“There is a reason why large companies have a number of bean counters. Numbers are important. Some numbers are more valuable than others. Sure, Microsoft’s Windows operating system has about 80-percent or so of the worldwide PC market, and Apple’s OS X and the Mac, despite record sales, are left in the dust,” Kate MacKenzie writes for Mac360. “Uh huh. Sure. Except that Apple’s Mac continues to sell record numbers every quarter and now holds more than half of the entire PC industry’s profits.”
“Windows Phone is Windows on a smartphone. Or, rather, on very few smartphones. It’s the Windows people love to hate but in your hand,” MacKenzie writes. “Windows Phone is a fail. Sooner or later the bean counters will force the company’s deluded executives to Think Different™ and do what they did to former CEO Steve Ballmer.”
“What about Android, Google’s incredibly popular mobile device operating system? It owns over 80-percent of the smartphone and tablet industry’s market share,” MacKenzie writes. “What else? Nothing. Only Samsung, the premier Android device maker, makes sufficient profits to count, and those are nearly 20-times less than Apple’s which make up about 95-percent of the entire industry’s profits.”
“Windows Phone? Android? They’re dead,” MacKenzie writes. “All we’re waiting for is the obituaries and the funerals.”
Read more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: The minute after Apple dumps Google as iOS’s default search engine, Alphabet Inc. will be gasping for air. That’s a lot of revenue and nearly all of the prime customers to lose in an instant. Apple CEO Tim Cook holds all the cards.
Google’s going to rue the day they got greedy by deciding to try to work against Apple instead of with them. – MacDailyNews, March 9, 2010
SEE ALSO:
CIRP: Android users upgrading to Apple iPhone at unprecedented rate – December 2, 2015
Millions of Android settlers are now upgrading to Apple’s iPhone – November 24, 2015
Apple’s iPhone can soon reap 100 percent of world’s smartphone profits – November 17, 2015
Apple’s iPhone owns 94% of smartphone industry’s profits – November 16, 2015
IDC: Apple iPhone sales up up 22.2% as new models capture upgraders and Android converts alike – October 29, 2015
Apple iPhone owns over 90% of smartphone profits, so why do others even bother fighting over Apple’s scraps? – October 8, 2015
Apple’s iPhone owns 92% of smartphone industry’s profits – July 13, 2015
I have to use a Windows Phone for work. It is the worst piece of garbage out there. Badly designed hardware & software. No wonder the only people using it are through enterprise – why would anybody possibly choose it for personal use?
Different strokes for different folks . . . My family and employees have been using WP for quite a while, and I have heard few complaints, none of which related to the OS or hardware.
I had a Windows Phone. It was way better than Android.
While my iPhone experience is superior in every way, I did not hate Windows Phone. In some ways, it was very good. Hardware is very decent for a low cost smartphone, OS does what it’s supposed to do, and intergration with Mac OS X is better than Android’s.
Of course, being in an Apple ecosystem, no integration with iTunes, is a big issue. Plus, the lack of my favorite apps was a big issue. And, of course, Google sabotaging it is an issue (Waze in WP is outdated, flawed, and Google has no intentions to fix it).
But, add good apps to the Windows Phone, and it’s a very good phone.
Android is a mess. Awful apps, awful user experience, awful integration… my experience was awful.
Your right.. If we get the apps . Android and windows phones are the future. Their are a thousand different phones for all types of people…why would u ever want a piece of hardware that u can’t make your own? Apples os is garb. And every one is oblivious. Why pay more for every god damn thing that comes out of apples r and d department… Hey apple why don’t u call it a stylus.. No u need to call it the apple pencil.. Why not put a bigger battery in their phones? So they can sell u an over priced piece of shit back plat they ripped off from some where else.. Apple is not innovating their stealing, and slapping a chewed up apple on it doesn’t make that ok. This article is garbage too. Such tragedy that they let this kind of shit get published
Android is winning… winning at being the most fragmented product in all of computing history. At least they’re winning at something. Thousands of devices that aren’t getting required software updates and security patches. Yeah… that’s great.
Where as the iPhone has GUARANTEED software updates!!!! Let me repeat that again. The iPhone has GUARANTEED software updates!!!! If you care one damn bit about the security of the data that you hold on your mobile device, you buy an iPhone!
I’m curious – which Android phone did you use, and how recently? Was it a Nexus by any chance?
I have an iPhone in the same boat. It’s useless and slow. I have to carry around a Windows Phone to get anything done of a personal nature. I have an Android for a house phone that gets turned on a half dozen times a year. No one phone will do what everyone wants.
Update to iOS 9.2, it fixes the lag.
