“A billionaire tycoon with a taste for publicity hardly needs more support, but the inescapable truth is Carl Icahn is right about the iPhone,” Marcus Wohlsen writes for Wired. “Not only will Apple continue holding on to current iPhone users, Icahn argues, but the company has with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus undermined the last good reason to stick with hardware running Android: larger screen size.”
“The validity of Icahn’s argument hinges on a development we observed earlier this week as Apple’s chief rival, Samsung, warned of a steep dip in profits. As major differences between phones—screen size, battery life, durability— continue to narrow, software becomes the key distinction setting one handset apart from another,” Wohlsen writes. “And in the software game, Apple has a competitive advantage Android can never cop… Apple is the only company to have both software and hardware totally under its control.”
“The tight integration of Apple’s software and hardware make the iPhone the only mobile platform on which innovation is universally consistent,” Wohlsen writes. “And because Apple can offer that assurance, it has much greater leverage in attempting to lure Android users to cross the great divide to iOS than the other way around. Take Apple Pay… With one decisive stroke, Apple was able to say, ‘Here’s a significant new feature that every new phone will have and that you can actually use.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yup.
An iPhone with a larger screen option will hurt Samsung immeasurably more than myriad, unending traipses through the legal morass. – MacDailyNews, May 2, 2014
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