple will retain me as an iPhone user is if they copy Samsung this time around.

iOS offers a great UX, as far as the system software is concerned, but I honestly think the iPhone 4/4s has the worst physical ergonomics of any phone I've owned. Everything they could have done wrong, they did wrong... and I won't lie: the fact that nobody but me ever says anything like that makes me wonder what's wrong with my judgment.

If the new iPhone actually turns out to be a taller (?!) version of the same package and sales don't drop off a cliff as a result, I'm in for some serious cognitive dissonance.

I'm having some serious cognitive dissonance over your comment. You're saying that if apple does not change the form factor of the best selling phone on the planet, sales will "drop off a cliff"? Solely on the basis of your personal screen size preference?

Yes. I am fairly sure that most people do not want a taller iPhone. They want a wider one, as evidenced by the success of the S3 and other larger smartphones... to say nothing of design principles based on aesthetic proportions that go all the way back to the ancient Greeks.

I have no idea what I would do with a taller iPhone 4S, other than complain about how I still have to spin it around to orient it properly 75% of the time when I pull it out of my pocket, and about how its display is still too narrow to be used safely for navigation and music playback in my car.

If I'm wrong, and there is a huge unmet market demand for an iPhone that is taller than a 4/4S but no wider, it will mean that I have no insight or understanding of the smartphone market as a whole, no product-design sensibility to speak of, and that I need to STFU and stop complaining. Nobody likes to be confronted with their own poor judgment, right?

I would like a taller iPhone because my only compliant about the size is how cramped the screen gets when I have the keyboard open or use apps that happen to have both a toolbar and a nav bar. Otherwise I think the physical size of the device is about perfect.

I disagree about the width/height. 640 on the iPhone vs. 720 on many newer Android phones. Not a huge difference there. Enough to notice certainly but it's the height that is far more dramatic. 960 on the iPhone vs. 1280 on many newer Android phones.

It's not the pixel resolution I'm complaining about, but the physical screen size. The Retina display has a much higher dot pitch than it really needs IMHO. Back off on the dot pitch, keep the resolution the same, and give me a bigger screen.

Interesting points. However I can see music playback work nicely: a music player in extra-wide landscape orientation would actually be quite similar to the backlit LCD screen of a classic car radio. You just need to way to firmly fix it somewhere in that orientation.

I agree that wouldn't really work for navigation, but for music it'd be kinda cool.

(note: I'm not actually thinking of buying an iPhone, going to get an Android, though probably not the latest model)

I'm not too excited over perspective of getting a murse to carry a phone. Taller iPhone still complies with a requirement for a phone to fit in the jeans pockets safely. And that seems to be a more thoughtful reasoning behind product design rather than "bigger = wider".

Funny enough it does seem as if Galaxy S3 is more popular with women here in Singapore. Might that be because they keep their gadgets in purses or I'm just wrong with my observation?

I feel the exact opposite. I had a Galaxy Nexus for a few months earlier this year. One of the reasons I switched back to my iPhone is that the screen is insanely too large for me.

The giant-sized phones have some appeal to some of the market, it's true, but for most buyers bigger is not better.

We're not talking about a wall-mounted display here. We're talking about something you hold in your hand, carry with you all the time, and hold to your face to talk. Bigger can be an issue for those one-hand-thumbing the device as well where they simply can't reach.

> The iPhone purchasing cycle is very cyclical

I agree. It's also very critical. What we need is a competitor to time-strategize and release a competitive handset at the same time as the iPhone flagship so that consumers don't have a clear choice. We keep giving Apple the all-clear to continue with it's vicious cycle.

Nokia and Motorola are announcing phones today; it's not clear when they'll be released but at least the marketing will be out there.

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