Reading this makes me think of Jobs as a Railroad baron of old. Kind of heartless, gruff, and willing to crush anyone in his way, but a guy with a vision so strong he will do anything. And it changed the world, it's hard to overstate that.
I remember seeing the iPhone unveiled and thinking "It's cool, but will people really buy such an expensive phone?". I think it was $600. That was pretty expensive at the time. I also remember thinking about how they wanted all apps to be web-based. A disaster for certain I thought. The phone market was all over the place and brand loyalty was in short supply. I'd seen compaq go from dominating PDAs and nosedive off the cliff. Motorola took their brand loyalty (remember how many people had Razrs?) and went into hiding. Time and again I'd seen phone platforms rise and fall. I was skeptical.
All I knew was one thing - I certainly wasn't going to buy one.
Years later and I now program for iOS a lot. Everyday pretty much. I'm a full blown Mac convert and I'll be honest, the iPhone was what caused it. I bought my first iPhone at version 4. Then I specifically bought my first Mac so I could use the SDK for that phone. I fell in love with the platform, in all its insane glory.
I might move to another platform one day, but I can honestly say I never imagined this is what I would be working on.
>> I'm a full blown Mac convert and I'll be honest, the iPhone was what caused it.
This will be Apple's saving grace. They're already entrenched several generations deep. For every kid getting an i-pod touch or i-pod nano today, in a few years, it's such a seamless jump to an iphone. Nothing to learn, no additional software to learn, no new interfaces to spend time getting familiar with. It's the same device, just with more functionality.
For me this is the most brilliant thing Apple has achieved. Being able to move a consumer from platform to platform with ZERO new investment on the users part? Genius.
That's exactly what Microsoft was counting on with their UI for Windows Mobile (even down to a Start menu) and why they make such a big deal about Office being available across all their platforms.
I'm sure that when the time comes, Apple will be prepared to throw away the UI and start over with whatever suits the next form factor.
> I think it was $600. That was pretty expensive at the time.
Just a few years before, people flocked to buy $599 Motorola RAZR flip phones on two years contracts. I saw the hordes lined up, myself. Next to that, the iPhone seems like a bargain
The lines for the Razor made me think the pundits who thought the iPhone was overpriced were crazy or not watching what was going on in the cell market.
Weren't the full-QWERTY Communicators within that price range? Any more interesting than that and we'd have credited to them a more full-featured OS barging into the range of PDAs - assuming we can rule out an Apple-style lateral leap.
Yeah, people forget how revolutionary it was. I bought an iPhone 3G in June 2009. I remember showing it to colleagues and friends, who were in awe about the whole experience. Their phones and smartphones looked primitive next to the iPhone.
This was around the same time the HTC Magic came out, although it was clearly a copy of the iPhone, it was a toy in comparison.
Now that Android has come a long way and even old ladies are carrying iPhones, it looks as if we had modern smartphones for ages :).
About the price - I say always pay full price. It is somewhat more than that even now (base model of 5s will cost over $1000 New Zealand). If more people treat the carrier as a dumb pipe, they might actually start doing that well to differentiate themselves.
Same here. Used to have a massive tower with Win7 and all sorts of Linux flavours booted onto it, 6 monitors and 2 laptops.
Sold it all, bought a single MBPr. Haven't looked back since. It literally took me 3 hours to become full familiar with it. Imported all my documents, installed my apps, good to go.
I always like stuff like this because you see that these people who knock it out of the park apparently effortlessly actually struggle like all the rest of us normal humans behind the scenes. They couldn't figure out how to make a touch screen, the processor wasn't available, Sir Ive's case was impermeable to RF, the LCD was causing interference on the multitouch display, etc... This stuff is hard. Really, really hard. Any one technical obstacle could have killed the whole thing.
Reading the article, I think even Apple thought it was just a case of taking existing parts and smashing them in a case - until they actually tried doing it.
A lot of the stuff Apple had problems with is almost certainly routine for the big existing phone players like HTC, Samsung, Nokia... I mean, Jobs and Ive didn't even realise that metal cases block radio waves, which is basically common knowledge. Many of their problems seem self-imposed in general - for example:
"Even people within the project itself couldn’t talk to one another. Engineers designing the electronics weren’t allowed to see the software. When they needed software to test the electronics, they were given proxy code, not the real thing. If you were working on the software, you used a simulator to test hardware performance."
