“iPhone 6 represents a willingness to cater to the market, to give the market what it wants (a larger screen iPhone) rather than adhering to an oddly Socratic ideal of ‘best.’ There is no best in an absolute sense, when it comes to consumer electronics. Apple’s belief that the 4 inch iPhone screen was the ‘best size’ had become an anachronism,” Mark Hibben writes for Seeking Alpha. iPhone 6 demonstrates Cook’s ability to strike the balance that Jobs achieved so well.””
“Now we know the true extent of the build out by Apple in anticipation of last weekend, as well as their failure to meet demand for the Plus. As of Sunday evening, the online Apple Store showed a typical iPhone 6 back ordered 7-10 business days, while the iPhone 6 Plus was back ordered 3-4 weeks,” Hibben writes. “Once Apple cranks up supply in calendar Q4, I expect the competition to be shredded. What really can stand up to iPhone 6? Windows Phone, with its sinking market share, antiquated 32 bit processors, and, let’s face, unpopular UI? Or the new, untested Android L? And where is a 64 bit equivalent to the A8? Intel’s 64 bit Merrifield? Try Googling Merrifield and see if you can find anything since February. If you do, be sure to let me know.”
“The lack of effective competition sets Apple up nicely for huge iPhone unit sales for the December quarter of upwards of 60 million units, for a y/y gain of about 20%. With this kind of unit sales growth, Apple is sure to gain smartphone market share, as it usually does in the December quarter,” Hibben writes. “More importantly, Apple will gain sustainable market share among the top 5 tier of smartphone vendors, a metric that I’ve proposed is more relevant since I wrote “Apple’s iPhone 6 Event: A Turning Point” in August. This metric excludes “white box” Android devices that don’t significantly contribute to the Android ecosystem and probably shouldn’t be counted as smartphones.”
Read more in the full article here.
No kidding, I wonder why?
It stands to reason. They can’t compete with the 5s either. Or the 5c, or the 5, or the 4s, or the 4, or the 3GS, or the… 🙂
“Apple is sure to gain smartphone market share,…” And with that market share gain all about 80% of smartphone profits. Great job Tim and company.
With both marketshare gains, and average-selling-price gains, due to the higher priced plus models, Apple is going to have blow out profits the next quarter or so.
80%? Sounds about right to me. Or, as profit share goes when there are losers: Apple with 100%, Samsung with 25%, everyone else together loses 25%.
Apple gave new meaning to “Size matters”. Android boasted about size but “failed” prematurely.
Google has a new Android coming that is going to blow Apple’s product away by being infinitely more power efficient; The Android Abacus.
Ah, the first truly digital Android! 😆
Bo….
is a dreamer….
I bet he dreams it every day……
Hope “Bo” is a Day Dreamer !
Don’t want to have wet nights !!
True and it is a 64 bead abacus!
Clearly, it isn’t size, but what you do with it.
Want to see margins get blown out wait till the watch comes on board …..
Margins on the Apple watch have to be huge with all the accessories that go along with it, killer product ….
Can’t innovate my ass!
But, wait… 64-bit processors are nothing special, especially for smartphones. Who needs ’em? 64-bit processors are no innovation. It’s all about how many cores you can have working for ya at once. Muhahaha.
/s
I’m really happy that Apple is vindicated after having to put up with so many jackasses who can’t seem to understand what’s important to Apple is done for their own reasons. Why can’t they just let Apple do it’s own thing without trashing Apple and spreading lies? Tim Cook is doing a fine job and yet people are still trying to second-guess him. What more can he do?
Apple will never have the equivalent of Android One to grab a billion more BRIC users. Apple is going to have to play to its own strengths of higher-cost, quality products for those who can afford them.
Apple has to wait for the Fire Phone to gain a foothold, then watch out! And then there’s the BlackBerry Passport (we told the engineers to think outside the box, not about one!) that’ll give the 6+ a run for its money!
Apple’s getting too complacent.
The problem I have with Seeking Alpha is that they want to harvest me, tantalising me with cunning conundrums, wheedling me into joining a borg registry of ten million. What they little realise is that I can already access superior wisdom through casting the I Ching, achieving greater awareness of the market’s subtle movements through introspective study of random hexagrams than through their dubious cocaine-induced musings.
Or Elliott wave theory. 🙂
I’ll bet you love to stare in a mirror and admire yourself. I’m sure there is a place for convoluted and banal patter such as yours somewhere, but it isn’t here.
Eat my shorts.
Yeah, you didn’t get it, you couldn’t get it—I was being publicly thanked in code.
