Supply Chain Indicators Point to Poor February for Apple

[bushman4]

Here goes Brian White analyzing. This guy has the worst prediction record of anyone, Yet he keeps on going. I wouldn't put to much credibility in his forecast.

 

[xVeinx]

How can a company that only sells 11 products that haven't changed much in the last
couple of years and is run by a so called logistics genius have a supply chain problem?

Ask Tesla.

 

[shoopaman]

Didn't Obama rave about Apple during his SOTUA? Analysts are stupid. Or play it like lawyers. Apple is already busting it in USA now. Perhaps that's where the difference are? Not sure if the difference of "made in USA"s are but regardless of that discrepancy, smells pungent like the ConAlyst trying to squeeze the nickel to get dime.

I never put any weight on these feathers of half baked analysis...

 

[Michael Scrip]

If it doesn't act, yes, it will be. All of your rah-rah-rah-sis-boom-bah facts notwithstanding, you have to put them in context to the other little fact that Apple reinvented this smartphone market, and with one fell swoop destroyed Palm and mortally wounded Blackberry, the leaders at the first iPhone's intro. Apple has all-but squandered that lead by failing to keep the OS relevant and modern; buy keeping the phone relatively unchanged model after model; etc., as mentioned in my previous posts.

And yet Apple sells more and mores iPhone each quarter... to people who never had an iPhone before.

I understand what you're saying... but people still like, and buy, the iPhone.

Apple won't go out of business and/or be acquired like Palm... nor will they be wounded like RIM.

Like it or not... people enjoy the iPhone... even if Apple isn't on top of the sales leaderboard.

Apple is proof that you can be 2nd place and still make billions of dollars. Those previously mentioned companies never had that. That's why they aren't around anymore (or are walking corpses like RIM )

Now here is Samsung, which has always been a decent phone maker, takes Android, previously unusable in a phone or anything else and starts making phones that make people 2nd guess the iPhone. Yes, that's a problem for Apple.

As I said in another post... Samsung sells phones across all price ranges.

Apple only sells mid to high-end phones.

When you consider those facts... Samsung's 63 million smartphones last quarter to Apple's 47 million smartphones isn't all that bad.

But you probably look at the total number and say "more people prefer Samsung phones..."

It's very difficult to compare the two companies anyway... as they don't offer similar product ranges.

The majority of Apple's smartphone sales are the current flagship $600+ model.

Samsung's Galaxy SIII only represents a small portion of their sales... meaning the bulk of their sales are lower-end phones. (a market in which Apple doesn't have a product)

So yeah... Samsung sells a lot of units. But it's not as black and white as you think.

If someone only has $200 to buy a phone because that's all they could afford... of course Apple isn't getting that sale.

But if they had $600 to spend on a phone... the iPhone 5 sells almost twice as much as the Galaxy SIII

Even the older iPhone 4S squeaked by the Galaxy SIII

In the end... both companies will sell a ton of phones. There is no contest of who sells the most.

 

[Ryth]

Which markets are you talking about? Moon and Mars?
Wake up. There is not much room left to grow. China Mobile and quite likely NTT DoCoMo will be the last big names added this year.
If you are hinting at emerging markets: they are just that, emerging. It will take decades until they are on a level playing field, and smartphones will be long gone by then. Until then, people in India, Brazil and China are happily buying Android phones in very large numbers. Unless of course, Apple comes up with a substantially cheaper iPhone.

T-Mobile alone in the USA will propel Apple even higher and already there is proof that Android is declining in the USA from a previous report a few weeks ago.

Emerging is not what you think it means and those markets are huge for Apple.

 

[charlituna]

That sums it up - apple are losing their hardcore fans. The masses who jumped onto the iphone and ipad will, just as quickly, jump onto the next 'must have'.

Perhaps. But so long as for every jump off there's at least 1 jump on, what's the major issue.

Apple doesn't view this as a zero sum game where every other companies win is their tragic loss. They are making enough sales and money to keep themselves happy. That's enough for them, which is why they don't do things designed just to chase market share

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When was the last time Apple didn't have some kind of event in the first 3 months of the year ?

As if that means anything. Apple should be allowed to move on the schedule they want to use without folks screaming doom and gloom over it

----------

Seems that it may take something earth shattering to get Apple to look at what the customer wants. Not what Apple wants.

Not having a master pitchman, hype master, and story teller is taking its toll.

Curious. How many iPhone 4s did Apple sell in the first two weeks, how many 4S, how many 5. US only to be fair to the notion that there were more locations at each launch which would naturally cause higher sales.

Sometimes tells me that the numbers went up. Suggesting that the switch from Jobs to Cook perhaps did nothing

----------

I think Apple should have a more regular structure of media events tied around their 4 keys business legs.

I would start off by bringing back the MacWorld Keynote in early February.

