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Apple Becomes Largest U.S.-Based Mobile Phone Manufacturer
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my wife used to get a new free cell from verizon every 2 years. now we'll be getting new iphones every 2 years. why pay for an old phone. not like AT&T is going to give us a discount for a paid off phone.
my wife's 3G will go to our son to be used as an iPod Touch when he gets the new one this summer. next year my 3GS will be sold or i'll upgrade our son's 3G with it and get rid of the 3G. with another child on the way we'll soon have 2 iphones in use and 2 as iPod's for the kids
it's not like the old days when an old cell was junked in the trash or given to the battered women's charity
It is also important to note that there is a huge price difference in the phones compared in this chart. The first iPhone was $599 while the Droid was $199 (to compete with the current iPhone price).
+2
Yeah, let's cut the crap. If Apple (or Motorola) wanted to be a US manufacturer they could pay Americans to build their products. But they don't, so feel free to leave out all the warm and fuzzy propaganda please.
Exactly, if the graph wasn't just Motorola propaganda, it would have plotted the gross sales figures.
What is wrong with this equation?
Most electronics -> American Company, parts or whole product made or assembled in Japan, China, Taiwan.
Ford, GM -> American Company, parts made in Japan but imported into US for sales.
Honda, Toyota -> Japanese Company, cars assembled in America
Hyundai -> Korean Company, cars assembled in America
We ship most of our jobs overseas because of "cheap labor" and then pay an import tax. I think that is funny, since the same countries we ship jobs to are outsourcing to us. Do they think we are cheap labor? or do they know that since it is assembled in America, they can skirt an importation tax?
May be something to research........
Edit - oh and there was a research done a while back (with auto companies like Ford who make American cars, and own a Japanese auto maker (Mazda). With these car companies, both cars were pretty much identical, and made with the same parts (and came from the same assembly plant). the american label went on one, and the Japanese label went on the other - but the Japanese model sold more, because people associated Japanese with reliability and american cars as junk.
And it's interesting to recall that at the time a lot of people thought he was nuts. One percent looked like an absurdly huge number for Apple to grab, since they were the new kid on the block. But Apple upended the industry, and now the majority of smart phones are attempting to copy them.
And THAT is the reason Apple only sold 1 million in the first 74 days. Guess how many Droids would have sold in 74 days at $599...
Let's better compare the first 74 days of the 3G versus the Droid, shall we?
Oh, wait the iPhone 3G, sold 1 million on the FIRST weekend... Oh you say that number included international orders.. OK I'll bite. The first weekend was 252,000 sold in the US.
Well according to TGDaily, AT&T activated 1.9 million iPhones in the quarter the iPhone 3G launched.
According to AT&T, it activiated 3.2 million iPhones during the quarter of the launch of the 3GS.
Hmmmmm.... I wonder who has better sales....
You could ask the same for almost any large U.S. company. That being said, there is no merit in that comment.
I can guarantee you, you will NOT be getting a FREE iPhone every 2 years...even every 10 years!
The free ones that most carriers provide...either at the beginning of your contract or when your contract ends and they really want to keep you, are perfectly fine for people who want to make calls (not web surfing or lots of texting). You'd be surprised that there are a LOT of people in that category.
-Eric
I think the lower-end Japanese cars are assembled in the U.S. was a political decision. (the Japanese were very closed, but politically, it looked bad to just export to the US, while not giving back to the economy that was buying the products - esp when the Japanese economy was doing very very well at one time). Over time, I think, certain states began offering 'incentives' to keep jobs.
The higher-end models, I believe are still made in Japan.
A lot of Toyota parts are not made in Japan, I believe, they outsource them globally as well, keeping only the precision parts in Japan.
P.
The parent company.
Believe me: the money is NOT in the mass production fabrication, it is in the patent/development/etc.
I can guarantee you, you will NOT be getting a FREE iPhone every 2 years...even every 10 years!
The free ones that most carriers provide...either at the beginning of your contract or when your contract ends and they really want to keep you, are perfectly fine for people who want to make calls (not web surfing or lots of texting). You'd be surprised that there are a LOT of people in that category.
-Eric
at this point you can buy a refurb iphone for $49 every 2 years. they might give the 3G away for free staring this June, but if they have the 3GS refurb for $49 in a few months it's still not that big a deal
smart phones are becoming a commodity and either this year or next you will see nice ones being given away for free without a BOGO deal
No apple sells 1 phone, one model, memory size does not equal different phones.
You can only buy now 3gs phone so its just one, still one phone so many sales, what does it say about what a part of the population wants when it comes to a phone.
Now with the ipad I guess that could be considered 2 different systems, but I don't see the iphone in the same way.
They're the #1 American phone supplier, not the #1 phone supplier in America. Several companies that supply phones in America supply more than Apple does.
This is mostly about shipping. Shipping a whole car to the U.S. is relatively wasteful, because you end up paying to transport the empty space inside the car. If you manufacture the different pieces all over the world and ship them to a U.S. plant, your shipping is more efficient and less expensive on a per-car basis. Since shipping a car costs the same (generally) regardless of whether it's a cheap car or an expensive one, the larger margin on more expensive cars can absorb the cost of shipping complete cars to the U.S. Whereas the much smaller margins on cheaper cars are helped by minimizing those shipping costs.
(And the U.S./Canadian auto manufacturers still buy a lot of their parts from U.S./Canadian suppliers.)
Do you want the production or the IP? It's hard to steal a factory.
anyone can manufacture anything. the parts are all COTS.
designing a product like the iphone takes engineering talent. MS had it in the 1990's and then Google got most of the talent in the early part of this decade. Apple grabbed the wireless talent a few years ago.
the next MS, Apple or Google will grab the talent in a few years
Which is great until some third world country makes a clone. We all know about that one though.
and Acura's are still made in Ohio right next to their Accord brothers
my Toyota Matrix that i got rid of last year had more US parts than the Pontiac Vibe
Does anyone really want a free phone, I had a few and they where so bad, but hey if your phone is just a phone, my iphone is everything but a phone for the most part, the phone is an afterthought to me.
go read jack welch's books. happens all the time. you just have to be one step ahead of the commoditization curve and get into the new thing.
when he became CEO, GE used to make clothes irons. he dumped all the businesses that were under risk of being commoditized and look at GE now