But remember, there is no monopoly.
You guys are tiresome. 13% of sold handsets.
Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
211–220 of 265 posts
Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was in a discussion the other day how every other attempt at bringing computing to underdeveloped parts of the world has more or less failed (OLPC for example), yet cheap Android phones have managed to become ubiquitous in places without stable electricity, running water, and stable or repressive governments.
Scale is the easiest way to make something cheap, and having a device targeted at every human rather than just school kids is going to be the best way to achieve scale. But as far as education goes, phones aren’t as good as a laptop as far as form factor. But better than nothing I suppose!
You can get a usb-c hub for 10$ with hdmi and usb ports.
That's essentially a desktop computer from the early 2010s in even the weakest Android phones.
More than enough to develop web apps on, I think a kid in Kenya was able to develop an entire website on a feature phone.
Samsung is trying to push Dex , so we'll see. It is worth noting many cheaper phones don't support HDMI out, but you could still figure out a way to project your phone to a monitor and have a desktop .
Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is seems in the right ballpark. Vertical integration means not only that Apple has sufficient control to make a “luxury” product (I use quotes bc the iPhone doesn’t really fit into the “luxury” category as it’s conventionally understood), but that it can build a value proposition around the notion that customers who buy into the apple ecosystem know their data isn’t going anywhere else. This sort of concern seem…
> Say what you want about Apple, but there’s no question that they go above and beyond their competitors when it comes to their users’ privacy. that's not what Snowden's leaks showed us. Apple inc. is a very willing participant in all sorts of shady NSA projects. in fact, you could even argue that the reason that Apple and other SV monopolies have evaded being broken up is exactly because of their full participation…
> that's not what Snowden's leaks showed us. Apple inc. is a very willing participant in all sorts of shady NSA projects.
I see people making similar claims but to my recollection the leaks were ambiguous and could easily be interpreted as the NSA having developed exploits, not as any kind of active participation. Where is this certainty coming from?
Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most expensive (non-novelty) phones sold right now are from Samsung. At every price point that Apple sells at, Samsung has a similar product. Apple also sells their handsets through carriers, big box stores, and online through places like Amazon. You can often buy their stuff for less at these places yet the stores are still packed because people will pay more if it's a better experience.
> People will pay more if it’s a better experience Luxury does not mean expensive, though $ can be a proxy. It often is much more about feeling (relaxed, comforted), experience (end-to-end, straightforward), and status (“high-class”). Samsung sells better phones for more $. Apple is much more about “if you don’t mind the price, we’ll take care of everything and it’ll be simple, comprehensive, and your friends will re…
As much as I hate to bow into cargo cult dynamics, the most expensive Samsung phone still leaves you as a green chat box on text.
Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, Palm's WebOS was fantastic - the issues were too little, too late; stupid carrier exclusivity, and underpowered hardware. WebOS had some real potential, too.
Oh yes, loved the premise of WebOS
It’s a damn shame we never got any hardware worthwhile.
Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here. I still think the tiles interface with vertical scroll was the best one for phones. I don’t dislike either Android or iPhone, but I still miss my Windows phone.
WebOS was the best interface and every other interface has spent the last decade slowly catching up.
They're _still_ not caught up and don't have the clean design it had. Unbelievable. I still can't align my phone correctly on my wireless charger like I could with my Palm Pre.
Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was not the analysis at the time. Also back then they didn’t have the fat margins. But the dealer network was thin so the risk of losing the channel wasn’t the risk people thought it was. I’m actually surprised they did as well as they did.
Apple's gross margin was always pretty high even if their fixed costs made them highly unprofitable. I'll grant that the Apple Store concept was a hail mary but they weren't a company losing money on every computer and hoping to make it up in volume as Dell and Gateway ended up being at the time. They had the cashflows to make the concept work.
We're talking about 2001 when apple's revenues were declining and it was losing money, though it had been in even worse shape a few years before. The stores were part of a Hail Mary.
Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't it pretty easy to to get a good phone? If people buy line A from brand B and are happy with it, I'd expect that 2-3 years later when they buy the latest A from B, they'd get a phone that's as good or better. I mention this because most people are satisficers, not maximizers. [1] They want a good phone, not the best phone. So I suspect that for most consumers, this isn't particularly a hard choice. They're going…
>Isn't it pretty easy to to get a good phone? If people buy line A from brand B and are happy with it, I'd expect that 2-3 years later when they buy the latest A from B, they'd get a phone that's as good or better. I'd argue that there hasn't been a single phone released since the Galaxy S10 that is an improvement on that phone. Sure it might have better specifications on paper, but they are all worse products due to…
Dang, that's a bummer to hear. I used to do a pretty thorough dive into the whole market (including iPhones) every time I needed to switch phones, but just kept ending up buying the latest Galaxy S, sometimes by a hair. This got me from the original Galaxy S to my current S10e, but it sounds like you're saying that that approach may have tapped out
Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
But if you did you couldn't. The ratio of wages to profit made on the item is way higher for iPhones. The quote is literally true. Textile mills in 19th century England operated with comparatively pedestrian profit margins and factory wages were a much higher proportion of expenses. It's estimated that the assembly costs of an iPhone are in the 20-50 dollar range, the profit margin is in the 300+ dollar range, clearl…
Conflating the Marxian economic concept of “rate of exploitation” and the modern usage of the word “exploitation” is disingenuous. You could similarly say that a FAANG engineer earning $400k is several hundred percent more exploited than a millworker two hundred years ago - which sounds preposterous of course.
It's not really the Marxian concept at play here. There's no measure of the organic composition of capital and of returns on capital to measure the exploitation rate that a Marxian economist would use. A Marxian economist would rather find that the rate of profit per unit of capital which is equal to the average rate of exploitation is relatively within norms. A Marxian economist would probably consider that Google at a 20% overall profit margin with the vast majority of expenses being labour or themselves mostly a labour cost in their production to be, while exploitative, much less exploitative than paying 20$ in wages to make a product then sold at a 400$ profit. Certainly the Apple hardware divisions are much more exploitative.
Certainly not even close to the level of exploitation that there was in 19th century England when the rate of return on capital was of around 30%, and where the most profitable mills often had over 50% profit margins, well ahead of even Google on their best years.
Instead I'm using the common, modern usage of exploitation, which is to pay someone very little to make a lot of profit from them.
Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
Believe it or not, but "stock Android" has been tried about 10 times. It failed. Only techies care. Regular users want a ton of features. Edit: Sales numbers tell you all you need to know about "stock Android" success :-)
I guess I'm a techie, because I don't want vendor crapware and I do want more than 2 years of software updates and security patches (though it has gotten better over the past few years - probably partially due to Android One, which is closer to stock Android!) And last I checked, Google's Pixel (5/6/etc.) phones seemed pretty decent.
pixel is not stock android