“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.]