Judging by the votes, you seem to be wrong on this one.
The wonders of omphaloskepsis! 🙂
I have been using the 5S for several months now and I haven’t been able to see any compelling reason to have a 64 bit processor in it. As far as I can see, it is a hopeful move on Apple’s part to get developers moving on it. The reality may be that they are just gearing up for selling much more memory at $100 for each next higher model. Most of the memory will be filled with zeros to occupy the higher order bytes and waste the memory.
Back in my early history, we had 8 bit processors and programmed with 1’s and zeros. Often times, we didn’t even get the 1’s and had to program entirely with zeros.
Funny you should ask. I’m partway through the Ars review and came across this:
“Depending on the type of work being done, 64-bit apps running on an ARMv8 chip like the Apple A7 or A8 pick up a nice speed boost compared to 32-bit apps running on the same chip; our benchmarks from last year show an average boost of around 30 percent. Last year when Apple said the A7 could be as much as twice as fast as the A6, it was conditional—it could be twice as fast as the A6, but only if your apps had also made the jump to 64-bit. iOS itself and all of Apple’s built-in apps made the leap on the day the iPhone 5S was released, though developers are taking longer to climb aboard.”
So it could be the apps you’re using are still 32 bit and it’t time to start bugging the developers. 3 out of the 4 phones Apple is selling are 64 bit and it’s time to give the developers hell. They knew this was coming and had a year to prepare. The guys who wrote Infinity Blade 3 took 2 hours to convert it to 64 bit so there’s no excuse other than laziness, or if your app doesn’t need speed.
BTW, how’d those zero only programs turn out? Must have run very fast!
“More importantly, Apple will gain sustainable market share among the top 5 tier of smartphone vendors”
You’re expending so much energy to basically calculate profit share, which guys like Horace Dediu have been able to figure out from public financial reports
http://www.asymco.com/2011/07/29/apple-captured-two-thirds-of-available-mobile-phone-profits-in-q2/
According to reports Foxconn is producing around 400K iPhone 6 and 150K iPhone 6 Plus. Pegatron is producing around 30 percent of the iPhone 6 or roughly 150K. So, the total number of 6’s produced each day is around 700K. Multiply this number by 90 days and the total equals 63 million. Add another 12 from other models and the forecast iPhones sold in the December 2014 quarter is 75 million, not 60.
I believe demand is so high (there are reports of lines tonight) that Apple can sell at least 75 million phones in each of the FY2015 quarters for a total around 300 million.
In another discussion group it was suggested that 4s owners should upgrade to the many fine Android phones available. It was an out of place comment due to the discussion being about iOS 8 on the 4s, so I cranked the snark level up a notch.
“Android phones are made by one company building an SoC, another company, who makes money by collecting and selling data about its users, writing the OS and a third company building the rest of the phone and getting all three to work together while putting their own interface between the user and OS, then it goes to a carrier who loads some extra bloatware on top just for fun.
Yeah, gimmie one!”
Think I overdid it?
The important thing about performance is not raw power but optimization. This is where the iPhone really shines. Optimization for Android has a lot of challenges as the same OS has to work with so many different devices. It is very much like the PC wars. The PPC was so much more efficient than the Pentium that it could crank out twice as much as a Pentium running at the same speed. The marketing problem was that uneducated buyers (i.e., nearly everyone) would consider clock speed, RAM and storage as everything, leading them to believe that the PC was a better performer. It wasn’t, but it was too much of a challenge to explain this to a shopper, particularly when the salesperson knew about nothing but Windows machines. What made it even worse was that around 20% of PCs were running CPUs that were far faster than the motherboards, cutting the the actual processing speed by nearly half. It didn’t matter to consumers because they never knew about it.
The PPC era has few successes. The first was undoubtably the G3 processor. A huge advance over previous generations and was used in the very successful iMac and iBook. The G4 was okay but supply became an issue.
Still PCs kicked ass because of the variety of choices, better pricing and the success of Win95.
The processors were still hampered by the OS. It wasn’t until OSX came out that the future started to change. Apple regained its lead in OS development and started to claw back share and visibility in part due to security issues with Win.
The final nail in the coffin was the shift to Intel. This removed a major barrier with chip availability and development. Tied with the superior OS, Macs have surged ahead in personal use. Businesses will primarily use Win machines because of conceived cost savings, although I would imagine the Win, Server and Office licenses must cost a pretty penny.
As Steve Jobs said: “Our competitors are flummoxed.”
The writer means, “Platonic” not, “Socratic.”