Torpedoing Googlebet’s search on iPhone won’t come a minute too soon.
The personal bias is strong in this “article.”
This is “Mac” Daily News for Apple enthusiasts, developers, and investors (many of us are all three), and we call garbage like Android and Windows what it is. So what else were you expecting?
I’d be nice if you’d stay here, but as a Win phone user I just might have to start annoying you coreheads so you might leave win phone fans to our crappy ecosystem without trolling our sites!
I think you meant to say this is Mac Daily “News”.
But yeah, total fanboy article on a fanboy site. The only thing is that people will believe everything they read on the internet, so they’ll think that iOS has no real competition, which is just false. Besides, competition breeds innovation, so I welcome it.
And in your “comment” as well.
Oh my, the Vapors, I’ve been overcome by the vapors. A harsh word about Apple rivals on an Apple enthusiast web page. My dear, Virginia, have we lost all human kindness? The Vapors, the vapors.
Hmmm. … I love my windows devices. Guess I just know how to use mine properly.
Didn’t realise Google was iOS’s default browser. Always thought it was Safari
Not browser, search engine. Google is the default search engine within Safari.
Oh never mind, I just realized you were remarking sarcastically on MDN’s comment x) how embarrassing for MDN.
The dumbest article about tech I’ve ever read. What a waste of time. Even if you consider that this is a site for Apple users.
Thank goodness for Ad-Blockers.
I would hate to contribute revenue to this site since it posts time-wasting nonsense like this and tries to pass it off as an article.
Google’s strategy with Android is simply to gain market share in order to sell advertising. To date that has worked well for Google, except in China where Android is forked and Google has no presence. Android remains popular enough in the The Americas, Asia Pacific, and Europe for Google to generate lots of ad dollars, so this strategy still gets a tick.
Chinese Android manufacturers operate like mini Googles, generating their own soft dollars from their installed base of forked Android phones and tablets, so this strategy continues to work for them, mostly.
Samsung is still making enough profits to justify continuing with their Android phone strategy and have realised that their own o/s will never amount to anything. So Samsung isn’t going away.
Sony and the rest of the Android bunch are in the market at a loss but reluctant to drop out because mobile is such a critical market if you want to be in IT. However I expect to see changes here and various unprofitable handset manufacturers will face reality and focus their energies elsewhere.
Microsoft will keep plugging away at their “Windows everywhere” strategy and that means hanging on in the handset market, despite slow sales. They have various strategies to lift sales, including making it easy for iOS developers to build Windows versions of their apps. If they put some $$ behind this, and if they can find one or two killer apps, then Windows market share might begin to look more solid. They are in this market for the long term and they are improving their product. I expect Windows phone market share to slowly increase, and Microsoft will benefit from the withdrawal of unprofitable Android handset manufacturers when/if that happens.
Apple’s app advantage has largely disappeared – developers are writing for android and iOS and most apps are on both platforms now. Apple’s user-spend advantage in the US is disappearing fast – more $$ were spent on Black Friday by iOS users, but the gap has narrowed significantly. Android users are no longer just the cheapskates!
But iPhone remains the glamour product in all markets and Apple is able to generate huge profits and increasing revenues. Whether the revenue curve changes as the market becomes saturated remains to be seen.
If the rumours of a 4″ iPhone are correct, then this may be the start of an iPod-like strategy by Apple to create products for lower price points. If they can do this without cannibalising their flagship products this will likely lead to market share gains.
Android continues to build market share in tablets. This is a problem for Apple and it’s hard to see what they can really do here – iPad Pro is unlikely to generate enough sales to make a dent here, unless the Pro approach is adopted across the range – even then, android works well enough for most tablet users. Apple’s relationship with IBM may squeeze Microsoft in the corporate market, but it won’t have an impact on personal users.
If Apple do not renew the agreement with Google to specify Google Search as the default on iOS, and if users accept this and don’t change the default back, this will hit Google’s revenues but it won’t change their strategy nor Android’s market share.
I also expect the replacement cycle for phones to increase as the incremental improvements have less and less impact. We are some way from that happening and Apple continues to find new use cases for phones (ApplePay, Health, Siri) and drives processor speed increases. Eventually, however, new features or specs will mean less to users and they will keep their phones longer.
Android and Windows phones are here to stay. The author of this article is just showing wishful thinking…
Thank you. Well said. Good differentiated analysis that I would have also expected from the writer.
“Windows market share might begin to look more solid.”
Windows is finished. Name one, recent Windows-based product that has survived a minimum of two years. Millions upon millions of people now own iPhones and/or iPads. These people will not purchase another craposoft product unless they sniff glue for a living.
