“Apple smartphone share down to 13 percent; iPad share in decline; Developers can’t keep their NDA; senior execs selling Apple shares: Things look a little dreary for the world’s biggest fruit company,” Jonny Evans writes for Computerworld. “Or do they?”
“Surely there will come a day when the world’s discerning consumers will look beyond a headline, follow the money to uncover who paid for a report, or ask themselves if what they happen to be reading tallies with their experiential awareness of reality?” Evans asks. “One lives in hope, but at what point does hope transmute and become denial? Is the visceral experience of a consumer, media-battered into some form of post-modern bespoke reality something possessed of its own integrity, or just a vessel of received vision possessed of none?”
Evans writes, “Apple’s position in all the rumor, conjecture, hatred and speculation seems relatively clear: it’s ignoring you. Why? Apple is working really, really hard.”
Read more in the full article here.
If Apple weren’t a big deal, no one would give it a second look. The fact is, EVERYONE is looking at Apple either with hatred or love. Apple evokes emotions like no other brand does, especially in the technology world.
So called Windrones and Fandroids, have proven not to be pro-whatever-they-use, but rather anti-Apple. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard from people their number reason for using what they use is because, “It’s not Apple.”
One person told me, “I don’t want Apple controlling everything!”
I looked at him with astonishment and asked him, while waving my iPhone in the air, “How does this device control me or anything else?”
His lame (default fantroid) answer was, “Well you can’t customize it.”
To which I replied, “If I didn’t like what it was when I bought it, I wouldn’t have bought it. Trying to make something better after the fact, means you bought a turd and now you’re trying to polish it.”
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! Perfect analogy!
infinity. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Brilliant!
Customization is definitely not the drawback of the non-Apple world. Quality, privacy, security, durability, product support, etc are the real reasons that the rest of the tech world looks so unappealing.
Apple, however, would be wise to avoid unnecessarily restricting consumer options and customization.
Telling other people that their products are turds, true or not, only gives the Apple community the reputation that we are all stuck-up snobs.
If I had started out the conversation calling their phone a piece of crap and extolling the virtues of my iPhone, then that would be highly snobbish. However, I normally don’t comment on other people’s phones, because I’m happy with mine. What do I care what other people choose to use? I don’t.
The fact is, Fandroids are ALWAYS the FIRST to make a derogatory comment about Apple and their products and about the people who choose to use them. Exactly the same thing Windrones used to do in the early 90’s. Why? Because they obviously HATE that they HATE Apple so damned much and have to settle for using something else.
Apple restricts customization of the interface, because they want to make it clear that the “look” of the interface is not what is important, it’s the experience of using it. The need to customize something is the need to make yourself feel better about using your device – to make it more enjoyable. Apple accomplishes this in other more subtle ways; originally the animations did this, and in iOS 7 the applied physics will take the animations to a whole new level.
I don’t think the typical consumer reads any of the crap written about Apple.
I think you can finish your thought at:
“I don’t think the typical consumer reads …”
What I’ve found, especially if you look at “traditional news outlets” (meaning NOT MDN, Macworld, AI . . .) is that typical consumers may not read the crap written about Apple, but they sure as hell comment about it in the articles they haven’t read. Go to CNN or (God forbid) NBC news and look at the comments on any article about Apple or Samsung. It’s hard to believe that some of those people can actually USE a computer/phone/tablet, much less know anything about them.
Yes it tends to feed down the food chain from those who do read it and use it as ‘proof’ to influence others till misconceptions become the norm. I herd a geeky bank teller a while back going on to a customer about how much better his galaxy was to an iPhone with no real factual reasoning. The perceptions and FUD are spread in this fashion until it is barely questioned.
Samsung figured spending a billion dollars on ads, erecting an army of internet trolls and sponsoring a litany of unflattering market reports would be enough to bring Cupertino to its knees.
They’re in for a rude awakening.
Maybe in a couple of years, we’ll look back at Eric Schmidt’s recent comments about the thawing of the icy Apple-Google relationship as solely referring to cooperation around NSA/privacy issues.
iTunes Radio by all accounts will be a huge success, and it will help Apple improve its ad network.
Evans deals out some flowery language and more complex thoughts that most of the rapid fire journalism so prevalent these days.
Apple anchors its technological solutions in the user experience and has a vision and a plan that scales from the long term down to the individual steps that will eventually bring this vision to fruition. Since 1998, these hardware and software steps have generally occurred ever two or three years in a release-expand-refine process. Apple is not just skating to where the puck will be, it is defining the playing field and knows where it expects the puck to be in ten or twenty years.
im sure Evans would be ever so pleased to see that someone noticed what he’s trying to do. I’m pretty sure he’d appreciate that and say thanks.thanks.
I have a feeling that Jonny Evans doesn’t even know what some of the words he used actually mean.
I especially enjoyed this pearl of wisdom: “experiential awareness of reality.”
Apple hasn’t been beleaguered in any of the years since the original iPhone was released. While headlines blast the fact that Apple’s global marketshare is down to 13%, not much is made of the latest comShare report that shows Apple sells as many smartphones in the U.S. as Samsung, HTC, and Motorola combined. This despite not having a big screen model phone, having lost its innovative edge, and all the other exaggerations that have been tossed about. Oh, and as MDN mentioned, not having released a new model iPhone in about a year.
It’s true that global trends and emerging markets matter, but the “Apple is Lost” and “Samsung is crushing Apple” memes are a joke.
These reports also never mention that out of all these Android makers only one is making a profit and that the vast majority of Android handsets are free phones that will never see an update. If Android phones were actually really selling well would you see a company like samsung selling their flagship phone the S4 on a buy one get one free promotion. That reeks of a backed up supply chain.
The cheap phones you disdain represent lost sales that Apple will not capture into its very profitable app store & ecosystem.
Apple can, and should, release a high-quality low-margin phone to show how bad the competition really is. It is strategically important for Apple to attract new customers into the fold the way low-cost iPods do. Without a staircase of products, Apple is losing huge chunks of the mobile market to the competitor that does … and many of them, once hooked on Android, are simply not going to switch. Why would they? Apple isn’t offering anything new or of an apparently better value than the competition. If you cover over the picture and the manufacturer name, and objectively look at the specs and prices of the iPhone versus any other TOTAL package: handset, ecosystem, and dataplan, Apple is no longer the clear standout the way it once was. That’s gotta change fast, and Cook isn’t getting it done.
Yeah. You’re wrong. The people who buy the cheap smartphones aren’t the same people that buy into the platform. Selling a low cost phone to a customer that is not going to invest in the ecosystem is a ONE time sale. Apple isn’t looking for these types of customers – they never have.
Giving a phone away for free to someone who’s willing to spend $80 a month for two years is a much better customer in the long for Apple… These people obviously are willing to make a commitment and are much more likely to help expand the platform’s user base in the long run.
The US is not the world.
As big money continues to short Apple and pay for FUD and Apple forum infiltration…notice that Apple is strangely down the past few days despite significant legal victories…
Go Samscum, keep spending your money unearned money – easy come easy go.
Anyone can ship millions of phones. Apple reports sales to endusers. Samscum now needs to sell all those phones so they can ship millions more.
Ship to claim share worry about actually getting them out of the channel later.
They don’t have to ship to claim share. They don’t claim share. They don’t announce how many they ship. It’s just someone’s guess.
Exactly. But one can guess from the 2-for-1 deals not even 4 months since the S4’s debut that they shipped way more than got sold at full price.