Apple got out of that sort of thing because having to design to a preset schedule meant having to sometimes rush things. Or to announce way ahead of time and give the other boys time to release a copy cat before they were on shelves.

 

[charlituna]

...which are not tied to any particular hardware platform.

I wonder how much of that 95% comes from Apple products

----------

Incorrect. apple sales are true sales, as in, to paying consumers.

Actually you are both correct and incorrect. Something like 60% of Apple's sales are by their two direct channels -- ie, the Apple Retail stores and apple.com online stores. Those are customer sales

The rest are sales into the third party channel and could be sales to the channel (ie shipments not end user)

----------

But... technology is accelerating at a faster past than any other time in history. Once upon a time not too long ago a company could keep a model for two years and consumers accepted it. No more. Consumers expect and crave change (see: History of Palm and Palm OS).

Maybe I'm a minority of one but I'd say that slowing down and not releasing something so you can say you did something, not including the latest and greatest tech which is also perhaps unstable just to say you have the latest and greatest etc is pretty darn innovative

 

[Ryth]

Google glass is innovative and has the potential to be category defining, but who's to say apple doesn't have something up their sleeve which is as interesting? Openness isn't part of their product development approach and unless they're ramping up production they can probably keep leaks under control...

Google glass will be another flop.

If you seriously think that is going to be innovative, I have a bridge to sell you.

----------

That sums it up - apple are losing their hardcore fans. The masses who jumped onto the iphone and ipad will, just as quickly, jump onto the next 'must have'. In the mass market, phones are fashion and no matter how good apple think the iphone X is, at some point people will get bored and move onto the next thing.

So if apple want to keep a sold foundation for the inevitable leaner times ahead they ought to take on board that quote above and give some attention to computers, OSs and raw geekery at the same time as they seek to milk the mass market.

I havent seen one "Apple" fan leave the platform yet. And I know about 50+. I know 1 android user out of my group. Thats a 49-1 split. None of those 49 have ever complained about innovation or their APple device. The Android person spouts that tech stuff all the time. Doesnt matter to 99% of the people.

 

[Michael Scrip]

Something like 60% of Apple's sales are by their two direct channels -- ie, the Apple Retail stores and apple.com online stores. Those are customer sales

The rest are sales into the third party channel and could be sales to the channel (ie shipments not end user)

And depending on which carrier you buy an iPhone from... it might have to be ordered.

I bought my iPhone 4S two months after launch... and I still had to order it. My Verizon store didn't have any in stock.

It's probably like that for the first few months.

Basically... every iPhone that comes off the assembly line has an owner within a day or two.

There are no warehouses full of unsold iPhones

And that's why it's understood that the iPhone's shipments pretty much equal sales.

----------

Google glass will be another flop.

If you seriously think that is going to be innovative, I have a bridge to sell you.

Google Glass is innovative but it's just not useful for the majority of the population.

It will not have mass-market appeal... but I like the idea.

 

[iMcLovin]

I hope for apples sake that 2013 won't just be iphone 5s & faster ipad with only faster cam and processor. The changes are to incremental for me to bother buying anything new...they need to make something significantly impressive to keep me spending money every year....and I hope they do, I find buying apple stuff a nice hobby and daily usability improvement...but I need to get something more than just a snappier homescreen

 

[BC2009]

Your list is not objective at all, just your opinion. You completly forgot to include other important innovations like OLED screens, Bluray, Cloud (Dropbox, Gaming, etc), the growth of internet radio on demand (Pandora), Android (Like it or not, it is a game changer in the industry), Netbooks (They suck but did greatly affect the industry), Galaxy Note (First smartphone with a pressure sensitive touch screen for Stylus).

Perhaps you failed to read and just looked at the list. I specifically did not include something that just mimicked what somebody already had done (i.e.: a non-innovation) nor did I include technological innovations that were not products. There is a huge list of things that have improved everybody's devices but have not changed any industries. But let's look at your list:

- OLED screens: cool innovation with specific drawbacks and still not practical for very large screens or very bright screens on mobile (i.e.: brightness is cranked way below IPS LCD screens because of battery concerns on most devices). Even if OLED screens do become mass-market and clear replacement for IPS LCD (which is still superior in practice, yet not in theory), the industry will view it as an industry-wide raising of the tides and consumers will say "oh, that kinda looks better". This is not a going to be a game changer, but an iterative improvement.

- Bluray: Let's face it. If Apple invented Bluray the press would be calling it a total failure given its inability to overtake DVDs in as many years as it has been available. Bluray is an interesting advancement on optical disk, but the format was not interesting enough to get people to flock to it over digital downloads. There is nothing about Bluray that has turned any industry on its side.

- Cloud (Dropbox, Gaming, etc): The innovation you referring to here is "The Internet" which is basically just many things becoming Internet-enabled. The innovation occurred far before the time-span I was bring up since I was trying to focus on what some would consider "recent years".

