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Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

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Re: Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

#81
post #46
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple reports sales to consumers; Samsung reports sales to vendors.

Which might hide a week or two of supply line latency. The difference only becomes very important when the product is dead in the water. Like the Playbook & Windows Phone 7.

If the difference was only a week or two of channel fill, then these vendors would be reporting actual sales instead of dancing around, trying to avoid the topic at all.

Re: Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

#82
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I mean by win is that they will wind up becoming the dominant technology with the lion's share of the market, revenue, and other companies building on top of. The also ran technology may survive, but it becomes relatively insignificant. For example compare the Mac vs Microsoft Windows. The Mac was better, had better product margins, etc. Microsoft was the commodity and completely owned the market. For other hist…

So how your theory explains Apple's success in recent years? Comparing Mac to windows makes no sense, but still: just look at the sales trend of Mac's vs. other computers. Then see how much companies are making with Android: many adopted the OS but only a couple actually get profits from it.

Apple's recent success has come from recognizing and creating new markets. Even in traditional computers, a large part of their current success is that they pioneered the market for people who want physically attractive computers. This is unlikely to continue to succeed for them without Steve Jobs a the helm.

As for Mac vs Windows, I'm referring to the old macs, OS 7, etc. That story ended with Apple almost dying before Steve Jobs came back and did what he did best - focused the company on creating new markets.

Moving back to your focus on profits, I think you could benefit from reading The Innovator's Dilemma and its followup The Innovator's Solution. What you'll learn is how across many types of technologies (examples include ship design, steel production techniques, earth moving machines, disk drives, etc), across many decades, whenever two technologies compete head to head, the odds very, very strongly favor the one that is cheap and crappy. Throughout the competition, all of the revenue to be made is in the established, strong technology - until they suddenly have no market left.

Given that history, there is no question what to expect in phones. The iPhone is clearly the superior option that makes more money. Android is clearly the cheap crappy option that ships more units. But both are going to improve faster than people's needs increase, and Android is going to win.

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