“more $$ were spent on Black Friday by iOS users, but the gap has narrowed significantly.”
Yeah, but in 2015 a commanding 78.3% of all mobile purchases were done on iOS devices. In 2014 that number was 79.9%. This means Apple users continue to dominate mobile commerce.
“iPad Pro is unlikely to generate enough sales to make a dent here”
Apple is on track to sell around 15 million iPad Pro’s this quarter (less than 2 months of sales) They sold 21.5 million TOTAL iPads during the December 2014 quarter. This means the iPad Pro is kicking ass.
http://www.twincities.com/technology/ci_29214388/twin-cities-accessories-makers-ipad-pro-gift?source=most_viewed
The iPad Pro growth is expected to continue in 2016.
“Name one, recent Windows-based product that has survived a minimum of two years”
You can’t be serious, right? Maybe, um, Windows? or Office? Or any number of desktop and laptop systems that run the platform?
Unless you mean specifically hardware? In that case, the Surface line of tablets. Also, the Xbox systems. Both of those are huge products, and (now) make money for the company.
Your figures about mobile purchases on iOS devices don’t really say too much other than people who own iOS devices spend more money through those devices than owner of other devices, as a whole. I’m sure this figure would still hold up even when normalized to amount spent per user, but it still doesn’t say anything about the success of the OS, just that people like to buy things via their iOS devices.
IPad has been a huge product for apple, but there have been a lot of recent (and not so recent) analysis of their sales, and sales have been declining for some time. In fact, while it still holds the majority (and the iPad Pro has been a boon to sales), IOS tablets are losing market share now that it has much better competitors, and it is unclear if it will be enough to reverse this trend. (i.e. http://www.businessinsider.com/strategy-analytics-apple-ipad-pro-and-microsoft-windows-sales-2015-11).
I saw the article you linked, and that is a really nice anecdote about a target audience who would make good use of the iPad pro. But that doesn’t really say much about the market as a whole. It would be just as meaningful as me telling you that my company recently adopted the Surface Pro line and it is supported in the Enterprise environment – then using this story to assert that MS is dominating the business market with it’s Surface line. While that was a true story, it hardly means much in the grand scheme of the market, just in my particular use case.
First, I’m not some neophyte and have maintained networks, programmed servers and began coding with MS SQL and VB two decades ago. I have owned dozens of HP, Dell, Samsung, Toshiba and Sony computers since the beginning. ALL have had some failure within two years of purchase. These failures have been the result of hardware and/or software issues.
The last MS computer I purchased was the Samsung tablet recommended to developers by Microsoft in late 2011. This computer is the worst piece of MS-based junk I have ever owned.
In 2012 I purchased my first Apple product and have purchased additional Apple products since. The hardware and software on these devices has been virtually flawless. I’ve never had a major hardware issue and have never had to do a full reformat, wasting days of my time.
Around half the U.S. now owns iPhones and the satisfaction rate is around 90 percent. These people are not going to suddenly wake up tomorrow and think to themselves that Microsoft has magically turned things around with their Surface products. Maybe some naive twenty-something kid will take the plunge, but for the rest of us Microsoft-based hardware is dust in the wind.
In terms of those Windows systems, I’m curious why/how they broke with such regularity? Also (perhaps more important) are they the same price points the Apple products you purchase?
I ask this because most of the time when people complain that MS can’t match Apple hardware, they’re comparing your typical $700-$1000 Windows system vs. a Mac that costs $1200-$1500. You get what you pay for. That being said, I’ve had a Windows laptop that is still running just fine after 5+ years, and my previous laptop took about 6 years before it bit the dust. They were both $750 laptops. By this measure, I should have been able to use one ~$1500 MacBook Pro and have it last at least 10 years before any hardware issues. But I’m going to assume you’re comparing apples to apples here and are talking about $1500 Dell/Toshiba/HP systems, since as you said, you’re no neophyte. But hardware quality has improved greatly over the past couple of decades, regardless of price point.
As an aside – the only full-reformat type problem I’ve ever had with a computer was the first time I installed a second hard drive on my desktop back when they still used IDE drives, and I was a kid so I didn’t know you had to set a second drive as ‘slave’ (needless to say, having two master drives in the PC confused it, and it tried to reinstall all of my hardware as a new system). A learning experience for sure, but now that we have SATA that lesson is irrelevant anyway.
Based on our respective experiences, I’m going to assume that your Apple products are lasting at least 4 years a piece before you need to replace them, and that mine will last 10. I’m currently on a 3 year old MBP, and it is struggling to keep up, even though I upgraded it to 8gb ram. It could probably keep chugging for a few more years with no major issues though – I’m hopeful, but I’ll likely want a hardware upgrade long before I hit the 10 year mark anyway.
