In the United States, where an iPhone 4 is free,1 customers who have the option of an iPhone choose it in overwhelming numbers (over 80% on AT&T and over 60% on Verizon). It’s increasingly clear that Android market share in the US was a direct result of iPhone carrier restrictions; those are largely gone now. Further subtract the folks who prefer Android, and the addressable market in the US isn’t as big as Frommer portrays it.
This is what increasing availability of the iPhone looks like:
Battery isn’t some one-off feature. You don’t fritter entire train rides away worried that your phone doesn’t have diamond-cut chamfered edges, or which widgets you should have on your home screen. (Or if you do, that is very sad and you should stop.) Your night has never been ruined because your apps load too slowly. We bitch about annoyances, app availability, syncing issues. But if we accept that reception almost entirely subject to outside forces, you’re left with battery life as more or less the only way your phone can totally screw up your plans. It’s the only thing you worry about. And we really need to stop ignoring it.
Time has a good overview of new battery tech that is seeking to solve the problem. Unfortunately most of it looks to be a few years away, at best.
At the end of the day I’d say it’s safe to assume the current crop of high-end ultra mobile devices can deliver GPU performance similar to that of mid to high-end GPUs from 2006. The caveat there is that we have to be talking about performance in workloads that don’t have the same memory bandwidth demands as the games from that same era. While compute power has definitely kept up (as has memory capacity), memory bandwidth is no where near as good as it was on even low end to mainstream cards from that time period.
The iPad 4 impresses; the Surface RT has a lot of work to do.
Fun aside, I think this post by Krzysztof Kowalczyk gets a lot right:
For Google the viability of the web is life or death situation and as such they’ll pour as much resources as necessary to make Blink work. In contrast, Apple is rumored to be pulling engineers from other projects and making them work on iOS 7, because iOS is late and iOS is the priority for them.
For Google, there will hardly be a higher priority project than Blink. It’s a foundation of pretty much everything else they do.
Which is why Apple is in a tight spot: if WebKit suddenly looses [sic] non-Apple contributions, they’ll have a hard time catching up with Blink. And while they really don’t care if web technologies advance quickly, they’ll be forced to at least keep pace with Mozilla and Google, both of which are putting the foot on the pedal recently.
The analysis is strong. This move does seem to put Apple in a tough spot. Consider their options:
Adopt Blink — Yeah right. The rendering engine is a fundamental piece of any OS, and Apple isn’t about to hand those keys over to Google; it’s the flipside of why Google, at least in my view, had no choice but to leave Webkit.
Match Blink Feature-for-Feature — Kowalczyk suggests Apple has to keep pace with Mozilla and Google, presumably for the sake of feature lists. Imagine is Blink had feature X, and Webkit did not! The geeks will riot…and normal users won’t care. Which means Apple will likely…
Fall Behind Blink — Yet remain the target rendering engine for web devs everywhere. Thanks in large part to the iPad, it doesn’t matter if Webkit falls behind, just like it didn’t matter that IE6 was an utter disaster (until it did, of course). Ultimately, it matters where the users are.
Google had to make this move; giving Apple veto power over a core component of their central strategic play going forward was untenable.
As for Apple, while this is a blow, they will be fine in the short to medium term (Oh, and wouldn’t it be something if Microsoft chose this moment to adopt Webkit?). If the iPad ever becomes an insignificant player, they’ll have much larger fish to fry.
Facebook unveiled its long-awaited mobile phone platform today. It is, as assumed, a Facebook “layer” on top of Google Android. I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, or even take a detailed look at the presentation. But I can already see where it might be useful and popular.
He (rightfully) tabs uninformed buyers, the folks who buy a phone because they need one, not because they have a specific model in mind.
That’s fine as far as it goes; I’m just not sure it goes that far: it’s based on an outdated view of the US market, and ignores the rest of the world.
In the United States, where an iPhone 4 is free,1 customers who have the option of an iPhone choose it in overwhelming numbers (over 80% on AT&T and over 60% on Verizon). It’s increasingly clear that Android market share in the US was a direct result of iPhone carrier restrictions; those are largely gone now. Further subtract the folks who prefer Android, and the addressable market in the US isn’t as big as Frommer portrays it.
The HTC First is only available on AT&T – the same AT&T that is completely dominated by the iPhone. Moreover, most of the uninformed are driven by price and thus use low-cost regional carriers, not the big four.