- Internet radio on demand (Pandora): This is an interesting innovation, but not nearly as transformative as what Napster did many years before. There are no real technological leaps that made Internet Radio possible that are worth cheering about in the past 13 years. The only leap for Internet Radio was their ability to cut deals with music studios to be able to stream the music and even then they have apparently not done a good job with those deals since Pandora keeps losing money.

- Android: Game-changer, yes -- innovative: no. Android was a game changer by commoditizing the innovative features of other operating systems. First it was Blackberry OS and then it was iOS. Android only changed so much in 4.0 because it literally sucked before that. Since 4.0 it has been iterative. Sure it has a fresh design language and does what iOS does, but 5 years later, but there was no game-changing innovation in Android. There was only catch-up and minor tweaks and feature differences over iOS.

- Netbooks: Netbooks were not innovative at all and their effect on the industry was a blip (i.e.: long enough for people to be fooled into buying them so they would realize that they did not want to buy another). I am trying to focus on innovations, not marketing scams that managed to work for 18 months before people got wise to it. Netbooks were no more innovative than laptops and those existed for years before netbooks. If somebody had managed to make a Netbook that was as powerful as a normal laptop then perhaps it would have been innovative -- nobody did -- they were just compromised laptops.

- Galaxy Note: Pressure sensitive styli have existed for years. In fact the technology used by Galaxy Note is licensed from Wacom who has been using it in Bamboo input devices for years. Samsung did not even do anything cool with it, but simply put together 15 to 20 shoddy apps that use it. The Galaxy Note has less than 2 dozen apps that even leverage the pressure-sensitive stylus and that number has not even grown in the 15 months of its existence. The phone itself in both of its incarnations have measured a tiny fraction of other smartphone sales. If you believe the Galaxy Note is a game-changer then you are exaggerating it worse than the press is. Anybody can build a bigger phone. I think the cooler innovation is from Ten-One Design and their Pogo Connect which builds the pressure sensitivity into the stylus and transmits that over bluetooth to a device like iPad that does not have a pressure-sensitive screen. An iPad + Pogo Connect is orders of magnitude more productive than a Galaxy Note 10.1. I think Pogo Connect even has more apps that are optimized to use their stylus than Galaxy Note has -- certainly they are BETTER apps just by including Procreate and Paper by Fifty Three.

 

[Chupa Chupa]

As I said in another post... Samsung sells phones across all price ranges.

Apple only sells mid to high-end phones.

I'm not sure why you are going out of your way to sugar coat Apple's current market position/predicament. Marketshare is marketshare no matter how you slice and dice -- if that were not the case then why was Apple so fruitlessly trying to compete against Windows for so long?

I don't know how old you are, but if you are knowledgable about Apple's history, then you know "the Steves" practically invented the concept of personal computing and Apple led in marketshare until the mid 80s. It's downfall was that Jobs only wanted to sell high-end computers made only by Apple -- Apple IIs and Macs sold for about $2k ($4K in 2012 dollars) where PC clones could be had for half that price or less....

The rest we all know: by the time Apple got around to making a low cost Mac (the LC) Microsoft already had 90% marketshare; Mac just 5%. Based on how you parse marketshare none of that matters because the price diversity of PC clones was greater than Macs, so no comparison. Nevermind Apple nearly went bankrupt on the model of just selling to 5%.

Even BMW, previously known to only selling luxury cars, and which Apple is frequently compared to, brought its lower cost 1 series to the U.S. to prevent losing marketshare in the $35K upwardly aspiring price range. It's a battle for the hearts and minds of consumers... all consumers, because once a segment has been cherry picked a company has to find new ones to generate real growth.

 

[Macist]

Samsung fanbois - 'Wow, Samsung are really innovative - they gone from 4" to 4.3" to 4.8" screens... I think they may go even bigger y'know - how do they dream this stuff up?!'

----------

I'm not sure why you are going out of your way to sugar coat Apple's current market position/predicament. Marketshare is marketshare no matter how you slice and dice -- if that were not the case then why was Apple so fruitlessly trying to compete against Windows for so long?

I don't know how old you are, but if you are knowledgable about Apple's history, then you know "the Steves" practically invented the concept of personal computing and Apple led in marketshare until the mid 80s. It's downfall was that Jobs only wanted to sell high-end computers made only by Apple -- Apple IIs and Macs sold for about $2k ($4K in 2012 dollars) where PC clones could be had for half that price or less....

The rest we all know: by the time Apple got around to making a low cost Mac (the LC) Microsoft already had 90% marketshare; Mac just 5%. Based on how you parse marketshare none of that matters because the price diversity of PC clones was greater than Macs, so no comparison. Nevermind Apple nearly went bankrupt on the model of just selling to 5%.

