161–170 of 177 posts
While it is true that Android phones haven't been able to undercut iPhones by much, the argument doesn't hold up for tablets and iPods because these markets haven't really been entered by the Android manufacturers yet. The Samsung Galaxy tablet is at the forefront but the real wave of Android tablets is months away waiting for the release of Gingerbread. Expect a lot of announcements around CES time. As for the iPod…
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That’s interesting but is it also a good reason to use “USA” and “the world” interchangeably? Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, Belgium, Greece, Sweden, Austria, Denmark, Portugal, Finland, Ireland and Romania combined – all EU member nations – are about equal to the US. They have a larger combined population (about 460 million v. about 310 million) but the USA certainly don’t beat them…
The article doesn't actually use "the USA" and "the world" interchangeably. It just says that Apple is the #1 buyer of flash memory in the world. I regret making my initial comment because in the context of the article, the comment I was responding to makes little sense.
Also iPod's market share is dwarfed by music-phones. It might be true for US and many other rich countries that people don't use that feature and use their iPod instead but in a significant part of the world people cannot afford to cash out $250 for iPod nano just to get a better user experience from their music player. Yes you can get a iPod shuffle for $65 but thats not an upgrade anymore.
Same goes for MacBooks. The equal quality products might have a fairly small price difference, but many people cannot afford to cash out $1400 for a laptop. Especially if there is an alternative available for $500. They are not comparable based on specs and quality etc, but they are comparable in that you can browse facebook, look at pictures and IM on both of them.
Anyway, i agree with Apple making great quality products and that they are nowadays more affordable than ever. I just don't agree with making conclusion about the world based on one quite rich country and belittling other manufacturers who build affordable products for the ones who cannot afford those premium prices.
Apple cheap - hmm, not sure I buy that. Why does an iPhone cost more than an iPod Touch, a standard 2G phone and a 3G USB dongle? That's all the hardware is. Why does an iPad with a 10 inch screen cost twice as much as a netbook with a 10 inch screen and a keyboard? Apple may have found some good niches to milk for cash with some attractively designed products, but cheap they most definitely ain't.
> Why does an iPhone cost more than an iPod Touch, a standard 2G phone and a 3G USB dongle? That's all the hardware is. Currently, that's not true. The iPhone 4 has a much better camera than the current iPod Touch. Not sure if there are any other differences.
I've had this argument far too many times. Specifically regarding the iPad vie put several theories forward regarding the 7" vs 10" tablets: 1. Apple has tied up the world supply of 10" capacitative touch screens. That's not far-fetched; 2. Price: as per Gruber's argument; 3. Fear: no one wants to directly compete with the iPad so they're seeking some form of differentiation. Nikon did this with DSLRs and Canon. It w…
All these might be true, but still be on-the-margin effects. In the PC world (and I think the old audio player world), any new Apple product was met a competitor with the similar specs (often better) at close to half the price (taking into account sales and such). Like the post concludes, if it was possible to make an android tablet (even a 7" one) that was a direct alternative to the ipad at $350 someone would be
http://articulo.mercadolibre.com.uy/MLU-20365527-tablet-pc-7...
Edit: here's an English post:
http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2010/04/the_apad_is_ano...
which says that it has a resistive touchscreen variety (instead of the capacitive multitouch like in the iPad) and thus much worse.
I believe that the price advantage comes not insignificantly from the market side of reselling software, apps, music and video and taking a not insignificant slice of the sale of those items. If you remove the market from the equation Apple's bottom line isn't as impressive, in fact the rise of Apple in recent years is coupled to the rise of their market place. So strong is their domination over music distribution th…
Even if Apple has achieved a near-monopoly over digital music or sales or portable music, it's not at all clear that they have had the opportunity to abuse that monopoly. There have been cases (Psystar, etc.) that have tried to get the bundling of Mac OS X and Apple computers ruled as illegal tying, and they have failed. For the foreseeable future, there will not be grounds for a federal antitrust case against Apple.
You should try to conceive of Apple as the poster child for a successful business strategy: vertical integration. A large part of the success of Apple's expansion beyond computers is due to the fact that they can and have ensured that the products work well together, and that most of the products they have introduced have been natural complements of their existing products.
You also seem to be somewhat ignorant of the timeline of Apple's rise over the past decade. The iPod was on the market and gaining traction for a year and a half before the iTunes Music Store opened. At the time the iTunes Store opened, DRM was mandated by pretty much all the content owners. If this contributed to Apple getting a monopoly on digital music sales, the blame should fall on the music studios for not insisting that the online stores they deal with use a single interoperable DRM system, and not on Apple, who had no incentive to promoting interoperability with other music stores and players.
