Apple becomes top phone maker by profits (beating Nokia, etc)
reuters.com
reuters.com
If anyone had predicted, when the iPhone was announced, that within 3 years Apple would be making the largest profits of any phone-maker, they would have been laughed out of the room.
1. By locking in with a&tt they got concessions that Verizon was not willing to grant, which must have had some effect on the phone's popularity. (Visual voice mail, no carrier mark on the phone, a very good subsidy (though, initially, no subsidy)...)
2. By only targeting GSM, they drastically simplified the engineering required for the device. The recent comments from an anonymous engineer on the Pink project made it clear that targeting both GSM and CDMA was a huge mistake for them. My understanding is that the two radios are not simply interchangeable. Building an iPhone for both would have required coming up with two radically different internal designs. This would have required engineering hours which would likely have delayed the phone. (or the 3g, or the 3gs) And that delay would naturally have cost market share.
So, it is pretty hard to say what would be different if Apple had a phone that ran on other carriers. And, it is a two way street, it sure doesn't look like Verizon plans on having the iPhone any time soon.
I can understand finding faults with Nokia for not being able to compete effectively against iPhone. But then which other mobile maker is right now able to do that. iPhone is pretty much a new product category. And Apple gets consumers and software like few others.
But I cannot understand finding faults with the choice of phones Nokia provides.
Not to mention having dozens of models shows a lack of focus.
Maybe I should have clarified what I like about choice in phones that Nokia or others provide. One aspect of choice which I like is the different pricing options. The mobile phones are needed by people all over the world with varying purchasing powers. Everybody cannot or does not want to afford the total cost of ownership of iPhone or even Nokia N97 or Droid. But there are billions who want to make phone calls.
The local Nokia website allows me to choose a phone by features (e.g: bar, slide, etc; should it have bluetooth, wifi, GPS, etc). This -again - is typical of every phone manufacturer on this planet that has more than three models to sell.
Even Apple faced a version of this problem back when they only made Macs. For a few years, just before Jobs' return, the marketing for Mac models was atrocious. Dozens of Power Macs and Performas, and 3 different lines of laptops, each with a weird 3-4 digit number to denote one model from another. One of Jobs' first "fixes" was paring down Apple's product line down to the four square product matrix that's been a staple of his keynotes since then.
You'd have to imagine this makes Apple's position a bit tenuous.
Apple focuses on quality, and charges decently for what they offer, I bought this computer a year ago, and it's still performing splendidly, and I expect it to continue for a long while. Meanwhile, the people I know who are looking for computers are thinking more and more about the low-end Macs, because while they're expensive, they're not computers you'll have to replace any time soon. If you only have a little money, you make sure it goes to something really good instead of to waste.
Apple's position is only tenuous if you think another company can make a better phone and price it more cheaply. I think neither will happen.
A phone with worse camera, less memory, slower processor, more expensive etc. than the rivals, from Apple I think could still outsell them, because of the Apple ecosystem. Oh wait... ;)
I had one phone that would always call people from my pocket because it had these 2 buttons on the side that if pressed at the same time, would activate voice dialing, and it would pick up random words from conversation and call whoever it thought you said. That made for some awkward moments. Oh, and there was no way to disable that "feature".
When you are choosing between $79 anything phone + 2yr contract, or a $199 iPhone + 2yr contract, it's kind of a no-brainer, unless you want a cheap phone for some reason, like you happen to be really accident prone.
Anyway, that is not my experience at all with Nokia. They are very popular here in Europe because there is no carrier lock-in and anyone can get any phone that they want. This means that the best phones tend to win, not the ones that are the most subsidized. The high-end Nokia series are N (multimedia) and E (business).
Your two-button key combination is either a bug, or you didn't lock your keypad.
Before I got my iPhone, I considered Nokias to be the best. In Europe the situation is different. You guys get way better phones than we do. I lived in France for a while and when I came back to the US, all the phones I could buy here looked 5 years old.
Our contracts aren't tied to a specific phone (except for the iPhone), so if you lose your phone you can replace it with just about anything that would work with that carrier. I have a friend who loses his phone every few months and he usually buys a cheap replacement on eBay.
what I was trying to say was that AT&T has a special iPhone contract that is separate from their regular contracts, in that it comes with a $30/month data plan.