“Today, there are well over 2bn smartphones in use, and there are between 3.5 and 4.5bn people with a mobile phone of some kind, out of only a little over 5bn adults on earth,” Benedict Evans blogs. “Over the next few years almost all of the people who don’t yet have a phone will get one, and almost all of the phones on earth will become smartphones.”
“What all those people pay for data, and how they charge their phones, may be a challenge, but the smartphone itself is close to a universal product for humanity – the first the tech industry has ever had,” Evans writes. “With billions of people buying a device every two years, on average, the phone business dwarfs the PC business, which has an install base of 1.5-1.6bn devices replaced every 4-5 years. PC sales are a bit over 300m units a year where phone sales are now close to 2bn, of which well over half, and growing, are now smartphones.”
Evans writes, “When we ask, then, how many people will own a smart watch, or a tablet or smart thermostat and so on, or how connected cars work, or who will control them or what software they will run, it seems to me that the best way to think of this is as a solar system – the smartphone is the Sun and everything else orbits around it.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes.
When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people. I think that we’re embarked on that. — Steve Jobs, June, 2010
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
Silly man.
Apple is the Sun.
The Internet is the Solar System.
The Internet of Things are the planets, moons, comets, asteroids, etc.
I’m an Internaut.
I’m confused. What was time again?
That wibbly wobbly thing
Makes more sense than the smartphone being the centre. Mind you there are plenty of flat earth techies out there using Windows.
And AAPL is down again this morning.
Big time. $105 soon?
I am afraid so. It is dropping like no tomorrow. 🙁
Can Apple defend its stock with $200B cash in the bank.
7 months. It’s down for the last seven months. And the iPhone refresh isn’t going to change things. Why would it? Apple has no one beating the drum for them. That and terrible advertising is killing them. Along with a failure in services. Consistent failures in services. it’s all about execution and promoting your products and services. Apple is failing miserably. It’s not Wall Street, it’s in Cupertino.
Down 3%
AAPL is on sale! Buy as much as you can.
So the Google sunglasses are the black hole.
Samsung is a piece of space junk orbiting uranus.
MDN take needs to go back further, to Steve’s “digital hub”: http://tommytoy.typepad.com/.a/6a0133f3a4072c970b0147e37c3b8c970b-550wi
The smartphone is the fastest adopted technology in the history of humans. It is mind blowing in a lot of ways. Google One will soon kill the feature phone. It is a free hardware design, so now there is little R&D cost for small smartphone makers. Razor thin profits, however can have home country advantage. Right after iPhone and Android took off Blackberry had record sales while quickly loosing market share. So far Smartphones have all but killed point-and-shoot cameras, music players, portable games, voice recorders. They have slowed PC sales, and are taking on remote controls. Oh yeah, they make great flashlights.
One day the sun will be our brains. A genetic tweak will give us the ability to communicate with the Universe via thought. Want to write a novel? The gist will be completed within seconds.