“Samsung’s announcement of the Galaxy S5 could hardly have been more low key,” Mark Rogowsky writes for Forbes. “After the disaster that was the S4 show, Samsung played this launch straight, letting the phone speak for itself. And certainly the S5 is a nice, evolutionary upgrade over its predecessor. But that’s all it is.”
“Another dull plastic enclosure and a similar overall design will now have Samsung fans echoing a familiar Apple complaint: It looks like last year’s model,” Rogowsky writes. “The Galaxy S5 remains critical to Samsung in that its a huge profit generator but to say that they are perhaps less obsessed with it than with previous phones in the series seems accurate. Part of this may have to do with the fact that Samsung will be spending less on marketing in the year ahead and without that prodigious budget, the company actually has lower expectations for the new model.”
“Apple almost certainly won’t have the iPhone 6 on the market before its typical September refresh, but it already knows that absolute unit growth has been hard to come by with its current pricing,” Rogowsky writes. “While there is no chance it will follow Samsung’s scattershot approach of making dozens of models to hit nearly every price point, CEO Tim Cook seems to have opened the door to more flexibility on how the company will tackle things going forward. The real mystery with Apple is whether it chooses to make a break with Wall Street’s obsession over margins.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple will do what Apple has always done (when they’re successful), sell premium products at premium prices to premium customers.
Apple already owns the high end. If Apple wants to go after mid-range users (and they already are with the 5c and should continue their pursuit), then they will be targeting the “premium” mid-range users. The people who buy content, apps, accessories, and use data participate in Apple’s unparalleled ecosystems. All others can go pound sand; they’re more trouble than they’re worth (which, after the sale, is very little, if anything). Samsung et al. can have them.
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