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Comment by JonFish85 | Hacker News Reader

100,000 phones a week? Big deal. Just over 5 million a year. If we're comparing to Apple, Apple sold 125M last year [1].

And 52 different version numbers. Support must be a nightmare, if it even exists outside of just "we'll give you next week's version".

These must be pretty minor changes if they're happening every week. How many of them are being passed through rigorous QA? I'm curious how many of the batches are just tossed due to a small error?

And man, would it suck to order a phone and then have it be obsolete within a couple of days of having it be delivered.

[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57540705-37/apples-fiscal-...

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What kind of warped reality do you live in that only selling 5 million units a year while updating the hardware every week is "no big deal"?

Regarding rapid obsolescence, this seems to work very well in Asian markets. They typically release a far greater number of devices, because there is a strong market for second hand phones, and many people like to keep switching to the latest thing.

The 5 million by itself is fine. It's the comparison to Apple that seems out of whack to me. The article doesn't compare them to a startup, it compares them to one of the biggest companies in the world. If you do that, you invite criticism on the comparison, which is what I gave.

Xiaomi is 3.5 years old, currently only sells in China and in Chinese market it has already overtaken Apple in market share.

I think comparing them to Apple on the basis of sold phones in China is justified.

Looking into my crystal ball, I further think that their strategy is so brilliant and their execution is so good that we're witnessing the rise of a new giant.

Give it 5 years and they'll be in the same league as Apple and Samsung on a world-wide basis, not just in China.

Do you seriously think that Xiaomi makes the kind of changes that Apple makes to their products annually on a weekly basis?

Do you seriously think they would have to before it's worth being impressed over?

It's impressive if it is good for the customers, but the comparison with Apple is uninformative linkbait.

Seconding the rapid obsolescence point about Asian markets. The CEO of one of the leading mobile phone retail chains (440+ stores) in India (3rd largest global smartphone market after China and the US, might be second largest very soon) told me consumers are changing phones every 9 months on an average.

This is the mass market he's referring to, not the folks who're spending $600-800 on the latest iPhones or Galaxy Notes.

Still, makes me feel positively ancient given I used my Nexus One for nearly 3 years before moving to the Nexus 4.

A number of people here all seem to be making the same mistaken assumption.

Just because they refresh their line of phones in batches of 100,000 on a weekly basis does _not_ imply that each change takes only a week to implement. Changes probably land when they're done, like the Linux kernel, no?

More competition is a good thing. Different ways of doing things is good - let's wish them well.

> 100,000 phones a week? Big deal. Just over 5 million a year.

Considering the fact they managed to created that market in three years, I'd say it's quite a big deal.

Xiaomi are China-only at the moment, whereas Apple are global. In the article, they say Xiaomi have a higher market share within China than Apple, so I would say they're doing very well indeed, especially considering that the company was only founded in 2010. That's the same year that the iPhone 4 was released.

I'm also wondering how you get regulatory approval. It doesn't take a lot of change to trigger a recertification with the FCC.

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