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Apple's Share of Smartphone Market Slips as Smartphones Outsell Feature Phones for First Time
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Looking for a low cost iPhone
I don't have an iPhone or even a feature phone. I have an old LG dumb phone and it is time to upgrade. The thing is I just can't justify $700 for an iPhone. (I buy my phones outright and go month to month. I will not sign a cell contract. Here in Canada at lest it's a fool's bargain.) Even $450 for an older model is more than I'm comfortable paying for but $300 would be something I could do. I really hope that Apple rolls out a low cost, plastic case / iPhone 4S guts model that falls in this price range. My three year old LG and iPod Touch are both on their last legs.
I don't have an iPhone or even a feature phone. I have an old LG dumb phone and it is time to upgrade. The thing is I just can't justify $700 for an iPhone. (I buy my phones outright and go month to month. I will not sign a cell contract. Here in Canada at lest it's a fool's bargain.) Even $450 for an older model is more than I'm comfortable paying for but $300 would be something I could do. I really hope that Apple rolls out a low cost, plastic case / iPhone 4S guts model that falls in this price range. My three year old LG and iPod Touch are both on their last legs.
Talking to yourself is OK when you're at home but doing it on an internet forum is just plain strange.
What? The iPhone has the only single chip LTE unit out there, meaning it uses half the power for wireless functions and the battery is fairly large with a screen that uses less power than most, most tests show longer web browsing and are about even in other tasks. Have you tried resetting the phone? iPhones are prone to battery draining glitches, mine had this problem.
Poor screen quality? The iPhone 5 has the best screen on the market, you clearly are very misinformed. Samsung's colors are so far off the spectrum they are nearly 50% off the mark. It's ironic they decided to use light blue for their background because that is one of the worst colors the phone reproduces, it's so far off I could tell just by glancing at the phone from 5 feet away. Not to mention that you can see all the individual pixels because Samsung uses a pen tile display that has half as many blue and red sub pixels, on a larger phone. The contrast and tone of the screen is ridiculously bad, the texture (visible pixels) is ridiculously bad, and the color is ridiculously bad.
Most uninformed consumers think that vivid colors are what makes a screen beautiful. I can tell you as a profesional graphic artist and someone who reviews screens and cameras that Samsung's screen is the bottom of the bottom. Yes it uses OLED technology, which is high end but that's like using gold plated thermal insulation on a Honda Civic. OLED improves black levels, black levels are something you worry about when you have everything else about the display right. Meaning after colors, white balance and tones. Samsung got every aspect of those wrong, AND used a pen tile display which makes OLED in this case like trying to add icing to a turd.
Now the Galaxy S4 display is somehing to write home about, the colors and tones are good, as is most everything else, and they are using such a high resolution that the pen tile starts to matter less. It still has sub par brightness outside of adaptive mode (uncalibrated mode), and the pen tile is still an issue, but overall it's not bad. The S3 display should never be considered anything but very poor though.
Personally I see the S3 as being a poor phone, especially considering it's graphics processor is 6 times slower than the rest of the market, the terrible screen, the cheap feel, and the simply bad display. The S4 isn't bad but it's still hugely overpriced, cheaply made and clunky, the HTC one is the best all around android device though.
Like you said the software matters, I had a ton of software issues with android with far too many completely broken apps and even viruses. It was unacceptable.
Here is Apple's biggest mistake. Overpricing their phones, not the new ones but old ones. If Apple dropped iPhone prices by $200 every year instead of $100 since iPhone 3GS Android may still have less than 50% global market share. Mr. Tim Cook no smartphone is good enough to loose only $100 per year. Imagine, iPhone 5 at $200, iPhone 4S at free on contract, and iPhone 4 at $250 off contract for prepaid. There would be no competition.
Yeah but where will Apple draw the line? Will they ever offer an $80 iPhone to sell in India or China?
I doubt it... so those sales will have to go to someone else.
Apple chooses not to enter the smartphone market at under $450... letting someone else take those low-end sales is not cannibalization.
All those phones in the "other" category are not stealing sales from Apple.
that magical Samsung warehouse with endless room for "shipped" phones must be getting bigger
Yap, gazillions of smartphones there. And for not selling them, every quarter they make more revenue
Samsung currently sell 37 different models of phone, with 3 different OSes, in the UK alone. It is probably not surprising that they lead the market if they have a phone for almost any preference or budget.
Apple's shipments are still increasing so I don't suppose that they are particularly worried, or feel that they need to compete in every market that Samsung does.
Apple's shipments are still increasing so I don't suppose that they are particularly worried, or feel that they need to compete in every market that Samsung does.
Their margins would suffer even more. Market share doesn't mean anything when you can't make a profit, just ask HTC, LG, Sony, etc.
iOS has almost zero to do with iPhone marketshare. If that were the case, iPad and iPad mini wouldn't be dominating as much as they do. Last time I checked they run iOS.
In the phone market, Apple really only competes on the high end and they make 80% of the entire mobile phone industry profits because of that. But pretty much everyone has a cell phone no matter how much money you make.
When it comes to tablets though, that's more of a luxury. People in developing countries on limited incomes aren't purchasing tablets. So the cheap low end tablets aren't finding much traction.