Even BMW, previously known to only selling luxury cars, and which Apple is frequently compared to, brought its lower cost 1 series to the U.S. to prevent losing marketshare in the $35K upwardly aspiring price range. It's a battle for the hearts and minds of consumers... all consumers, because once a segment has been cherry picked a company has to find new ones to generate real growth.

It's not as if Apple can't do 'lower cost' (the plastic MacBooks were great but people tending to go for the alu models so Apple didn't bother updating it).

Also, in computer terms 'market share' doesn't mean much. You see vast numbers of MacBooks in the wild now - probably the single biggest brand. Linux has 1% share of desktops yet runs most of the internet.

Windows has huge market share but much of that is just no-margin 'dumb terminals' running word and the company database in offices. If Apple thought it had a winning formula to make big money on corporate desktops it would. They flirted with enterprise servers (Xserve) when the went Unix but just didn't have the history in that market to make it work.

They have quite correctly seen the iPad as future 'business machines' - virtually every single corporate deployment of tablets is iPad-based, so entrenched that the Surface looks like an 'non-standard' outsider product like the Mac did in the dark days of the mid-90s.

 

[BaldiMac]

Ah makes more sense, didn't know that Apple made as high as $13B in revenue outside of hardware sales. Anyhow point being, Google having their maojority of their revenue through ad sales is not different from Apple having most of their revenue coming from hardware. Nothing wrong but nothing different.

Talk about false equivalence!

Which markets are you talking about? Moon and Mars?
Wake up. There is not much room left to grow. China Mobile and quite likely NTT DoCoMo will be the last big names added this year.

Carriers that offer the iPhone only represent 50% of global subscribers. And as has been pointed out a number of times, the iPhone does not compete at the low end of the market. Tremendous room for market share growth for the iPhone.

The big question is whether expanding into these markets will actually allow Apple to increase profits.

I'm not sure why you are going out of your way to sugar coat Apple's current market position/predicament. Marketshare is marketshare no matter how you slice and dice -- if that were not the case then why was Apple so fruitlessly trying to compete against Windows for so long?

Sure, but market share isn't the only metric. Despite not leading in market share, Apple enjoys almost every single advantage afforded the market share leader. Economies of scales, profits, developer support, accessory support, etc. What's the point in being number one, if number two gets all the prizes?

I don't know how old you are, but if you are knowledgable about Apple's history, then you know "the Steves" practically invented the concept of personal computing and Apple led in marketshare until the mid 80s.

Apple never led in PC market share. They peaked around 20%.

It's downfall was that Jobs only wanted to sell high-end computers made only by Apple -- Apple IIs and Macs sold for about $2k ($4K in 2012 dollars) where PC clones could be had for half that price or less....

Jobs wasn't even with Apple during its downfall.

The rest we all know: by the time Apple got around to making a low cost Mac (the LC) Microsoft already had 90% marketshare; Mac just 5%. Based on how you parse marketshare none of that matters because the price diversity of PC clones was greater than Macs, so no comparison. Nevermind Apple nearly went bankrupt on the model of just selling to 5%.

None of which equates to the smartphone market where Apple has the developer support, enterprise support, and higher market share than it ever had with the PC.

 

[Michael Scrip]

I'm not sure why you are going out of your way to sugar coat Apple's current market position/predicament. Marketshare is marketshare no matter how you slice and dice -- if that were not the case then why was Apple so fruitlessly trying to compete against Windows for so long?

I don't know how old you are, but if you are knowledgable about Apple's history, then you know "the Steves" practically invented the concept of personal computing and Apple led in marketshare until the mid 80s. It's downfall was that Jobs only wanted to sell high-end computers made only by Apple -- Apple IIs and Macs sold for about $2k ($4K in 2012 dollars) where PC clones could be had for half that price or less....

The rest we all know: by the time Apple got around to making a low cost Mac (the LC) Microsoft already had 90% marketshare; Mac just 5%. Based on how you parse marketshare none of that matters because the price diversity of PC clones was greater than Macs, so no comparison. Nevermind Apple nearly went bankrupt on the model of just selling to 5%.

Even BMW, previously known to only selling luxury cars, and which Apple is frequently compared to, brought its lower cost 1 series to the U.S. to prevent losing marketshare in the $35K upwardly aspiring price range. It's a battle for the hearts and minds of consumers... all consumers, because once a segment has been cherry picked a company has to find new ones to generate real growth.

Yeah... but you can't pay your rent with market share.

Isn't it possible to NOT have the highest number on a market share chart... and still be successful? Wildly successful even?

Let's see... when the iPhone came out... companies like Nokia and RIM had more market share. Apple survived.

Then... Android had more market share. Apple survived.

BTW... I'm 35 years old and I'm well versed in the history of Apple and "the Steves"

The difference between then and now is... Apple is making about 6 billion dollars every 3 months. And people are buying their products as fast as Apple can make them. They are in no danger of going bankrupt anymore.