I am skeptical as to how aggressively AT&T (or any other carrier) will push the Facebook Phone. True, AT&T is constantly on the lookout for something, anything to counterbalance their iPhone dependence. But a Facebook phone with Messenger front-and-center is hardly in their interest
Outside the United States, the HTC First is a relatively expensive2 mid-range phone. The mid-range is proving to be increasingly untenable, stuck in the middle of superphones sold at premium prices3 and cheap Android phones that run the Facebook app, not to mention the LINE app, Kakao Talk app, Whatsapp…
The Verge has a 15-minute hands-on with the Facebook Home. It’s well worth the time.
I must say, I’m impressed. The level of care and attention to detail is immediately apparent; it’s far more fluid and “fun” than anything I’ve ever seen from Android.
WebKit is a lightweight yet powerful rendering engine that emerged out of KHTML in 2001. Its flexibility, performance and thoughtful design made it the obvious choice for Chromium’s rendering engine back when we started. Thanks to the hard work by all in the community, WebKit has thrived and kept pace with the web platform’s growing capabilities since then.
However, Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation – so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit.
The only surprise is that it took this long; Chrome and all its parts are the centerpiece of Google’s strategy going forward. The Cook doctrine – “We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make” – is not just reserved for Apple.
And now it seems the Apple-Google divorce is complete.
We’ve recently begun collaborating with Samsung on an advanced technology Web browser engine called Servo.
Servo is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way. This means addressing the causes of security vulnerabilities while designing a platform that can fully utilize the performance of tomorrow’s massively parallel hardware to enable new and richer experiences on the Web. To those ends, Servo is written in Rust, a new, safe systems language developed by Mozilla along with a growing community of enthusiasts. Rust, which today reached v0.6, has been in development for several years and is rapidly approaching stability.
We are now pleased to announce with Samsung that together we are bringing both the Rust programming language and Servo, the experimental web browser engine, to Android and ARM. This is an exciting step in the evolution of both projects that will allow us to start deeper research with Servo on mobile.
Bless Mozilla’s heart, but if they are building a systems language and rendering engine from scratch and only just now beginning to research mobile, well, good luck with that.
Samsung’s involvement is interesting of course. Can you buy a non-profit?
In the 10 days this blog has been online I’ve spent a lot of time on mobile, and understandably so! It’s the biggest business in tech, and the entry point to computing for much of the world. But, like many geeks, it is traditional computers that have always been closest to my heart, and what is happening to computers by way of the iPad – launched three years ago today – is in many ways the opposite of what happened in mobile.
What made the iPhone so revolutionary was the fact that it wasn’t actually a phone. The phone was just another app on the (single) start screen, alongside a calendar, a camera, a calculator, a map, a notepad, a clock, and an iPod.
The Original iPhone
Previously, one’s satchel included each of these items; the iPhone aggregated them into one general purpose computer. The iPhone was a truly personal PC, always with you, fully adaptable to any language or input method, and always connected. Every iteration of the iPhone, or Android for that matter, has been to make it more like a computer, more capable, more powerful, and more indispensable. Today I feel perfectly comfortable leaving the house with nothing but my phone, certain I have everything I need.
The iPad, despite being so closely related to the iPhone, has actually gone in the opposite direction. It is not so much a computer as it is an appliance, significantly better at some use cases – reading, drawing, playing games – and significantly worse at others – writing, organizing, editing. In this way it began the disaggregation of personal computing. Instead of using one device for all of our computing needs, we used two. True, you can use the iPad as your only computing device, but most don’t; they simply keep their old laptop a little bit longer than they would have otherwise, and use both.1 And, unlike the iPhone, the iPad has become less like a computer over time; many, including myself, consider the Mini the best iPad yet, despite the fact it is less powerful and less capable.
The divergent effects of the iPhone and iPad make total sense when looked at from a human-centered perspective. The phone is often the only device you have when out-and-about, so the more capable the better; the iPad is usually used when stationary, when it’s more conceivable to have multiple devices at hand. In fact, while my Mini is perfect for reading, a larger iPad would be nice for the graphics I make for this blog. And, if one has a choice, why wouldn’t one want to use the best possible tool for the job?
So here’s to the iPad, and here’s to perfect tools.
Although this blog only launched last Monday, I did pre-populate it with posts from a former Tumblr circa 2010. Here are three posts I wrote on the iPad, in honor of today’s three-year anniversary:
The Wall Street Journal has 531 words in a news item about Apple’s plans to start production on a new iPhone in the second quarter. 155 of the words are useful:1
Apple Inc plans to begin production of a refreshed iPhone similar in size and shape to its current one in the second quarter of the year, according to people familiar with the device’s production, teeing up a possible summer launch for the next version of its flagship device.
At the same time, Apple continues to work with its manufacturing partners in Asia on a less expensive iPhone that could be launched as soon as the second half of this year, these people said. The four-inch device likely will use a different casing from the higher-end iPhone. Apple has been working on different color shells for the phone but its plans remain unclear.