Apple could apparently get away with this, but I expect their development techniques would have killed lesser companies. Maybe, in some alternative universe where things worked out just a little differently, the iPhone killed Apple too rather than being their biggest success.
I wonder if this sort of "encapsulation" you describe Apple did could have been one of the reasons why they succeeded in building an amazing product? It seems counter-intuitive at first, but isn't it a possibility that encapsulation works well outside of software as well?
I'm sure this can't be what you intended, but it sounds as though you just said that developing something like the iPhone is a matter of routine for companies like HTC, Samsung and Nokia, and that Apple only found it hard because of poor technique.
Some things are always hard, but doing them for the first time is harder.
Building buildings is always difficult, but if you've done it ten times before, you know a lot of the caveats. If you're doing it for the first time, you'll go slower due to more learning-by-doing.
Sometimes it takes an outsider to come in and build with no preexisting design or engineering prejudices (or even overt knowledge) to change the world.
> Sometimes it takes an outsider to come in and build with no preexisting design or engineering prejudices (or even overt knowledge) to change the world.
Yes, this is probably the main reason why Apple was willing to spend extra time and effort reinventing the wheel rather than hire some experienced smartphone engineers. This decision may have been influenced by the experience of the Lisa project, where the influence of engineers from HP has often been blamed for some of the shortcomings. (Mind you, on the other side of the coin the Macintosh barely survived the conviction that a hard disk or more than 128KiB of RAM were unnecessary, a mistake which seems to have been based in the Apple II background of the Mac people.)
(It's not a uniqutely Apple practise either. In the heyday of Japanese electronics companies, several times a firm made a successful leap into an area which was completely new to them, often into a technology which was still in a very early stage or already had strong players or both. See /We Were Burning/ http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-Electron... .)
Well I think it's obvious what he meant ... If true, tripping over obvious, common knowledge things like what materials block RF signals is not something you would see major cell phone players doing.
I remember thinking during the reveal that that's a neat hack, the live digital video output from a phone that presumably is running bleeding edge software and drivers and whatnot. It's really mindblowing how well it all came together. Most teams in the world would not have pushed themselves that hard, I think.
Indeed - I think making all the hard work look effortless is the reward you get for doing the hard work. The mistake is to want people to see how difficult it all was - then things go to shit.
They had AT&T, the iPhone’s wireless carrier, bring in a portable cell tower, so they knew reception would be strong. Then, with Jobs’s approval, they preprogrammed the phone’s display to always show five bars of signal strength regardless of its true strength. The chances of the radio’s crashing during the few minutes that Jobs would use it to make a call were small, but the chances of its crashing at some point during the 90-minute presentation were high.
Bringing a COW (Cell on Wheels) in seems like a reasonable precaution - you have a presentation with lots of people showing up, you want everything to work correctly.
Yeah, I don't really begrudge them there. As anyone who's ever had to do a tech demo should know, tech demos are the living embodiment of Murphy's Law.
Happened to me at a Microsoft event. Me and my friend got up on stage to demo our Software and BAM!! it crashed :P right in front of a hall full of big shots!
They continued to fake it (though not to the same degree) right up to the iPhone 4 when it bit them in the ass by making the antenna gate thing seem worse:
No, they didn't make it seem worse. If I put the phone on my flat hand, and let the signal stabilize, I could drop the signal by about 16dB with one finger (as numerically shown on a jailbroken phone). This was often enough to terminate a call.
There was no "seem" about it - it was a bad design. If I could have gotten a refund AND gotten out of my carrier contract, I would have.
> There was no "seem" about it - it was a bad design
And yet until the 5s last week, the iPhone 4 was still being sold, and selling like hotcakes. Why no problems without a redesign? It is maybe possible it was that big a deal?