Apple IS in the hearts and minds of consumers. There are 300 million iPhones out in the world at this very moment... and millions of apps, games and iTunes songs downloaded every day.

I honestly think you should use your "doom and gloom" speech on another company.

 

[LordVic]

stop this nonsense.
you can't pick and choose which were "more important" then downplay others. The same thing goes for your list as well.

What the entire technology industry is, is a building block on top of eachother. Apple's 'innovations' didnt happen in a vacuum. They took advantage of existing technologies as well as adapted them to suit what they needed at the time just as much as any of these did below. Apple had many "bads" to go with the goods. Not everything was perfect when released. The iphone 5 is not the same phone that the iphone was.


2003: iPod (absolutely winner on handheld music players and eventual online download store)
Handheld music devices existed BEFORE the ipod. Apple just made it more 'cool', buy advancing the tech to make them small enough that they'd look good carrying around. I had 2 different 'ipod's' before I ever bought the first gen ipod.

2007: iPhone (completely changed the smartphone industry and expanded it)
Wont deny that it didn't change it and break it into brand new markets, but yet again, they weren't the first fullscreen touch based device. nor the first smartphone. They took an existing product market, advanced it, and made it affordable and "cool" enough looking (didnt look like a nerd carying one), that the market jumped on it.

2010: iPad (up-ended the entire PC industry)
wasn't the first tablet in existence. See above for iPhone.

I'm not saying these weren't important. They were. All very VERY important in todays technological market. But they did it through the same techniques and advances that you see below, and attempt to completely discredit.

Technology doesn't just magically come out of thin air. it's ALL revolutionary. it all needs a building block and a foundation in which needs to be built on. are some of the below technological advances going to completely redefine industries? Maybe, Maybe not, But that doesn't mean they are any less important to innovation and the future of technology than any of those that proceed it.

if there was no LCD, we'd have no iDevices. So where's in your list is that invention? What about the transister? that could be up there too. the list goes on, and on, and on.

to counter your below:
OLED might not be 100% ready today, but it's clear that the development is there to make this replace LCD. the power savings, contrast benefits and thinness is absolutely driving more than just a few companies towards coming up with making the displays bigger and more affordable. thus advancing us for the first time potentially out of the LCD era.

Bluray: Maynot have caught on as big as industry expectations when released, but it was the driving force behind true HD media distribution. Being able to put HD content out to viewers quickly in a physical media, in early low bandwith days with caps put HD on the radar and made people say "I WANT THAT". Blueray didn't lose cause it was blueray, blueray started losing because the internet itself has hit speeds and uses that nobody even thought possible.

Netbooks were absolutely a stepping stone for the "ultrabooks" of today. they were the first attempt at a thin, light, small Ultra low voltage computer in an affordable package. Without them, the ultrabooks might never have come along. the MBA was a direct result of the sudden emergence and selling of these types of Devices, so much that the MBA's first iteration used many of the same technologies, including the ATOM ULV, design originally just for such low end, low power devices.

Perhaps you failed to read and just looked at the list. I specifically did not include something that just mimicked what somebody already had done (i.e.: a non-innovation) nor did I include technological innovations that were not products. There is a huge list of things that have improved everybody's devices but have not changed any industries. But let's look at your list:

- OLED screens: cool innovation with specific drawbacks and still not practical for very large screens or very bright screens on mobile (i.e.: brightness is cranked way below IPS LCD screens because of battery concerns on most devices). Even if OLED screens do become mass-market and clear replacement for IPS LCD (which is still superior in practice, yet not in theory), the industry will view it as an industry-wide raising of the tides and consumers will say "oh, that kinda looks better". This is not a going to be a game changer, but an iterative improvement.

- Bluray: Let's face it. If Apple invented Bluray the press would be calling it a total failure given its inability to overtake DVDs in as many years as it has been available. Bluray is an interesting advancement on optical disk, but the format was not interesting enough to get people to flock to it over digital downloads. There is nothing about Bluray that has turned any industry on its side.

- Cloud (Dropbox, Gaming, etc): The innovation you referring to here is "The Internet" which is basically just many things becoming Internet-enabled. The innovation occurred far before the time-span I was bring up since I was trying to focus on what some would consider "recent years".

- Internet radio on demand (Pandora): This is an interesting innovation, but not nearly as transformative as what Napster did many years before. There are no real technological leaps that made Internet Radio possible that are worth cheering about in the past 13 years. The only leap for Internet Radio was their ability to cut deals with music studios to be able to stream the music and even then they have apparently not done a good job with those deals since Pandora keeps losing money.

- Android: Game-changer, yes -- innovative: no. Android was a game changer by commoditizing the innovative features of other operating systems. First it was Blackberry OS and then it was iOS. Android only changed so much in 4.0 because it literally sucked before that. Since 4.0 it has been iterative. Sure it has a fresh design language and does what iOS does, but 5 years later, but there was no game-changing innovation in Android. There was only catch-up and minor tweaks and feature differences over iOS.

