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How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

forbes.com

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Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#11

Post by rednukleus »

JonFish85 wrote: post #5

100,000 phones a week? Big deal. Just over 5 million a year. If we're comparing to Apple, Apple sold 125M last year [1]. And 52 different version numbers. Support must be a nightmare, if it even exists outside of just "we'll give you next week's version". These must be pretty minor changes if they're happening every week. How many of them are being passed through rigorous QA? I'm curious how many of the batches are j…

What kind of warped reality do you live in that only selling 5 million units a year while updating the hardware every week is "no big deal"?

Regarding rapid obsolescence, this seems to work very well in Asian markets. They typically release a far greater number of devices, because there is a strong market for second hand phones, and many people like to keep switching to the latest thing.

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#12

Post by JonFish85 »

rednukleus wrote: post #11
JonFish85 wrote: post #5

100,000 phones a week? Big deal. Just over 5 million a year. If we're comparing to Apple, Apple sold 125M last year [1]. And 52 different version numbers. Support must be a nightmare, if it even exists outside of just "we'll give you next week's version". These must be pretty minor changes if they're happening every week. How many of them are being passed through rigorous QA? I'm curious how many of the batches are j…

What kind of warped reality do you live in that only selling 5 million units a year while updating the hardware every week is "no big deal"? Regarding rapid obsolescence, this seems to work very well in Asian markets. They typically release a far greater number of devices, because there is a strong market for second hand phones, and many people like to keep switching to the latest thing.

The 5 million by itself is fine. It's the comparison to Apple that seems out of whack to me. The article doesn't compare them to a startup, it compares them to one of the biggest companies in the world. If you do that, you invite criticism on the comparison, which is what I gave.

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#13

Post by gibwell »

rednukleus wrote: post #11
JonFish85 wrote: post #5

100,000 phones a week? Big deal. Just over 5 million a year. If we're comparing to Apple, Apple sold 125M last year [1]. And 52 different version numbers. Support must be a nightmare, if it even exists outside of just "we'll give you next week's version". These must be pretty minor changes if they're happening every week. How many of them are being passed through rigorous QA? I'm curious how many of the batches are j…

What kind of warped reality do you live in that only selling 5 million units a year while updating the hardware every week is "no big deal"? Regarding rapid obsolescence, this seems to work very well in Asian markets. They typically release a far greater number of devices, because there is a strong market for second hand phones, and many people like to keep switching to the latest thing.

Do you seriously think that Xiaomi makes the kind of changes that Apple makes to their products annually on a weekly basis?

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#14

Post by gohrt »

bluedino wrote: post #6
zwieback wrote: post #2

These engineers must be from a different species - my experience with HW is that it's very hard to change anything in a week, especially when you're building 100000. Then again, they have everything under one roof so they can probably just walk over to the PCB designer and then walk some more to the guy setting up the manufacturing equipment, who has reels of every known component in stock. I'm curious what they chan…

Forbes has been hit and miss lately. For every good article they do about tech, they do some short, sensationalist 'China is taking over' piece like this.

Link to a good article in Forbes?

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#15

Post by gohrt »

devx wrote: post #9

If only Google did the same with all Android devices, or at least a big "Google-approved" subset of them. They need to bring over the ChromeOS update system to Android, especially now that Chrome and Android have the same guy running them.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#16

Post by snowwrestler »

The whole point of the iPhone is that it is a pocket-sized general purpose computer, so that updates can happen via software instead of hardware.

That was like the 5th slide in the original launch presentation.

If you have change hardware to offer users an incremental feature, you're not really competing with the iPhone.

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#17

Post by brianbreslin »

How are these changes implemented? Are they things that require moving buttons? Recasting dies? Or are they things like "this model april4-11-2013 has a malfunction charging on USB?" And it's fixing circuitry? This seems unrealistic, even if it was just releasing a new color.

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#18

Post by jussij »

JonFish85 wrote: post #5

100,000 phones a week? Big deal. Just over 5 million a year. If we're comparing to Apple, Apple sold 125M last year [1]. And 52 different version numbers. Support must be a nightmare, if it even exists outside of just "we'll give you next week's version". These must be pretty minor changes if they're happening every week. How many of them are being passed through rigorous QA? I'm curious how many of the batches are j…

> 100,000 phones a week? Big deal. Just over 5 million a year.

Considering the fact they managed to created that market in three years, I'd say it's quite a big deal.

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#19

Post by wmf »

devx wrote: post #9

If only Google did the same with all Android devices, or at least a big "Google-approved" subset of them. They need to bring over the ChromeOS update system to Android, especially now that Chrome and Android have the same guy running them.

I think the problem with Android updates is developing them in the first place and getting them carrier-approved, not pushing them out.

Re: How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices

#20

Post by toomuchtodo »

heifetz wrote: post #10

Here's an experiment. Take all the forum members on macrumors and crowd source a new phone by taking all of their ideas. See what kind of mutant non-functioning phone results from a democratic process. One of the reason why Apple and Google's phones and OSs are successful is because there are visionaries (Ives, Jobs, Rubin) at the top coming up with new ideas, instead of taking a poll and purely going with consumer f…

Benevolent Dictator > Design By Committe
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