I just feel badly for Windows Phone and Blackberry.
As an iOS developer, I'm wondering at what point I should abandon ship and switch to Android development.
Gentlemen! sales so far:
iPad: 154
Android: 8
Android pirates: 2,462
I was referring to the period in the late Sixties when the Beatles were quite consciously competing with the Beach Boys. Think "Sgt Pepper" vs. "Pet Sounds" -- not "White Album" vs. "Kokomo".
As a consumer, I couldn't care less about how much profit Apple makes. Marketshare ensures that developers will continue to produce for the platform you're on (iOS).
Good comment. I feel the same way to a point, I haven't brought myself to switch to another phone but I am a bit bored and I realize that's a bit crazy as we are just talking about a phone, but with two-year contracts (ATT) and the phones not changing much on the in-between years, i.e. S versions, it does get a bit stale, especially considering how much we use our phones every day.
Also, why isn't Android considered Linux?
The same reason why iOS isn't considered Unix.
As a consumer, I couldn't care less about how much profit Apple makes. Marketshare ensures that developers will continue to produce for the platform you're on (iOS). The more marketshare they lose, the more likely things will come out sooner or exclusively on other platforms. If your platform/device can't do the latest and the greatest, that also affects mindshare.
Marketshare has NOTHING to do with being able to make the best phone. The best ways to do that? High profit is number one. And honestly a LOWER production run. Cutting edge technology is really difficult to get 100M into production. It'd be much easier to only get say 20M into production.I want the iPhone to remain the best phone out there. Apple has the knowhow to do this. It seems like their business model is holding them back. Their marketshare continues to drop, but they're making money that's apparently more important to them than marketshare. We'll see what iOS 7 does to help this, but I agree with others that it doesn't seem like that much of a game-changer.
Yes, that's what they could do if they cared about marketshare. But they don't. ANY companies number 1 goal is profit, profit, and profit. Yeah, we as consumers want cheap stuff. But so what.One way to increase marketshare (especially with a brand as established as the iPhone) is to lower prices. Apple already has an obscene amount of money just sitting there. If they care about marketshare, they will lower prices of their iDevices, or at least offer entry-level ones at lower prices. They're no longer the only serious contender in town, and most people will buy other products if they're comparable but cheaper.
You still haven't convinced me that marketshare is more important than profit. YOU may want more people to have iPhones to make yourself feel better about your purchase.Yes, they will go from getting a ridiculous amount of profit to just a very high profit margin. But having enough money is not even close to a problem Apple has right now. I think that marketshare, by making sure they match or surpass features of the competitors and/or making prices lower, will accomplish want consumers want. Hopefully someone at Apple will remember that money isn't the only thing that's important to success.
Strange isn't it how history repeats and Apple does not learn.
Apple computers could be on almost everyone's desk and Apple computers could run the work, in the same way PC's do now if Apple did what Microsoft did.
But no, they know better, and perhaps we are going to see a repeat performance with mobile phones.
Android on a vast sea of handsets by all the very top manufacturers in the world, even from the people who design and make the bits that go into iPhones, and yet Apple won't let go of iOS.
I'd love to see 10 or 20 years from now.
I'm someone, like many apparently, who has dropped iOS for Android and hasn't looked back.
1) The fact taht company stop reporting their sales have nothing to do with these shipped metrics. These are still accurate. Plus Apple reports these same Ship-through metrics when they report their sales. I'm not sure how they handle it with Apple store... but they report shipped to BB/AT&T/etc as a "sale" even though it's only actually "shipped". So it's still a mostly apples to apples comparison
2) Well, I can't speak knowledgably on this. You may be right, but I thought I would have heard about this if it were the case.
The problem Apple have is they are greedy. They charge massively over the odds for things. Take the imac for example. They charge twice the price for a ssd hard drive. They charge more like 3-4 times the price for memory upgrades. They are sitting on billions of pounds. Something tells me the profit margins are waaaaaay too high and this is why people are abandoning ship. Im leaving apple today actually , yes everything works nicely together but its not perfect and with the mac pro or high end imac the only option for me , i can build a PC for less than half with a better spec.
Greed!!!
and now hardly anyone uses a computer on a desk and uses MacBookAirs, iPads and IPhones.
Your logic is really bad.
Competition is healthy for everyone. Not only the consumer: also the producers. It keeps everyone on top of their game. And it serves as many different types of consumers as possible.
Remember The Beach Boys vs The Beatles in the late sixties? Not to compare Android to either of those bands (!), but the competition spurred both to greater and greater heights of innovation -- and brought immeasurable happiness for those who bought their records.
Way crazier numbers than I thought. Profits are great, but low user numbers will severely hurt Apple. Most of the huge apps (Facebook, Instagram, banking apps, foursquare, etc) are all free. They will all go Android first. Also monetizing is catching up on the Android side. I just can't see a way for Apple to turn this around.
Huh. I figured developers tend to target the platform where they make more money.
Market share is only important in context. Apple currently enjoys all the benefits of being in first place even though it is in second place. When that changes, I will be concerned as a consumer.
It would be nice if IDC split the report into market segments. If there were a high-end, mid-range and low-end chart all of this "Apple is doomed, I am going to start developing for Android" nonsense will end.
It is rather clear that Apple is holding its own in the high-end, gaining in the mid-range, and non-existant in the fast growing low-end. Why people consider that four $50 phones sold to people in China are somehow more meaningful than selling one $650 iPhone 5 is beyond me.