- Netbooks: Netbooks were not innovative at all and their effect on the industry was a blip (i.e.: long enough for people to be fooled into buying them so they would realize that they did not want to buy another). I am trying to focus on innovations, not marketing scams that managed to work for 18 months before people got wise to it. Netbooks were no more innovative than laptops and those existed for years before netbooks. If somebody had managed to make a Netbook that was as powerful as a normal laptop then perhaps it would have been innovative -- nobody did -- they were just compromised laptops.

- Galaxy Note: Pressure sensitive styli have existed for years. In fact the technology used by Galaxy Note is licensed from Wacom who has been using it in Bamboo input devices for years. Samsung did not even do anything cool with it, but simply put together 15 to 20 shoddy apps that use it. The Galaxy Note has less than 2 dozen apps that even leverage the pressure-sensitive stylus and that number has not even grown in the 15 months of its existence. The phone itself in both of its incarnations have measured a tiny fraction of other smartphone sales. If you believe the Galaxy Note is a game-changer then you are exaggerating it worse than the press is. Anybody can build a bigger phone. I think the cooler innovation is from Ten-One Design and their Pogo Connect which builds the pressure sensitivity into the stylus and transmits that over bluetooth to a device like iPad that does not have a pressure-sensitive screen. An iPad + Pogo Connect is orders of magnitude more productive than a Galaxy Note 10.1. I think Pogo Connect even has more apps that are optimized to use their stylus than Galaxy Note has -- certainly they are BETTER apps just by including Procreate and Paper by Fifty Three.

 

[LordVic]

Snip

Stop being a logical middle

they don't like our kind around here.

you're either a raving ifanboy, or a fandroid.... us moderates obviously can NEVER be right

 

[XVentura]

Never reason from a price change.

 

[RetepNamenots]

What hardware is Google making? I know they have their Nexus products, but those are all through other parties. I guess they now own Motorola and are working on their next phone rev (not sure when that is due out). I know of Google Glass and self-driving car projects although I'm not sure if they'll produce the former and I believe the goal is to sell the technology/package to automobile manufacturers for the latter. Others I'm missing?

I don't think it matters that they're going through third parties, because they still have the final say.

 

[oliversl]

I won't call it a "Disaster" when it indeed work and work for many people. If you say there is little development in 6 years, then you don't really know or own iOS.

Maybe that used to work when they had no real competition but 3 years in tech today is far different from 2010.

3 Years with little to no progress and 6 years and little development on iOS.

Siri - Gimmick that is wrong 1/2 the time
Maps - Disaster
iCloud - Disaster that duplicates or deletes songs.
iTunes - Bloated slow and also hasn't seen anything but minor updates. Ping, Genius are a joke and they dogged Ping after nobody Ping'd it.

 

[linkgx1]

I find it funny that markeshare "doesn't matter" when Apple isn't top dog. Right now it only matters for tablets.

But the thing is the iOS is only avaliable on APPLE PRODUCTS. Android is on Samsung, LG and several other companies. I think it's ridiculous to day that "ooooh, Samsung's sales are lower than Apple's. Therefore, they suck!".

No...

Samsung is fighting too many companies at the same time. Apple and LG. It's a complicated issue because Android is just an OS.

Apple and Samsung (top dogs) are both going to have their up and down periods. Most humans like trends. Right now, people are starting to jump to Samsung to support the 'underdog'. Then when Samsung is an unstoppable force, it's gong to be rinse and repeat with another company (Uhh...LG? SONY? BEATS AUDIO!?!).

Apple will on fail when they rest on their laurels. Screw that "we don't follow the herd" BS. If you see the trend going towards bigger phones, DEFINE the big phones category. I like what Apple did with the iPad Mini when they made the 7.8'' because that is slightly more useful than the 7'' tablets of late.

 

[aerok]

Perhaps you failed to read and just looked at the list. I specifically did not include something that just mimicked what somebody already had done (i.e.: a non-innovation) nor did I include technological innovations that were not products. There is a huge list of things that have improved everybody's devices but have not changed any industries. But let's look at your list:

- OLED screens: cool innovation with specific drawbacks and still not practical for very large screens or very bright screens on mobile (i.e.: brightness is cranked way below IPS LCD screens because of battery concerns on most devices). Even if OLED screens do become mass-market and clear replacement for IPS LCD (which is still superior in practice, yet not in theory), the industry will view it as an industry-wide raising of the tides and consumers will say "oh, that kinda looks better". This is not a going to be a game changer, but an iterative improvement.

- Bluray: Let's face it. If Apple invented Bluray the press would be calling it a total failure given its inability to overtake DVDs in as many years as it has been available. Bluray is an interesting advancement on optical disk, but the format was not interesting enough to get people to flock to it over digital downloads. There is nothing about Bluray that has turned any industry on its side.

