“Shares in Apple touched another record high on Friday, as anticipation builds for this week’s iPhone launch,” Tim Bradshaw and Paul Taylor report for The Financial Times. “Hints in the artwork of the invitation to the launch event in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center suggest that Apple’s latest smartphone will indeed be called the iPhone 5, which was one of the world’s most popular search terms in 2011 despite that year’s launch of the iPhone 4S.”
“Yet the leaks and rumours coalescing around the new iPhone suggest that it may not be the huge leap forward that many Apple investors and customers long for,” Bradshaw and Taylor report. “The device is expected to have a thinner profile with a longer screen that is nonetheless still smaller than Samsung’s Galaxy S3 or Motorola’s latest RAZRs, launched last week. The iPhone 5 is almost certain to be faster, with an upgraded processor and 4G cellular data connection, using the same LTE technology as the latest iPad and most other new smartphones.”
Bradshaw and Taylor report, “The iPhone launches into a more competitive mobile market than ever… IHS Screen Digest predicts that Windows Phone will grow 140 per cent in 2013 but remain “a distant third” behind Apple and Google’s Android-based smartphones. If Windows and Nokia remain unlikely to derail the new iPhone, a more immediate threat is from Google itself. IHS forecasts Google’s Android smartphones will retain a huge lead over Apple by the end of this year, with 550m active smartphones globally compared with 250m iPhones.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Bigger isn’t better. Quality of display, operating system, one-handed usability, pocketability, aspect ratios, and other factors are more important than a diagonal size number. If you can’t read on a 4-inch Retina display, your next step is a visit to your eye doctor or your nearest Apple Store for an iPad (or, soon, perhaps, an iPad mini).
Fact: Even if the only changes are a taller screen (with a significant screen area increase of nearly 20%) and 4G LTE (and we know iOS 6 including a significantly improved Siri are also coming), the iPhone 5 will break all smartphone sales records – just like every single iPhone model before it.
As for market share, that’s nice. How did Android ever manage to achieve that? After all Android only infringed on Apple’s design patents, it’s slapped into 1,000+ models, they count phones so removed from “Android smartphones” as to be unrecognizable, they are constantly sold under “Buy One, Get X Number Free” promotions, etc.).
Profit share is better: Apple rakes in 71% of the world’s smartphone profits – September 8, 2012.
Naysayers, AAPL shareholders thank you – any lowering of expectations ahead of Wednesday only helps Apple.
Related article:
It’s official: Apple invites media to iPhone 5 special event on September 12 – September 4, 2012