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Comment by freshyill | Hacker News Reader

Remember, Apple needs to target the low end to succeed in China. They need to put out the crappiest, cheapest phone they possibly can otherwise Samsung and Xiaomi will eat their lunch.

Edit: Obvious sarcasm is apparently not obvious enough.

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Does Apple care about beating crappy Samsungs in market share? Probably not. There will always be a market for low end/ cheap/ burner phones. There's little room for margins, and those customers don't buy into the ecosystem as much. Comparing ecosystem revenue per user, Apple's doing fine. They sell a top-end phone to people that will pay a premium, and continue to buy apps and media. It's kind of like telling BMW that they need to compete with Kia.

Sure, more market share would be nice, but it's not necessary. If iPhone's are seen as a luxury item/ status symbol, then there's little advertising needed. Plus, Apple could still sell iPhone 4s and 5s to compete with lower end. (I think)

I know you said sarcasm, but Apple is selling the last gen iphones at a competitive price against Samsung mid range in India.

For example: the iPhone 4S, 5c and 5s are 17,500 and 23,000 37500 Indian Rupees respectively. Compare that to the Galaxy S4 at ~26000 grand 2 at 17000, galaxy note 3 at 34000.

Atleast in India, the last gen Apple phones seem to be priced competitively with the last gen Samsung phones. This is just comparing the lowest models, and not getting into the specs, ofcourse.

Are you sure you didn't mix up the model numbers? These sites [0][1] are saying it's the iPhone 5c that's 37500 Indian Rupees, which is 609 USD. In comparison, Walmart is offering the 5c, contract-free, at $549.[2]

[0] http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/iphone-5c-8gb-variant-l...

[1] http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/priced-at-rs-37500-w...

[2] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2428171,00.asp

They don't seem to be doing too badly in China. (Armchair opinion but: I think devaluing their brand in China would be the worst thing they could do.)

"74.5 million iPhones, 46% growth over last year. Unit sales up 44% in US, up 97% in BRIC countries. Sales doubled yoy in China, Brazil and Singapore."

and

"Performance of Greater China was particularly impressive with revenue up 70%."

Apple doesn't need to target the low end. They seem to be doing just fine, making the largest quarterly profit in history by not indulging in a race to bottom in search of market share.

Do you see these numbers? Why would Apple care about low-end, low margin sales in China?

They also need to open source iOS (also sarcasm)

And a netbook.

This made me laugh because I remember netbooks being a fad where everyone had one and tried working on an underpowered Atom CPU with a tiny battery, a tiny low-res screen running IE under XP with a billion browser toolbars installed, reducing their visible browser space to about 20px at the bottom. Oh the sad memories.

Strangely, the MacBook Air is essentially a Netbook, just better made and not in the "race to the bottom" of both price and quality.

Just replying to myself as I have been downvoted with no replies (how annoying that is), but I wanted to stress that I think the MacBook Air is a GREAT machine and only compared it to Netbooks because of its small convenient form factor, which the netbook was trying to accomplish, albeit with limited success. I had an Acer Aspire One and enjoyed using it (I even made it a Hackintosh and it ran OSX 10.6 but kinda slowly, although with accelerated graphics thanks to the Intel inside it) but I am not under any illusion that netbooks were a fad. I was surprised they did so well and how effectively Intel stole the market overnight that Via should have had with their EPIA boards!

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