- Cloud (Dropbox, Gaming, etc): The innovation you referring to here is "The Internet" which is basically just many things becoming Internet-enabled. The innovation occurred far before the time-span I was bring up since I was trying to focus on what some would consider "recent years".

- Internet radio on demand (Pandora): This is an interesting innovation, but not nearly as transformative as what Napster did many years before. There are no real technological leaps that made Internet Radio possible that are worth cheering about in the past 13 years. The only leap for Internet Radio was their ability to cut deals with music studios to be able to stream the music and even then they have apparently not done a good job with those deals since Pandora keeps losing money.

- Android: Game-changer, yes -- innovative: no. Android was a game changer by commoditizing the innovative features of other operating systems. First it was Blackberry OS and then it was iOS. Android only changed so much in 4.0 because it literally sucked before that. Since 4.0 it has been iterative. Sure it has a fresh design language and does what iOS does, but 5 years later, but there was no game-changing innovation in Android. There was only catch-up and minor tweaks and feature differences over iOS.

- Netbooks: Netbooks were not innovative at all and their effect on the industry was a blip (i.e.: long enough for people to be fooled into buying them so they would realize that they did not want to buy another). I am trying to focus on innovations, not marketing scams that managed to work for 18 months before people got wise to it. Netbooks were no more innovative than laptops and those existed for years before netbooks. If somebody had managed to make a Netbook that was as powerful as a normal laptop then perhaps it would have been innovative -- nobody did -- they were just compromised laptops.

- Galaxy Note: Pressure sensitive styli have existed for years. In fact the technology used by Galaxy Note is licensed from Wacom who has been using it in Bamboo input devices for years. Samsung did not even do anything cool with it, but simply put together 15 to 20 shoddy apps that use it. The Galaxy Note has less than 2 dozen apps that even leverage the pressure-sensitive stylus and that number has not even grown in the 15 months of its existence. The phone itself in both of its incarnations have measured a tiny fraction of other smartphone sales. If you believe the Galaxy Note is a game-changer then you are exaggerating it worse than the press is. Anybody can build a bigger phone. I think the cooler innovation is from Ten-One Design and their Pogo Connect which builds the pressure sensitivity into the stylus and transmits that over bluetooth to a device like iPad that does not have a pressure-sensitive screen. An iPad + Pogo Connect is orders of magnitude more productive than a Galaxy Note 10.1. I think Pogo Connect even has more apps that are optimized to use their stylus than Galaxy Note has -- certainly they are BETTER apps just by including Procreate and Paper by Fifty Three.

Once again, all this, just an opinion. Not FACTS.

There was only catch-up and minor tweaks and feature differences over iOS.

LOL iOS is amazing but no way Android was playing catch-up over iOS.

----------

Well said my hardware agnostic friend.

stop this nonsense.
you can't pick and choose which were "more important" then downplay others. The same thing goes for your list as well.

What the entire technology industry is, is a building block on top of eachother. Apple's 'innovations' didnt happen in a vacuum. They took advantage of existing technologies as well as adapted them to suit what they needed at the time just as much as any of these did below. Apple had many "bads" to go with the goods. Not everything was perfect when released. The iphone 5 is not the same phone that the iphone was.


2003: iPod (absolutely winner on handheld music players and eventual online download store)
Handheld music devices existed BEFORE the ipod. Apple just made it more 'cool', buy advancing the tech to make them small enough that they'd look good carrying around. I had 2 different 'ipod's' before I ever bought the first gen ipod.

2007: iPhone (completely changed the smartphone industry and expanded it)
Wont deny that it didn't change it and break it into brand new markets, but yet again, they weren't the first fullscreen touch based device. nor the first smartphone. They took an existing product market, advanced it, and made it affordable and "cool" enough looking (didnt look like a nerd carying one), that the market jumped on it.

2010: iPad (up-ended the entire PC industry)
wasn't the first tablet in existence. See above for iPhone.

I'm not saying these weren't important. They were. All very VERY important in todays technological market. But they did it through the same techniques and advances that you see below, and attempt to completely discredit.

Technology doesn't just magically come out of thin air. it's ALL revolutionary. it all needs a building block and a foundation in which needs to be built on. are some of the below technological advances going to completely redefine industries? Maybe, Maybe not, But that doesn't mean they are any less important to innovation and the future of technology than any of those that proceed it.

if there was no LCD, we'd have no iDevices. So where's in your list is that invention? What about the transister? that could be up there too. the list goes on, and on, and on.

to counter your below:
OLED might not be 100% ready today, but it's clear that the development is there to make this replace LCD. the power savings, contrast benefits and thinness is absolutely driving more than just a few companies towards coming up with making the displays bigger and more affordable. thus advancing us for the first time potentially out of the LCD era.