>Maybe some naive twenty-something kid will take the plunge, but for the rest of us Microsoft-based hardware is dust in the wind.
This is funny to me, because it was the naiive 20-something kids who really made iPhone such a hit by taking the plunge. And now look at it! For the record, I’m not saying Surface is magically turning MS around as a company, but this first-party hardware is much better than the varied quality you used to get 10-20 years ago from the likes of Dell/HP/Toshiba/etc.
But…. none of this has anything to do with the point of this article, or even my previous comment. Cheers!
U fucks are the same.. Ignorant brainwashed apple fans.. I just don’t get what u people see in that shit
Ha ha what a ridiculous article. Is this for real? So the two operating systems that own the entire world will disappear because they don’t earn the same revenue percentage as apple. Are you serious? Microsoft and google will dissolve because they don’t make the sane margins as apple. Is it even worth leaving a comment on something so moronic? Probably not.
In that case one has to a ask why you did… It certainly didn’t add anything of note to the discussion.
Is this article the result of a middle school position paper assignment? Seriously lacking in critical thinking and analysis.
MSFT, based on the inferior products ie….Surface PRO 4 and Surface Book should just trade all of their stock at .03 on the $ to Apple and just die already! Who wants this BS? I personally love $25 Usb cables and an $800 (and rising) phone every two, no every year!
Good old apple sheep, your phones keep doing dumb shit to you, apple cloud is a porous joke and yet you praise the pieces of garbage! You people are hilarious…ya I got a windows phone, and it has never frozen on me, onedrive (which MS has given me a free TERABITE!!!!!) has never screwed me over, unlike iphone 6 did for thousands, my phone is three years old and is still as fast as it was the day I got it, this phone has updated dozens of times and not once did i ever have to delete a bunch of my shit to get it….apples a joke and android is worse but the biggest joke of all is all you sheep going ape shit over garbage
Dear Chuck: Could you be more troll?
It’s good to hear good things about your Windows Phone. But you can’t spell (terabyte). You pile on invectives like a trailer trash. You end up being the joke.
As for the Apple ‘sheep’ theory, you haven’t been around here very long, have you! Apple fanatics are the most demanding tech users in the world. MDN makes that entirely clear, if you’d bother actually reading the comments, such as mine below.
“Apple fanatics are the most demanding tech users in the world.”
LOL. Maybe a small fraction of them, but any true tech nerd I know gets frustrated by Mac due to its closed nature. A good number of Mac users don’t even know how to fully use their phones, let alone demand new features. Most just buy the new Mac or iPhone because “it is the best” without taking a minute to think about any alternatives, or what actually makes it “the best”. Or, at best, they recognize it might not be the best, but they’ve gotten used to it and are in the ecosystem already.
Have you met a linux user? Or someone who builds their own Windows PCs? Or a PC gamer? I guess that last one doesn’t really exist on MacOS.
Any true tech nerd I know gets frustrated by Mac due to its closed nature
There’s an ignorant comment. What PART of Mac? Apple is involved with over 300 open source projects. They just put the El Capitan version of Darwin up on the net as open source.
Noticing the flag pointing out that you are NOT a Mac user (find it for yourself, I won’t tell you), I don’t see a point in chatting any further.
But I will point out that I stick with my statement: “Apple fanatics are the most demanding tech users in the world.”
Meanwhile, the negative things orly point out about fanaticism are important and worth avoiding.
He pulls the old myth card that Mac users couldn’t possibly be gamers. Here is my counter card that Windows PC users aren’t serious computer users, so of course they have far more gamers. The fact is that the market share for games is far higher for Windows box users. However, I play several games on my Macs, including a number of Windows games via emulation. The limitation with Windows emulators is that none of them support DirectX 11 or 12. Therefore, Mac users have to use BootCamp, booting over to their Windows partition. QED.
Oh look, I know what I’m talking about when I discuss Windows? Too bad orly didn’t bother to know what he was talking about discussing Macs. 😛
QED? So you practice mathematical logic in addition to your troll-trampling skills. Bravo.
Macs don’t have a closed nature, not since Mac OS 9. What they have is a default walled garden, but the savvy user can easily open the garden gate and stroll into the wilderness if she so chooses.
The cruel irony of online games is that you don’t know when you’re getting your ass kicked by a Mac user or a twelve-year-old or a girl. That’s some real butt-hurt for Windows and Android users whose social identities, insignificant in real life, are dependent on dominance in anonymous internet contests.