The other 376 are absolute garbage and actively make the reader dumber.
A sampling:
The two devices reflect new pressures on Apple. The Cupertino, Calif., company has long commanded unique premiums for the iPhone, but consumer demand for cheaper products is spiking.
But is a conjunction is commonly used to list two contrasting facts about the same topic.
“The box is small but heavy.”
“The movie is two-and-a-half but goes by quickly.”
“The WSJ is a business paper but doesn’t seem to understand basic strategy.”
The problem with this sentence is that Apple commanding unique premiums doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with consumer demand for cheaper products. Turns out not all consumers are the same! Some will pay more for a better phone, some only think about price. And some live in the United States where an iPhone 4 can be had for…$0!2
Of course, any “good” article needs a supporting quote, and a Neil Mawston from the unfortunately named “Strategy Analytics” is happy to help:
A flood of smartphone entrants and the rise of Samsung Electronics Co. have commoditized the market, squeezing margins and dividing profits among an array of devices.
“There isn’t really any major differentiator between the players at this phase,” said Neil Mawston, an analyst at research firm Strategy Analytics. He said to cope, Apple needs to take a page from Samsung and launch more products faster.
“The panacea is to transform the industry with a revolutionary design,” Mr. Mawston said. Until then “you have to do the traditional business school implementations like manage costs and move quicker than rivals.”
Interestingly enough, the panacea for Mr. Mawston may be attending business school! He would see something like the following in Strategy 101:
Sustainable Competitive Advantages
Mawston, like most analysts, seems unaware that phones can be differentiated by more than speeds and feeds, and is thus fixated on the lower right corner. Here there is no differentiation, everything is commoditized, and the day is won with volume, supply chain dominance, and wide distribution. And Samsung is winning in all three areas. They have the greatest volume, the own what is likely the most efficient supply chain, and they are available on basically every single carrier in world. (The vast majority of that volume is actually at low price points. The Galaxy S is only about 10% of their total volume of smartphone – the article wrongly suggests it is 100%.) Kudos to them!
But it turns out there are two sustainable positions in an industry (and to be clear, this isn’t exactly rocket science. Again, business school…). The low cost leader – Samsung – and the highly differentiated one. See, Apple already did “transform the industry with a revolutionary design.” And while Android has made significant gains on the hardware, software, and even ecosystem fronts, the overall package offered by Apple is still highly differentiated. The evidence bears this out: Apple charges the highest prices for phones, happily subsidized by carriers (especially in the US), because customers will change carriers to get the iPhone. This results in by far the highest margins in the industry with only a small portion of the overall volume.
What’s funny is the article actually provides said evidence in the last paragraph:
Samsung’s share of global handset shipments rose to 25% in 2012 up from 21% in 2011, according to Strategy Analytics. Apple’s rose to 8.6% from 6.0%. Last year, Apple captured nearly two-thirds of the profits in the industry, up from 62% in 2011. Samsung’s share rose to about a third from 19%.
The total disconnect between this final paragraph and the rest of the article is mind-boggling, and truly does a disservice to the reader. Not just because it’s wrong – although it is – but because it overlooks the much more interesting truth that Apple is facing challenges with the iPhone. While their current position is very secure – and suggesting it isn’t is where this article, like many others, goes wrong – they are moving ever closer to saturation in the markets where carrier subsidies shield customers from the iPhone’s true cost. In fact, Apple’s stock slide is understandable; theoretically, the stock price accounts for future growth, and the flipside of saturation is continued high profits but lower (or even negative) growth.
Apple dominates every market, like the US, where price is immaterial. They are not under much threat from Samsung or from anyone.3 A lower-cost iPhone, which is still differentiated but approachable on a full-cost basis, is about growth in unsubsidized markets (like India for example), and is the key to avoiding saturation (and unlocking the stock price).
While the company is widely believed to have innovative products up its sleeve, many analysts think the next developments that could really disrupt the market—like bendable displays or mainstream wearable devices—are years away.
I mean, seriously.
Although I highly doubt an iPhone will launch in the second quarter; production may begin for a September launch ↩
To be sure, in much of the rest-of-the-world device makers sell direct to customers, which makes iPhones more of a tough sell. But that doesn’t mean consumer demand for cheaper products is “spiking;” it means that as the iPhone pursues greater growth it is necessarily moving down the demand curve ↩
Although I do think the lack of a large screen is an issue. My wife, to take a sample size of one, is planning to switch to Android this fall if there isn’t a large screen iPhone by then ↩
