21–30 of 73 posts
> When you buy an Android phone you sign in to your Google account. Behind the scenes, Google starts recording a huge amount of data about you as a user, your preferences, your routine.
Some would say not accessing customer data is a feature. I am very careful who I share my data with and appreciate Apple's approach.
> Apple won the smartphone wars a long time ago. This claim is made, but it's not very specific. In what way did Apple win the smartphone wars ?
I think apple has actually lost the "smartphone war". Android market share is somewhere around 85%, ios under 15%. It doesn't matter who manufactures the hardware if you control the software and this is true especially if profit from the phone hardware manufactured by you is not really that important part of your profit stream.
> Apple won the smartphone wars a long time ago. This claim is made, but it's not very specific. In what way did Apple win the smartphone wars ?
I was highly surprised by that assertion too. If you take market share as a determiner, Google has basically crushed Apple: https://www.idc.com/prodserv/smartphone-os-market-share.jsp
I believe you mean that Android has dominated iOS in terms of market share. But when one company gives their OS away for free to everyone and the other restricts their OS only to their own devices, that's the only result you could ever reasonably expect.
Google as a company has had little to no involvement in the creation of specific phones. And when they have had involvement, they've outsourced much of the work. That's actually partially why this article exists -- the Pixel phone represents their first foray into making their own phone, software and hardware together, like Apple does.
So to me the statement that Google has crushed Apple makes little to no sense because until now Google hasn't even attempted to compete with Apple directly, and Apple has intentionally limited the scope of iOS's distribution.
If we're going to compare Google-created phones to Apple-created phones, how many Pixel phones do you see daily vs. iPhones?
In Q4 of 2015, Apple generated about 63% of it's revenues from iPhone sales [1]. That's almost 2/3rds of revenues for a $605B company. Google is nearly as large in terms of market cap (~$550B) but revenues from Android don't even come close (never-mind hardware sales, which are negligible). It's estimated that Android has brought in around $31B _total_ revenue [2] since it was launched in 2008. The numbers by year aren't publicly available, but even if we're being very generous, it's unlikely that Android accounts for more than 10% of Google's revenues in any given year.
So yeah, in terms of smartphones, one company (Apple) is basically a smartphone manufacturer with a few things it does on the side (laptops, etc.) and the other is a search engine with smartphones as a side business.
Personally, I prefer Android. I've been an Android user for years and I can't bring myself to switch. I broke my Nexus 5x phone recently and I've been using my wife's old iPhone for a few weeks now and I can't wait to go back. But I roll my eyes every time I read an article about how Google is on the verge of taking over the market from Apple. Sure, if you look worldwide, the number of Android phones out there exceeds the number of iPhones, but if you look at the high end of the market--which seems to be where all the money is made--iPhone are still quite dominant. When I start to see Google's numbers get into the same _ballpark_ as Apple's for Pixel sales vs. iPhone sales, then I'll be intrigued.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/253649/iphone-revenue-as... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-21/google-s-...
> Apple won the smartphone wars a long time ago. This claim is made, but it's not very specific. In what way did Apple win the smartphone wars ?
I think apple has actually lost the "smartphone war". Android market share is somewhere around 85%, ios under 15%. It doesn't matter who manufactures the hardware if you control the software and this is true especially if profit from the phone hardware manufactured by you is not really that important part of your profit stream.
> Apple won the smartphone wars a long time ago. This is a bold statement. On what measure? Last that I've seen is that almost 87% of the smartphone market is dominated by Android. It might be true for app monetization, but definitely not as a whole. Good read though.
> Last that I've seen is that almost 87% of the smartphone market is dominated by Android. How much money does the iPhone versus the Android phones make?
The article mentions why Apple is the best: unbeatable hardware. It's that simple really...
With smartphones, sure, there are other companies that are pushing technology forward (Sumsung's Galaxy phones are often beyond what an iPhone can offer), but with Apple, I don't have to worry about hardware failing (walk into the neares Apple store, get it fixed/replaced), and I don't need to worry about the software not being updated anytime soon (I can't trust Samsung any more with their updates, and even Nexus 4, Google's flagship phone released in 2012, stopped receiving updates more than a year ago - compared with iPhone 5, also released in 2012, that's still updated today).
A couple nitpicks: - Virtual Reality - still hasn't demonstrated mainstream appeal. I'm pretty bearish on it being the next 3d TV's - Resolution - Does anything north of 300dpi really matter at this point? Maybe for VR, but see above - Privacy - as data breaches become the norm, where/how do you want your data stored?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Last that I've seen is that almost 87% of the smartphone market is dominated by Android. How much money does the iPhone versus the Android phones make?
How much more money can Google make with the data they get from that 87% of market share than Apple can make from the iPhones themselves?
Nope. Google is and always has been an advertising company.
It affects how they implement search, Android, and everything they do.
All knowing AI, however clever, from an advertising company may start to move some more onto Apple. That Apple isn't putting personalised data into everything is becoming a marketing feature that they should be shouting about.
Edit: Not sure what's controversial to cause lots of up and down votes, I guess some don't believe Google are an advertising company. I wonder where they get their revenue from.