But remember, there is no monopoly.
You guys are tiresome. 13% of sold handsets.
You guys are tiresome. 75% of global mobile profit.
Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
241–250 of 265 posts
Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
>"And if I ever have an issue, there are 3 Apple stores within 25 miles of me." I am in Toronto and if we are talking 25 miles radius there are like hundreds of shops that can sell/replace/fix android based phones.
A lot of those stores will also do some iPhone repairs. If you are having trouble with your email or want help connecting some accessory, how many of those shops will help with that kind of stuff? When it's an issue that can't be fixed and your phone is still under warranty, how many of those shops give you a replacement on the spot? A few will for sure, but it's not a lot of them.
>"A lot of those stores will also do some iPhone repairs."
Yes they will. They do not start their day by praising almighty Samsung / Apple and do whatever gets them money.
>"If you are having trouble with your email or want help connecting some accessory, how many of those shops will help with that kind of stuff?"
I do not know "how many" exactly but they do help customers with many things, not just repairs.
Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
No, I'm sorry, the "rate of exploitation" is purely a Marxian economic concept, and it is a simple ratio: that of the total amount of surplus-value to the total amount of wages paid. The article we are discussing here clearly refers to the Marxian concept and not anything else. You are conflating so many different things (gross profit margin, net profit margin, rate of return on capital, rate of exploitation) that I do not even know where to start. I would recommend a primer on economics.
Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
#244I think one of the smartest things Apple did was open physical stores and not depend on carrier stores and Best Buy. I've often wondered why their competitors don't do the same thing? Why isn't there a Samsung store a block away from every Apple store? Having a physical location for purchases, repairs, and support is why I always recommend Apple devices when somebody who isn't super technical asks me what to buy. Mic…
Apple is capturing 75% of profits, and sees the stores as instrumental to that. Every other company seems to see retail as an additional cost. Apple started with kiosks inside of Best Buy, too, and it took many years before their stores reached the level of ubiquity they have today. Any competitor trying to make the same level of investment would lead to Apple's share of profits inching closer to 100%, as their compe…
Apple products are also valuable because they build in user-centric dark-pattern limiters that HN hates but consumers happily value and pay for.
These threads keep saying the profits are sales and marketing as if artificial. On the contrary, user-centricity even to point of dev-hostility is a specific product market fit tradeoff Apple pursues, giving the whole brand a halo effect and premium.
Devs need to roll with that or will continually find themselves misaligned.
Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
You guys are tiresome. 13% of sold handsets.
You guys are tiresome. 75% of global mobile profit.
Among plenty of competition, consumers voted with their wallet. Consumer preferences remain clear. That’s not a monopoly.
If one doesn’t like consumers’ choice, one can try to understand why the value one thing over another and out deliver that. But first one must really grok it.
HN threads show that’s hard as supporting the non-tech user-centric approach requires an atypical world view among Makers.
Numbers show it’s hard as a majority of the competitors are not engineered or marketed with that understanding.
There’s likely a connection.
Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
#246...with only a 13% share of units. That is, all other vendors together sold 87% of units, but earned only a combined 25% of industry-wide profit. The vast majority of those other vendors are companies headquartered in Asian countries with a long history of promoting market share, access to information, and knowledge transfer at the expense of short-term profit. They might be making less money willingly to grow/mainta…
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.
I think that's how it goes with any distribution problem. If you make it cheap enough then it becomes ubiquitous and even spreads into impoverished areas. I believe this is the only way to eliminate world hunger for example.
Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
I will grant that a small fraction of iPhone owners do a careful analysis similar to yours. And good for them. But just look at Apple ads to see what their real market is. Their ads don't argue that they're a good value. Apple established themselves as a luxury good that indicates wealth and social status. Their ads look like other ads for wealthy people. The reason Apple doesn't make a cheap phone is the same reason…
>In my view status goods are a plague upon humanity. Why? I'd argue that status goods have driven technological and artistic progress throughout time. So many innovations were the result of someone trying to make a new higher status good, or trying to make a status good cheaper(so they could have more wealth/power). Living in the 21st century, almost every good you can buy would have been a status good to someone at…
Violence and war have also driven technological and artistic progress. I don't think that makes them good.
I also think you're confusing "did contribute to the creation of" and "was the only possibly way we could get". E.g., it's true that early cellphones were status goods. But given the massive market for them today, it's clear that was not a necessary step toward their existence and perfection.
Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah. Half the reason people buy iPhones is to show other people they aren't poor. Buying a sub-$300 phone doesn't achieve that goal.
> Half the reason people buy iPhones is to show other people they aren't poor While I'm pretty sure you jest here, this simply isn't true. iMessage, FaceTime, consistency with family and friends, and the (whether founded or not is up to you) trust in a machine that'll last you quite a few years and "just work" is the main reason people buy iPhones. Not saying that this is my thought process (i have my own reasons for…
> iMessage, FaceTime, ...
Right, the top two reasons to use an iPhone are iMessage and FaceTime. And those are the two apps that are still basically impossible to compete with with PWAs due to unimplemented functionality.
They have seemed to make more progress on this over the past couple years after getting called out with very astute questions from Rep. Cicilline: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20190716/109793/HHRG...
getUserMedia has now been implemented in WebViews, so WebRTC calls in Chrome for iOS are now possible, that was big.
Web push is key too, looks like now code complete in WebKit: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=182566
No progress yet on the Fullscreen API: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206854
And issues remain with expiring permissions, e.g.: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=228317
Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
You guys are tiresome. 75% of global mobile profit.
Among plenty of competition, consumers voted with their wallet. Consumer preferences remain clear. That’s not a monopoly. If one doesn’t like consumers’ choice, one can try to understand why the value one thing over another and out deliver that. But first one must really grok it. HN threads show that’s hard as supporting the non-tech user-centric approach requires an atypical world view among Makers. Numbers show it’…
> Among plenty of competition
Can you name 2 other OSes that compete meaningfully against Ios? Keep in mind I'm not talking about ecosystems that make less than half of the profit Ios makes for Apple. Hence the "meaningful".
Re: Apple Captures 75% of Global Handset Market Operating Profit in Q2 2021
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
OLPC also suffered from durability issues (repairs required sending the laptop back to the US, IIRC?) and cost issues (they never did hit the $100/unit price point) Even Raspberry Pi leverages the scale of Broadcom chips, which also get used in Android phones
OLPC was a really cool idea, but it turned out to be yet another in a long line of "good-idea fairy visits a wealthy first-worlder with yet another way to fix the third world", like What Three Words, etc.
That’s a pretty revisionist history that ignores a lot of how it was done. It required local partnerships, used a lot of local educational material, and had a huge amount of involvement on the ground during deployments.
It also ignores that the very cell phone penetration we see earlier also comes from wealthy countries in creation — the main OS is still supplied by Google.