Bluray: Maynot have caught on as big as industry expectations when released, but it was the driving force behind true HD media distribution. Being able to put HD content out to viewers quickly in a physical media, in early low bandwith days with caps put HD on the radar and made people say "I WANT THAT". Blueray didn't lose cause it was blueray, blueray started losing because the internet itself has hit speeds and uses that nobody even thought possible.

Netbooks were absolutely a stepping stone for the "ultrabooks" of today. they were the first attempt at a thin, light, small Ultra low voltage computer in an affordable package. Without them, the ultrabooks might never have come along. the MBA was a direct result of the sudden emergence and selling of these types of Devices, so much that the MBA's first iteration used many of the same technologies, including the ATOM ULV, design originally just for such low end, low power devices.

 

[linkgx1]

Perhaps you failed to read and just looked at the list. I specifically did not include something that just mimicked what somebody already had done (i.e.: a non-innovation) nor did I include technological innovations that were not products. There is a huge list of things that have improved everybody's devices but have not changed any industries. But let's look at your list:

- OLED screens: cool innovation with specific drawbacks and still not practical for very large screens or very bright screens on mobile (i.e.: brightness is cranked way below IPS LCD screens because of battery concerns on most devices). Even if OLED screens do become mass-market and clear replacement for IPS LCD (which is still superior in practice, yet not in theory), the industry will view it as an industry-wide raising of the tides and consumers will say "oh, that kinda looks better". This is not a going to be a game changer, but an iterative improvement.

- Bluray: Let's face it. If Apple invented Bluray the press would be calling it a total failure given its inability to overtake DVDs in as many years as it has been available. Bluray is an interesting advancement on optical disk, but the format was not interesting enough to get people to flock to it over digital downloads. There is nothing about Bluray that has turned any industry on its side.

- Cloud (Dropbox, Gaming, etc): The innovation you referring to here is "The Internet" which is basically just many things becoming Internet-enabled. The innovation occurred far before the time-span I was bring up since I was trying to focus on what some would consider "recent years".

- Internet radio on demand (Pandora): This is an interesting innovation, but not nearly as transformative as what Napster did many years before. There are no real technological leaps that made Internet Radio possible that are worth cheering about in the past 13 years. The only leap for Internet Radio was their ability to cut deals with music studios to be able to stream the music and even then they have apparently not done a good job with those deals since Pandora keeps losing money.

- Android: Game-changer, yes -- innovative: no. Android was a game changer by commoditizing the innovative features of other operating systems. First it was Blackberry OS and then it was iOS. Android only changed so much in 4.0 because it literally sucked before that. Since 4.0 it has been iterative. Sure it has a fresh design language and does what iOS does, but 5 years later, but there was no game-changing innovation in Android. There was only catch-up and minor tweaks and feature differences over iOS.

- Netbooks: Netbooks were not innovative at all and their effect on the industry was a blip (i.e.: long enough for people to be fooled into buying them so they would realize that they did not want to buy another). I am trying to focus on innovations, not marketing scams that managed to work for 18 months before people got wise to it. Netbooks were no more innovative than laptops and those existed for years before netbooks. If somebody had managed to make a Netbook that was as powerful as a normal laptop then perhaps it would have been innovative -- nobody did -- they were just compromised laptops.

- Galaxy Note: Pressure sensitive styli have existed for years. In fact the technology used by Galaxy Note is licensed from Wacom who has been using it in Bamboo input devices for years. Samsung did not even do anything cool with it, but simply put together 15 to 20 shoddy apps that use it. The Galaxy Note has less than 2 dozen apps that even leverage the pressure-sensitive stylus and that number has not even grown in the 15 months of its existence. The phone itself in both of its incarnations have measured a tiny fraction of other smartphone sales. If you believe the Galaxy Note is a game-changer then you are exaggerating it worse than the press is. Anybody can build a bigger phone. I think the cooler innovation is from Ten-One Design and their Pogo Connect which builds the pressure sensitivity into the stylus and transmits that over bluetooth to a device like iPad that does not have a pressure-sensitive screen. An iPad + Pogo Connect is orders of magnitude more productive than a Galaxy Note 10.1. I think Pogo Connect even has more apps that are optimized to use their stylus than Galaxy Note has -- certainly they are BETTER apps just by including Procreate and Paper by Fifty Three.

You seem to hate anything Apple doesn't come up with.

Excuse me while I continue to watch Skyfall in full DTS-HD Audio on my PS3.

 

[soundguyami]

Report is bogus. Explain why there has been an increased demand in the new iMac model, but production up till a week ago was 4-6 weeks out. As Cook states....Apple gets parts from multiple suppliers just like HP, Acer, and the like do.

 

[alent1234]

Report is bogus. Explain why there has been an increased demand in the new iMac model, but production up till a week ago was 4-6 weeks out. As Cook states....Apple gets parts from multiple suppliers just like HP, Acer, and the like do.

imac is a tiny percentage of apple's sales these days