Wonder if some 4s were worse than others. I still use a 4 and have never dropped a call. I have poor coverage everywhere I use it too. I do have calls go straight to voicemail, but it's usually in my pocket when this happens.
i am glad to be old enough to remember the time before the iphone. seems like a stupid thing to say, right? but go to any tech forum and it seems like all of it is forgotten already, 2007 is kinda blurry and Apple producing smartphones completely normal.
when the rumours started swirling about apple launching a phone people could not believe it. like at all. apple, the ipod guys, building a phone?! no way, what a joke. you had the photoshops of ipods with a dial, etc. analysts explaining why this was completely wrong, impossible and apple was doomed.
same at the launch of the iPad. same at the launch of the iPod (less space than a nomad, no wifi, lame). what the fuck is a nomad one might say today.
those great photoshops of steve holding a giant iphone to his ear, hilarious. an iPad, buhaha, bunch of retards at apple. but now the galaxy note makes perfect sense. to exactly the same neckbeards who laughed at apple's idiocy before.
apple is indeed the most frustrating company. it somehow has defied gravity in the second jobs era and proven that large swaths of the tech world couldn't define taste and style if their life depended on it.
and perfection, like the iphone launch, is a matter of style and taste.
I don't know how you can consider the Apple TV a flop. The first generation one was built of OS X instead of iOS for reasons that this article makes very obvious but it hammered out a clear path for the future Apple TV. Much like the MacBook Air, it's really only a "flop" if you're talking about the first generation product and not the establishing of a product line.
Neither took the world by storm, but they both launched a product category that was ill-defined at the time and Apple sells millions of both. There were internet connected set top boxes and ultraportables before the Apple TV and the MacBook Air, but there were only Smart TVs, Rokus, Google TVs, and Ultrabooks after.
Maybe it's just me but establishing a successful and profitable product line that exists to this day hardly qualifies as a flop. Just a shaky first generation. Which, keep in mind, also applies to the iPod.
IMO, the iPod can hardly be considered a flop. The iPod HiFi, THAT was a flop.
The iPod isn't a flop. People I know who got one (including the nontechnical) used it a ton, and it was awesome.
The iPhone isn't a flop. Same story, everyone I know who got it loved it.
My parents got an Apple TV, after enjoying their iPods and iPhones. As far as I know they haven't used it since the first week, and after seeing them try, I don't blame them. The problems that the Apple TV is trying to address are real, but IME it's not there yet.
On the other hand my father has been consistently using his Apple TV non-stop since last christmas. I didn't even have to instruct him on how to use it aside from a 5 minute intro course.
I've heard similar rave reviews from 3 people over 60 about how great the Apple TV is. None of which I would position as tech-savvy.
there are examples of apple flops, but the apple tv is actually not one of them. we're now adding them in conference rooms as it kills the fucking projector cable mess once and for all. printers are airplay enabled, work great. will there be projectors with airplay soon?
as for real flops - very often it's services. remember ping? does anyone really care about newsstand, passbook?
they had a pretty good run hardware wise though. the cube might be a candidate. some nano iterations. but else?
Apple TV, from what I gather, was mostly a side-project for Steve Jobs. Something to play with while the focus was on iPhones and, later, iPads. Especially from that perspective it's actually a huge success, and a good way for Apple to dip its toes in an area that many expect is their next Big Thing.
"Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued — it happened, but mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are [expletive] up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.’ He was just very intense. And you would always feel an inch tall."
"Compounding all the technical challenges, Jobs’s obsession with secrecy meant that even as they were exhausted by 80-hour workweeks, the few hundred engineers and designers working on the iPhone couldn’t talk about it to anyone else. If Apple found out you’d told a friend in a bar, or even your spouse, you could be fired."
It's easy to forget how far Apple had already come by this point. I re-discovered this super-insulting dude asking an obnoxious question to Steve at WWDC 1997: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6497475
As `teovall noted, any particular reason you linked a version covered with SEO keywords with only a few views of the video instead of the one with 2.5 million (which has the exact same title but is remarkably lacking in SEO spam)?
Thanks. I like the hypothetical $10B a product might make. I expected him to make a funny and snarky shoot-down, the questioner but got a sympathetic and good answer.
Articles like this help to show all the work involved in the path from a vague idea to a finished product. That's the hard part. Guess that's why they get upset when some other company just sees the end product and just makes a clone of it, without having to face all the hurdles to arrive there from the initial idea..
Except that the other companies have done essentially all of the hard work this article talks about themselves, and more, and have been doing it for years before Apple entered the smartphone market. I mean, many of Apple's problems were with stuff like baseband development and antenna placement which their competitors have been dealing with successfully since before the iPhone even entered development.