You can also see the play out in the U.S. (where people are generally more well off) where the iPhone is leading in marketshare and increasing its lead while Android continues to drop. It's all about money. People love iOS. It has the highest satisfaction rating among consumers which is pretty telling. So not sure why you think this has anything to do with it.
The only thing that could really increase Apple's market share around the world it to simply offer a cheaper phone. It doesn't have to have a bigger screen (the iPhone 4 is selling like gangbusters on Verizon), new redesigned OS, or any of the silly stuff clueless people on tech forums say.
It simply has to be cheaper. Point blank. Because at the end of the day, that's all getting more marketshare is about. Of course profits is a whole different matter though (and much more important), which is why Apple might not ever just make a cheap iPhone just to get more meaningless marketshare.
Yes they sell them eventually, but more than probably later than the period evaluated in these market studies.
Since the smartphone business is constantly expanding, it makes it so that Samsung's "future sales" numbers look bigger compared to Apple's "current sales" numbers.
Perhaps you would like to view these simple diagrams (I can direct you to the full article if you would like) dealing with the issue of iPhone 5's almost twofold battery life:
After that, you can read this entire, very comprehensive article on why the iPhone 5's display is better in almost every single measurable aspect than the Samsung Galaxy S3's.
I would like to inform you that I am VERY aware of the facts and ignore none of them.
Anyone can sacrifice margin for market share. That's easy. The point is to maximize profits and that's what Apple does, hence why Apple rakes in 70% of the profits in the entire mobile phone industry.
Market share matters only up to a point and that point depends on your business model. Apple is a hardware vendor - that's how it makes its money. For Google the thing that matters is market share because they need eyes on ads and to be able to get their hands on data. Those are both perfectly legitimate business strategies, of course.
Now, I know what people will say - if Apple fails to hold onto the largest market share the platform will lose dev support. Well, in reply to that I say: WWDC sold out in 90 seconds. Clearly the slide in market share isn't putting off the developers who still make far more money from iOS than Android.
Plus, iOS is bigger than iPhone. If you combine iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch sales you've got hundreds of millions of customers per year and these customers buy apps and surf the web, unlike Android owners who appear to do sod all with their tablets.
This proves "People wants bigger screen". Tim Cook failed.
As absurd as it is to anyone who gives a damn about build quality, reliability, user interface, and achieving great battery life at a given size point, this does prove that the smartphone market overwhelmingly does only want two things:
1. Bigger screen
2. Cheaper
Who can blame Samsung for raking in the mad bank by offering a phone that is substandard in virtually every way, but that achieve the new "innovation gold standard" of having a bigger screen and being cheaper? Sometimes you just have to play the cards you're dealt.
It does matter a lot what platform these first-time-cheap-smartphone-buyers get, since they will most likely get the same platform a couple years later when they upgrade to middle-price-range-smartphones and later high-price-range-smartphones.
More importantly, when the market share ratio (Android vs. iOS vs. Windows) is too high (say 85 vs. 10 vs. 5), it dictates the general support from the enormous numbers of small app developers and website administrators, which then translates into general user experiences. When that happens, a lot of users will have to stick with the majority even if they really really wish to have something from the minority.
iPhone 4 costed ~$180 to make when it first came out, 4s and 5 are ~$10 more sequentially. They can easily sell a 2-3 year old phone for $250 with Apple like margins with at least 35% profit.
But let's look at actual results.
Android has almost 3 times the market share of Apple's iPhone... yet web traffic from iPhones is way above Android... developers overall are more happy with iOS... and iPhone customers are extremely satisfied.
Apple might not have the "biggest number" on the market share chart... but I'm not seeing Android boast about anything except that market share number.
Great... Android has the most market share... now what are they doing with it?
I'm not seeing the problem by Apple not having the most market share.
I'm starting to believe that the headline "Android dominates smartphone market share" is nothing more than a headline.
There's no compelling story after that...
But Apple makes the most profits and that is what is most important to a consumer.
Shouldn't that be "But Apple makes the most profits and that is what is most important to a Apple shareholder"?
To me as a consumer, seing that Apple have much higher profit margins on their phones makes me think they are overpricing their phones compared to the competition. But as long as we are stupid enough to pay this overprice, who can blame them?
Shouldn't that be "But Apple makes the most profits and that is what is most important to a Apple shareholder"?
To me as a consumer, seing that Apple have much higher profit margins on their phones makes me think they are overpricing their phones compared to the competition. But as long as we are stupid enough to pay this overprice, who can blame them?
The smiles were to indicate that post was in jest.
In the UK, about £60 will get you a used 3GS on eBay, a bit more for 32GB, and you can get reasonable phone service for £10 a month. Not all-singing-and-dancing phone services, but something like 150 minutes, 500 MB, plenty if you had a dumb phone before.
I've seen people switch from Blackberry to the iPhone... and from Android to the iPhone.
I'm finding no proof that "once you use Android... you'll always use Android"
Plus... if you've only got less than $100 to spend on a smartphone... your only option is Android. It may be a case of "I could only afford this cheap phone... and it happens to run Android"
In other words... the platform wasn't the motivating factor... price was.
When they can finally afford a more expensive phone... they might be thrilled to switch to iOS.
Again... I'm seeing little evidence of people sticking with Android because that's all they know.