Like stated above, HTC were short of AMOLEDs (e.g. Desire HD). Samsung ones. Afaik Apple use LG IPS LCD panels. Example seems way off base. Not your fault though, but still.
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How Apple Uses its Supply Chain as a Strategic Weapon
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Like stated above, HTC were short of AMOLEDs (e.g. Desire HD). Samsung ones. Afaik Apple use LG IPS LCD panels. Example seems way off base. Not your fault though, but still.
The first time, it could be some "beating to the punch". But the fact that the story has repeated a number of times says something.
Not really - if the relationship is amicable and makes sense - then once the initial deal is struck - maintenance of that deal is easy. In other words - if both sides are happy with the arrangement - there's little reason to seek elsewhere.
Read my post again. That is what I wrote. I'm not presuming I have any inside knowledge but Apple beat HTC. If HTC had better foresight they could have gotten in before Apple. The only exception I can think of is if there were some untoward shenanigans and someone tipped Apple off about HTC or another company about to make a buy. But I don't think that was the case. So bottom line: when you doze off you get beaten to the punch. That's part of the competitive market.
You are confusing "anti-competitor" and "anti-competitive". Every company is supposed to try to do things better than competitors and to get into a better position. If Apple orders a large number of parts, and the manufacturer then cannot build enough for someone else, that's competition. Apple's competitors could have ordered first, right? If they didn't, that's their fault.
"Anti-competitive" is a situation where you prevent others from competing. Not prevent them from beating you, and being better than you, but from competing.
Or if HTC had contracts with some parts supplier, and Apple paid the supplier to break its contract instead. That would be anti-competitive. If a supplier builds 5 million parts a month, and Apple orders 5 million a month, that is not anti-competitive. If HTC puts in an order, the supplier can just build more capacity. If Apple paid that supplier to not add any capacity, or to not sell to HTC, that would be anti-competitive.
"Bad for competitors" is not the same as "bad for competition". When a baseball team practices very hard, that is bad for their competitors, but good for competition.
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yes, it says HTC should build the same phone and sell it on all the carriers. not the idiocy they do now where the customize their 4.3" design and sell slightly different phones under different names
You know, I think they can and can't.
There are great designers the world over, with great ideas. I bet some of them work at Microsoft, Dell and the rest. But the difference is who's approving their designs. When Steve Jobs was at the helm at Apple, he had great taste and approved great designs. Most of these top guys at other companies have terrible taste though and I'd be willing to bet that a lot of great designers were getting paid but their work was getting put through the ringer and watered down or dismissed outright.
I really love the irony of this story though; being obsessive control freaks and controlling the software, hardware and not licensing out its OS was the big knock on Apple for years. But in the end, it was really the winning strategy. Once customers got over the novelty of having a thousand third-party hardware and software guys churning out a lot of products and choices, they realized most of those choices were beyond mediocre (hello Google of 2011).
blah blah blah the iphone 4s has to many damn issues so apple need to refocus their energy i think...
I have an idea. Congress should pass a law known as the "Goliath Act." What they should tell Apple is as follows: "Apple, you're making too much money. You have too much cash. In the interest of promoting competition, we have come up with a set of regulations for you.
1. 99% of your $81 billion cash reserves shall be seized and placed in a special fund that competitors will be free to tap at any time
2. Each quarter, 99% of the cash you earn shall be placed in the same fund that competitors shall be free to tap at any time.
3. You shall be required to order up to 1 million of each component that you need for your products. Of the components you order 95% of the orders of each component shall be donated to competitors at no cost whatsoever.
4. You shall be forced to license Mac OS X and no restrictions shall be placed on the hardware.
6. You are required to license iOS. RIM shall have the exclusive right to build iOS devices. No input by Jonathan Ive is permitted.
7. HTC, RIM, Samsung, and any other competitor shall be allowed unfettered access to your campus. They are permitted to sit in on any company meetings. They are free to demand any information at any time."
Hope this satisfies your desire to promote competition.
Hoarding would be losing money.
Given the shortages of iPhones and iPads in the past, it seems like they're buying as much as possible, building as much as possible, and still not meeting demand.
For them for to be hoarding, they'd have to be selling less product compared to demand AND at the same time sitting on parts that are losing value over time. It'd simply be suicidal.
If they order twice as many screen as other parts - they can still be making as many as they CAN and as fast as possible given the amount of parts they have. And to shut out the competition - I wouldn't put it past any company - let alone Apple who can afford a little "waste"
Anything's possible with a company the size of Apple. I still think they keep the supply low intentionally to keep the demand and free publicity high. They did this with the iPad 2. They didn't have any to sell in their own stores, yet they added Walmart, Target, Radio Shack, etc as retailers. And launched it in other countries around the world with the same shortages. Coincidence? I don't think so.
Supply of product low is intentional for publicity? Conspiracy theory.
What to know why supply is low? Because producing Apple's devices takes significant investment in the production lines. Like the article says, how many companies require building their devices to use a quarter million dollar laser to burn nearly invisible holes in them?
Wasn't there an early article with the iPhone 4 where the Foxconn head said they had to buy some sort of prototyping lathe or CNC machine for each line just for the product?
http://9to5mac.com/2010/09/10/foxconn-making-137000-iphone-4s-each-day/
What about that Liquidmetal stuff they played with? Sure they're not using it yet, but it's just another example of how likely they're using many odd tools in their production lines.
I have no idea how long it takes to make each part of an iPhone 4 or a Macbook Air, but if starting a production line costs that much money, it's no wonder they can't make them fast enough.
Buying more manufacturing tools isn't the solution, it's not like those are something you just call up Home Depot and ask for. They'll have to be built to order too.
Besides, once you have these many production lines up, what then? Sales are always higher in the beginning and then taper off. If you end up with too many unused lines, that's millions wasted in extra lasers and robots.
All Apple can do is start manufacturing early with the expected demand. Wait too long and the finished good depreciate. Start selling too early and too many backorders. I doubt any of us would actually fair better in balancing this out for a product cycle.
Nothing phases fanboys, I see. Too bad they're incapable of understanding that this article just proved that Apple isn't magical. They just operate like a big corporation out to make the most money they can. Good job worshipping a big corporation.
No one denies that Apple isn't out the make the most money they can. Fandroids are the ones who claim that Google cares not for revenue and profits and that they just want to make the world a better place. But then again, in the eyes of Droidtards, Google is all about "Don't be evil," right?
Take a look at the first 2 pages full of apple worship. They all deny it (they think Apple is there to cater to them personally, haha.) About Google, who cares if they make money off of advertisement. And android fans like that android is open source, which has nothing to do with them liking other companies for what they bring to the table.
That's not the impression I got. They seem to think that it's just plain business. Apple deserves credit for planning ahead, and I happen to agree with them. What is wrong with that? How is that "Apple worship."
And as for Google, I don't care if Google makes money off of advertisements. I simply have a problem with people making it sound like Google isn't in it for the money and that they do what they do out of the goodness of their hearts. Face it, Google is in it for the money as much as Apple is.
As for Android being open source, it's debatable. By definition, the end user should have unfettered access to the source code for a piece of software to qualify as open source. If the end user has to "root" the device to get access to the source code, that's not open source. There have been reports that Google is implementing rudimentary controls over the skins that OEMs put on their devices. Add to that the fact that Google closed the source code for Honeycomb. I'm not sure if Android qualifies as open source any longer.