If anything Apple were the ones that came along after other companies had done all the hard work and piggy-backed on their work whilst claiming the credit. Companies like Nokia and Motorola literally developed the technology that made mobile phones possible, and had to build stuff like phone radios in an era where no-one had ever done it before, whereas Apple could rely on pre-existing chips, software and design experience. Then Apple sued Motorola to stop them selling phones whilst insisting they didn't have to pay Motorola for the patents they'd obtained through doing all that pioneering work.
>> The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains.
While scenic, the 280 is certainly not 'remarkably empty'. I make the commute from San Jose to SF everyday and wish I shared the enthusiasm of the author.
Apologies for commenting on something completely orthogonal to the point of the OP.
I grew up in the valley, and I can tell you that in 2007 the traffic on 280 and 101 going north in the morning was much lighter than it is today. As SF tech companies have grown dramatically in the last few years, so has the traffic. The same was true building up to 2001; after dotcom, the traffic went down dramatically. Of course, improvements to the highways and interchanges around that time made traffic feel even more sparse on the peninsula.
Those post-dotcom days were sad; the reason there was less traffic was the unemployment of people you knew. You felt that everywhere you went.
It's still emptier than most other freeways and expressways in the area, I think you'll agree. Even during the morning commute north, it's very reasonable except for maybe the 85 intersection (and before you get into SF, naturally). Compare that to the dreadful 101.
"The thinking goes, why let bad Internet or cellphone connections ruin an otherwise good presentation? But Jobs insisted on live presentations. It was one of the things that made them so captivating. Part of his legend was that noticeable product-demo glitches almost never happened."
What is interesting is that product-demo glitches happened all the time. We went to one presentation in which Steve had to ask for people not to use the Internet because they had not enough bandwidth.
But mistakes were so "naturally handled" that people just did not care.
I think Edison said, you will not be remembered by your mistakes, but from your successes.
I'm guessing they didn't. (Has the statute of limitations passed or something?)
Now obviously they could claim they shielded the Moscone center and only operated on channel 14 indoors. (The US bans channel 14 due to the frequency being used by satellite.)
I think the FCC might still fine them, if there was a clear-cut case with hard evidence.
The technical details of the presentation are interesting, but less relevant than how well the device worked at launch. It worked. The iPhone was a success not because it was the first, but because it was the first really usable device, it put everything that came before it to shame.
> The iPhone was a success not because it was the first, but because it was the first really usable device
This is both true and a horrible rewriting of history. People loved their Blackberries. The term Crackberry was invented before the iPhone was even a rumor. And don't tell me it wasn't mainstream, it had taken over most of the business and government market. It was confined to those markets, but within those huge markets it was utterly mainstream. But even before that other people loved Palm devices.
The capacitive touch screen was a clear advance - but don't tell me there was no "usable" device prior to that.
BBM was what people loved. Have you forgotten about Blackberry's nubs and balls that constantly broke/got stuck? People dealt because that was the state of the art at the time.
I could type faster on my Blackberry Curve (a consumer targeted device) than my current Galaxy Nexus or any iPhone/iTouch touchscreen (plus I could literally type a full message and send by touch-typing, without any doubt as to what I was actually doing without looking at the screen).
I admit I prefer the button-less form factor in many respects, but boy do I miss that well-designed tactile keyboard.
I had a BB for about 8 years (1999-2007) before moving to touchcreens with the iPhone, and I can't actually go back to a physical keyboard - it's too slow! I can type way faster on the touch screen now. Though you do need to pay attention to your auto-correct.
You probably can type faster than I can using Swype/Kii/etc. But for whatever reason, I do best with tactile feedback.
(I use a Das Keyboard for the IBM Model M "clicky" experience, and hate my laptop or other keyboards after getting it. I completely understand that I may be in the minority, but regardless, I loved the response of my Blackberry keyboard).
And remember, the iPhone was the first phone with visual voicemail. It boggles the mind that we all had to deal with horrible audio menus for decades before Apple came along and strong-armed Cingular into fixing voicemail.
I pretty much never sent an MMS before or since, and it had email which was better and cheaper. No copy/paste was more annoying, but a fair comparison is with other phones of the era, and my previous phone (some top-end but dumb Sony Ericsson) didn't either.
Amusingly, there was one technical snafu during the presentation. Steve's clicker stopped responding [1]! Of course, the way he handled it, in my opinion, made the presentation that much better and that much more human.