The profits of the iPod+iTunes Store combo provided most of the funding for the Intel switch and the development of the iPhone. Like the iPod, the iPhone was on the market and gaining traction for about a year and a half before the App Store opened. It's hard to argue that Apple's computers have been helped much by the iPod and iPhone other than by generally strengthening the Apple brand.
Each step of the way to their current position, Apple has done it by introducing products that can be at least moderately successful on their own, without the hardware/software tying you are complaining about. None of those individual steps has been anywhere as close to monopoly abuse as, say, Microsoft's entry in to the video game console market, which faced no significant legal challenges. Nor has Apple clearly erected any artificial barriers to entry for competitors. Their agreements with content producers are not exclusive, and now that DRM is not applied to music sales, there's no significant barrier to using music purchased through iTunes on other music players. To the extent that Apple has created any barriers to competition, it has only been by raising the standards for usability and quality.
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Actually the new Nook is not an e-ink display, it's a 1024x600 LCD, and it does come with a web browser. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371521,00.asp http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/26/nook-color-first-hands-on...
But other than both halves of his argument being incorrect, I can see why parent's comments get upvoted and mine down.
Meanwhile mikeklaas short, completely and wildly factually incorrect comment gets plenty of upvotes, apparently because it supports the HN popular view that anyone daring to compete with Apple must be incompetent?
Apparently, at least where Apple is concerned, HN has it's own version of group-think now?
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That was back when flash was new and exotic, right? Every music player on the market is flash-based now, and so are many computers. Samsung's Wikipedia page says that Apple accounts for about 2% of their sales.
I agree that the flash market has changed a lot in the past two years, but no mobile gadget maker can compete with Apple as a reliable consumer of flash memory. Even the newcomers who are using the flash to build SSDs probably have to deal with the fact that Apple's deal with Samsung was made first, and sales to Apple went a long way towards funding the fabs that enable Samsung to now sell flash to so many other comp…
Of that I'm a bit skeptical. For one thing, this sort of idea was fairly common about the G4 processors, even though Apple was by far the smallest purchaser of G4 processors -- Ericsson, Cisco, and Nortel were shipping routers using G4's in tens of thousands while Apple was still taking pre-orders in some cases.
Another thing to consider is that Samsung is among the world's largest semiconductor manufacturing companies. They fabricate and sell enough semiconductor products to make even Intel's volume look comparatively small. Even with the iVolumes that Apple produces, it's hard to imagine that even they could be a dominant consumer by volume.
Apple cheap - hmm, not sure I buy that. Why does an iPhone cost more than an iPod Touch, a standard 2G phone and a 3G USB dongle? That's all the hardware is. Why does an iPad with a 10 inch screen cost twice as much as a netbook with a 10 inch screen and a keyboard? Apple may have found some good niches to milk for cash with some attractively designed products, but cheap they most definitely ain't.
I suspect the real reason is that Apple keeps the iPod Touch cheap to sell to people who can't get an iPhone for some reason (they're too young, they can't afford the data plan, their employer insists on BlackBerries). When they have a chance to buy a smartphone of their own, it'll probably be an iPhone, so they won't have to learn a new UI, or walk away from the apps they've bought.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that the flash market has changed a lot in the past two years, but no mobile gadget maker can compete with Apple as a reliable consumer of flash memory. Even the newcomers who are using the flash to build SSDs probably have to deal with the fact that Apple's deal with Samsung was made first, and sales to Apple went a long way towards funding the fabs that enable Samsung to now sell flash to so many other comp…
" sales to Apple went a long way towards funding the fabs that enable Samsung to now sell flash to so many other companies, too." Of that I'm a bit skeptical. For one thing, this sort of idea was fairly common about the G4 processors, even though Apple was by far the smallest purchaser of G4 processors -- Ericsson, Cisco, and Nortel were shipping routers using G4's in tens of thousands while Apple was still taking pr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All these might be true, but still be on-the-margin effects. In the PC world (and I think the old audio player world), any new Apple product was met a competitor with the similar specs (often better) at close to half the price (taking into account sales and such). Like the post concludes, if it was possible to make an android tablet (even a 7" one) that was a direct alternative to the ipad at $350 someone would be
Archos 10 inch tablet: $300. http://www.archos.com/products/ta/archos_101it/specs.html?co... I'm not saying it's the best tablet ever, though on a spec checklist it might actually win (camera, HDMI out, USB host, multimedia formats etc.). I'm more interested in the fact that the vast majority of Gruber-style pronouncements about how special Apple is require you to not have any knowledge of what's actually happening o…