😀 Walled garden, plus of course the proprietary GUI. Apple also increasingly requires developers to pay for yearly developer membership, most specifically so they can obtain Apple approved software security certificates and write software that works with Apple’s sandboxing system in OS X, which of course is all part of the walled garden.
I don’t do online gaming much, except with my nephew. Therefore, I don’t know about the anonymous gaming culture. But it sounds kind of odd and sad.
Derek, on another topic: I wonder about your enthusiasm for Windows 10. I understand your commitment to your user community; that in itself is laudable. Did you undertake this support role because people were asking for your help with Windows 10? Were they users with new machines with the OS pre-installed, or were some of them asking you if they should respond to the incessant pop-ups insinuating that Nirvana was right around the corner, so Please Upgrade Now?
My sister asked me what she should do…I told her to to ignore the messages. But those intrusive pop-ups don’t go away. Microsoft is extremely aggressive in moving their customers into a new, submissive position, not unlike Adobe and other companies that love money more than customer satisfaction.
I’m a board member at the local ‘PC’ user group. We’ve recently change the unofficial name to ‘Technology’ user group as we rarely talk about Windows.
Because of the Microsoft offer to sign up to basically beta-test Windows 10 and keep it thereafter, I signed up in order to see what was going on. I’ve been running it in Parallels. I gave a presentation to the UG during the beta so members could see what was changing. The UG utterly TRASHED Windows 8. One of our members had demoed how to hack 8 back to 7’s GUI. We kept 8 off our club’s PC laptop. We now run 10, but keep running into bugs.
I’ve heard (via the excellent Security Now! podcast) that Microsoft is in all out assault mode FORCING people’s computers into agreeing to download 10 onto their drives, ready for installation. There’s a free utility to block that download, turning off the ‘default’ setting of downloading. Then MS flipped a switch that automatically flipped user’s choices to NOT download 10. This flip is triggered several times a day, which in turn forced the developer of the free utility to make it run 24/7, vigilantly undoing MS’s dirty work, keeping 10 OFF users drives.
IOW: Evil Marketing Moron behavior from Microsoft. They refuse to let users say ‘NO!’.
I agree that 8 looked awful, but I installed 8.1 on my Mac Pro. Haven’t had any real problems with it, other than puzzling over some of its split personality UI issues. I fear 10 because Microsoft’s new business model is beginning to look like Facebook’s or Google’s — trying to mine our personal data. I quit LinkedIn when they started doing the same thing.
I’m sick of LinkedIn and generally ignore them except for friends. I’m also nauseated at Microsoft’s intensifying insistence upon surveilling their victims, AKA customers, for personal data whether they like it or not.
As for Windows 8 or 8.1, I never bothered with it except to watch demos, which convinced me it was a deeply foolish demolition of the Windows interface for the sake of ‘Gee Whiz’ infliction of their touch GUI. Bleh.
When I read articles like this, it makes me feel *sick* that competition in the marketplace is failing. Much as I LOVE Apple, every company requires competition. Instead, Apple mostly has a lot of lame brain or ripoff competitors. That’s a bad thing.
For those not familiar with the nightmare horror of the MONOPOLY, here’s your homework assignment. It’s depressing stuff:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
I would hardly say that Android is failing in any way. If you think this articles assertions are correct, then maybe you should take a homework assignment and read up on actual facts, like market share.
If you’ve been paying attention, Apple has been incorporating aspects of their competitor’s products into theirs – even more so in the past few years. Just like it goes the other way. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out the hardware features of the Nexus 4 (2012) vs the iPhone 6 (2014). (
) It brought them up to speed with old tech. This wouldn’t have happened without competition (which is very much not dead).
Sure Android may have felt less polished in the past, but if they didn’t push the envelope, iPhone users wouldn’t have a lot of the features they do now. Likewise, the latest android versions are incorporating things that iOS does as well.
Just because someone says something on the internet and publishes it on a website, doesn’t make it the gospel truth.
I think you dialed a wrong number.
Moving along…
I have plenty of experience on IOS and Android even that I don’t like anymore in the case of windows phone I have been using since when windows 7 lunched till now. Still I am not feeling any upset and bored to used it. Now I got windows 10 mobile on my Lumia 930, it gives me awesome user experience. Beautiful live tile home screen and notification awesome. In coming new hardware and software will provide better user experience and every job done experience than predecessor.
I take it English is your second language. Regardless, you’ve done well in expressing yourself. Windows devices are superior to Android devices in terms of support and OS upgrades, and they also do not rely on Google which is an information vampire. Be well.