"In the span of seven years, the iPhone and its iPad progeny have become among the most important innovations in Silicon Valley’s history. They transformed the stodgy cellphone industry. "
What other stodgy industry is there that Apple could easily disrupt? How about this: how does it make you feel when you use the DVR box that your cable / satellite company forces you to use, to watch tv? I know the answer for me. Seems like low hanging fruit with potentially enormous payoff for Apple.
On the technology side Apple has actually built everything necessary (AppleTV + iTunes streaming) but the problem is dealing with the content silos.
If Apple could it would simply license all the content and stream it to customers either for a standard price (e.g. $1.99 per episode of 480p programming, $2.99 per episode of 1080p) or via subscription (e.g. MLB/Netflix) or ad-supported (e.g. Hulu Plus).
The only reason AppleTV isn't TV nirvana (at least in the US) is licensing issues. (BTW you can program an AppleTV to recognize any remote, so you can seamlessly make you TV remote also control your AppleTV, without even switching modes).
In case you're wondering, the basic problem right now is that TV networks get paid about $2 (I did a bunch of back of envelope calculations, so I may be significantly off, but it's in this ballpark) in advertising per viewer-hour, so if a family of four watches an hour of TV, then the network gets about $8 in ad revenue. Apple is offering $1.40/h, and it's also messing with DVD sales and syndication so there's a big gap there.
Now, I seriously doubt that the production company that makes the content gets much of that $8, so if Apple could deal with content producers directly...
If Apple can convince the networks that they will be better off with Apple than with the local cable company, then Apple can win. I can't help but think that if Steve were still here, he could get it done (much like he did with the music companies for iTunes and the original iPod). I'm not so sure that the current crew at Apple has the right stuff. What I mean is, Steve would have said "this way is better. You can give me a bunch of reasons why you don't think it will happen, or you don't think it ought to happen, but I'm telling you that it is going to happen, and I am making it happen. Now are you with me or shall I run you over?" There were a million reasons why iTunes could never work. He made it work. I understand the reasons you list for why TV is not going to work. I just wish Steve were here to make it work.
Steve was good, but not magic. One thing counting against this deal is that people have seen what happened to the music companies and the phone carriers. Carriers still hate the iPhone, they don't make much money from it, but are in a position where they have to sell it to remain competitive due to consumer demand.
There's a pretty strong argument that the telcos love iPhone (see Horace Dedieu's analyses, e.g. http://www.asymco.com/2013/04/23/the-job-the-iphone-is-hired...). The music companies may despise Apple but they're kind of being stupid. It's not Apple's fault that the bottom dropped out of their nice little business of selling people CDs with 10 tracks they didn't want to get 1-2 tracks they did AND selling people CDs of music they'd already bought as LPs.
The TV channels are a different matter. They are, today, right now, happily making $2 per viewer hour, and Apple is offering them effectively $0.70 or so (let's say the average TV show is watched by two people in a household; even if it's only one, that's $2.00 vs. $1.40.) The TV networks aren't threatened by a Napster equivalent. And the people who really might benefit from Apple's business model -- content producers -- are tied up in an existing business model that's hard to wean off of.
It seems to me that it will taken people like Joss Whedon or Rob Thomas (Veronica Mars) -- the kinds of people who could Kickstart a movie or TV season -- to try their luck at selling content direct to consumers (through Apple, Amazon, etc.) to convince rightly skeptical content producers to ditch the useless middlemen.
If Apple could it would simply license all the content
Sure, but that won't work: the content is paid for by the cable companies.
It's, what, $30 billion per year going to content creators straight from the cable companies, up front? The content creators absolutely need the cable companies today, there's no other way for them to operate. They don't self-fund, period.
So Apple would need to pony up. If they came to the content creators and said look, we want to do this thing, here's $100 billion for the first three year, up front—it'd happen. Money talks in Hollywood. It might be the only thing that does.
Sadly, there's no way in hell Tim Cook could (or would) make that happen. He's way too conservative. Hell, he couldn't even handle Scott Forstall.
Apple certainly has the money and doesn't know what to do with it other than buy their own stock. Well, that's what they could do with it. $100 billion and you own cable television.
It looks more like Apple will likely partner with a couple of satellite or cable companies and offer to recreate their TV/settop experience for them. Basically, replace Cisco and TiVO, and change the whole customer experience model to be on the set top box, no more calling in to add channels, deal with PPV issues, etc.
I would also bet they're going to try to find a way to make 4K video distribution work to have a reason to switch, perhaps building a dedicated high-speed VPN from the iTunes Store through the cable company's network where they get a cut of the price - since there's no way you could stream 4K over a wide area without dedicated QoS,.
The question is who will bite. Clearly the wireless carriers have benefitted a lot from Apple's presence - more data usage == more dollars. If Apple can do this with cable companies, they'll have a massive and eager channel to sell shiny 4K TVs and boxes through (and more iTunes content), and Cable companies will have incentive to experiment with a new a-la-carte vs. subscription content pricing model for 4K.
I didn't arrive at it, it's a well-known industry figure, I'm not sure where I heard it first. (I live in Los Angeles and lived in Hollywood for years, working mostly on the film side, but I know a lot of people in TV, too.)
Here's an article for consumers on unbundling[1] I found after one Google search that says that ESPN alone receives $7.2 billion per year from US cable companies, which sounds about right to me. (They also earn money for ads, I don't know if any of that is kicked back to the cable companies. I doubt it...)
It shouldn't be surprising even if you crunch the numbers yourself. There's ~100 million cable subscribers, and the average combined bill (Internet/Cable/Phone) was $128/month in 2011.[2] So that's $153.6 billion per year. It's not hard to imagine that ~20% of that goes to the people making the content that's playing on cable. If anything, it'd be surprising if it were lower than that.
The timing of the project launch is pretty remarkable. It seems that Jobs wanted to do this for some time, but was waiting and watching for technical feasibility. From the effort they had getting the demo to work, it seems that they launched the project something like immediately after the progress of the component technologies brought that feasibility into view. And even then they had to manage risks, and then they had to get the thing into production.
And while that suggests some pretty deep technical savvy at executive levels, they still had heartburn over seemingly simple questions like "can you put radio waves through aluminum?"
It seems to me that the genius of Jobs was 1) to envision customer experiences based on really remarkable extensions / integrations of existing tech and 2) to judge the moment when those visions had gone from "someday" to "now".
Watching the original iPhone unveil, it was pretty surprising to see all the Google love from Steve, and Eric Schmidt come bounding onto the stage http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxUDiS3AR0M
>What worries Apple fans most of all is not knowing where the company is headed.
As a former Apple fan, I actually find the iPhone's hemorrhaging of market share and Apple's uncertain future extremely encouraging. I always attributed the things I liked about Apple to their struggling underdog status. They lost that with the iPhone, and they've never been the same since.
It will be fascinating to see if some of the old Apple shines through in the years to come.
If you look at the general course of Apple, they've generally been quite consistent in their road map. I think the incredible success of the iPhone might cause a slump for a while, but then they'll just continue what they've been doing for a while: releasing good, high-end and profitable products and comfortably occupying multiple niches.
Alternatively, they might create a few more iPhone- and iPad-like successes and continue ruling new and existing product categories.
In both cases, they'll keep 'shining' for quite some time. If that stops, it'll suck for people like me who are fully invested in their ecosystem. That said, I switched to a Nexus 4 recently and it was surprisingly painless.
I think it is hilarious how Jobs basically reinvented the wheel when it came to operations security, when there have been major organizations doing secret things for decades that he could have pulled the lessons from.
I always thought Apple took the iPod and added phone radio to it, then they took out the radio, made the screen big and called it iPad.
Not anymore. This is interesting stuff.
iOS is starting to regain marketshare from Android. Now that Apple is making serious downmarket moves with the 5C, it may soon be time to rethink whether Android was ultimately successful at competing with Apple.
Within two years, non-iPhone smartphones will be niche players with partisan user bases, but the bulk of mobile development will be once again for iOS.
The saddest thing about this viewpoint, is that even Apple doesn't want to achieve it. You are living in a fantasy universe that even the company you idolise doesn't see as desirable. Apple doesn't want to cater to the low end. If they were ever going to do it, they would have with the 5c. It's never going to happen.
And further, the large mainstream bulk of consumers are never going to want luxury, high end devices. So Apple is never going to reduce the other players to a "niche". The big question is largely around whether they try to occupy the top 50% of the market or the top 25% of the top 10%. But they've made it extremely clear that they have no interest in trying to hit the top 75%, let alone the top 100% of the market.
On the other hand, perhaps not so extreme, Americans are generally unaware that they way they purchase cellphones, subsidized by the carrier and attached to a contract, is not the way people in the rest in the world do it.
Dude, I'm an iOS fan, but you sound kind of like Baghdad Bob.
Absent a major schism between Samsung and Google, or the sudden rise of a competitor (Amazon?) who competes very hard at the low end, Android/GooglePlay is here to stay - it's Google's second major platform (other being Adwords/Adsense)
What is more likely is that the talk about iOS going the way of Mac because Cook != Jobs will dissipate, as Apple continues to successfully compete.
At $550 out of contract, the 5c is not a serious downmarket move. It may be the illusion of one, though. I paid roughly that for my Nexus One in 2010 and paid $350 for my Nexus 4 almost a year ago.
I'm pretty diehard Android fan, but I don't believe for a second that they've sured up the market for good. I think all companies involved will have to continue competing vigorously and I like that just fine.
Based on that comment, you have no idea what a downmarket customer is (even in the US). They aren't people who get phones "free" on contract. Downmarket customers don't have contracts. Sometimes they can't afford the guaranteed monthly expense. Often no one will give them a contract, usually because of poor credit. They're the ones who appreciate $99 or cheaper smartphones because, as limited and out-of-date as they are, they're still a big step up from the feature phones they were getting.
Yeah, I don't see Apple selling as far downmarket as, say, Tracfone. But they'll capture the midrange to low end of the contract market which is downmarket from where they were before.
iOS is starting to regain marketshare from Android.
They just released a new iPhone. It's probably fair to say that that will be a short-term bump that will flatten in good time.
I think it's seriously disingenuous to describe the 5C as a "serious downmarket move". It's a token move at best, and doesn't get anywhere near the price point a "downmarket" device would require.
Based on the pricing we're seeing on the 5C (some offers for $50 or $100 less than announced price) Apple is putting some flexibility in its wholesale pricing to give third parties more wiggle room with the 5C. So it's by no means a "cheap" phone, but it's not as expensive as it first appears.
As for Apple gaining market share in the US, I think what we've seen is that Android is starting to run out of feature phones to replace, so it's now in a fight for the high end space with Apple, which will probably see movement in both directions for a while. I suspect a significant portion of the iPhone market and a larger portion of the Android market is really just phones with touch screens -- these are people who don't buy apps or use most of their phones' capabilities. The "network" effects that will determine the fates of the ecosystems depend on people using their phones as computers rather than merely phones.
In Europe recently Windows phone (i.e. Nokia) is doing very well. It will be interesting to see how that plays out too.
I don't think it either a "serious downmarket move" or a "token". I think it is the iPod mini for the iPhone generation. It is the hint at the iPod strategy moving to the iPhone after all this time. I would imagine we are a generation or two from the actual downmarket move.
They gained share on Android last quarter, which doesn't include their newly launched phones. Horace Dediu raised the idea that Android has peaked in the US a few months ago, and the latest numbers seem to back him up.
> iOS is starting to regain marketshare from Android.
There is zero evidence of that and plenty of evidence that it's the opposite. Android is activating more than twice as many phones as the iPhone every day, it's a gap that the iPhone will not be filling for at least five years, if ever.
In the US it has been happening, and is a fascinating anomaly. Apple has grown to 40.7% of all US mobile subscribers - and that was before the new launch.
That's massive, and completely different from the rest of the world.
I remember seeing the iPhone unveiled and thinking "It's cool, but will people really buy such an expensive phone?". I think it was $600. That was pretty expensive at the time. I also remember thinking about how they wanted all apps to be web-based. A disaster for certain I thought. The phone market was all over the place and brand loyalty was in short supply. I'd seen compaq go from dominating PDAs and nosedive off the cliff. Motorola took their brand loyalty (remember how many people had Razrs?) and went into hiding. Time and again I'd seen phone platforms rise and fall. I was skeptical.
All I knew was one thing - I certainly wasn't going to buy one.
Years later and I now program for iOS a lot. Everyday pretty much. I'm a full blown Mac convert and I'll be honest, the iPhone was what caused it. I bought my first iPhone at version 4. Then I specifically bought my first Mac so I could use the SDK for that phone. I fell in love with the platform, in all its insane glory.
I might move to another platform one day, but I can honestly say I never imagined this is what I would be working on.