The only Apple products I have ever owned have been an iPhone 3 and an iPhone 4, so I’m hardly an Apple loyalist. However I suspect when my phone is out of contract I will get another iPhone. It does everything I need it to and I can’t think of anything a competitor could offer which would be compelling enough to make me change brands.
i don’t even have an iphone, yet every time something positive about Apple is said it turns into an Android vs iphone thread, as if the Android phones are all owned by the same company. it’s curious who the bigger fanboys are.
I get it.
The only significance I intended was to compare the marketshare of the two operating systems.
Does that explanation make sense? If so, can you explain your second sentence? It doesn’t make any sense to me.
Touches nose. Winks.
We didn’t have any Apple products until summer of 2010 when my boss gave me an iPad, then wifey JpnGal got her iPhone 4 (first smartphone for her) last December. And just two weeks ago, we got a MacBook Pro. Yikes!
how is comparing an open source (?) mobile os held by 80 different companies with a subsection of the proprietary os held by one company relevant or useful? unlike Microsoft, Google does not earn direct revenue from selling the os and Apple is not interested in sharing theirs.
While the type of pancreatic cancer that Jobs had was less severe than most, his survival was never a sure thing as most people are dead from islet cell tumors within a decade, many within as little as two years.
Whatever new age bullshit he tried initially likely had little effect on his overall quality (and quantity) of life in his final years.
Back to the topic at hand, I think ignoring other iOS devices is the wrong way to go in this discussion. The iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch are all functionally the same machine. And jumping from one to the other involves no learning curve. That’s what’ll keep Apple on top in the mobile device war for a long time. They’ve locked in a huge base of people and they don’t even need to get them to commit to a phone contract.
If the question is whether Apple is losing or gaining ground, then the closeness of association (or otherwise) of the competition against which it is (or is not) gaining ground does not matter.
Or in other words, it doesn’t matter that Android isn’t a single-entity competitor. Because the question is not “Is Apple making more money than Android?”
Android, Symbian and Windows Phone encompass groups of devices, but from the point of view of the customer, are fairly interchangeable within platform, so it’s not unreasonable to consider the platforms themselves as contenders against Apple’s iOS.
Top 5 Myths about Apple
Apple is Going Out of Business
If you use the smart phone platforms as a metric for how well one company is doing, then you can’t ignore the non-smart phone sector. Smart phones make up only 30% of the total cell phone market, and Android has a bit over half of that. Would you call a baseball game in the third inning? If you compare phone market share, as opposed to smart phone market share, its a much different story. There is a huge, untapped segment of the market, waiting to be exploited.
But who cares about any of that? Only android fan boys. Apple has a healthy ecosystem surrounding their platform, and consumers are spending money on much more then just their monthly wireless bill. Android users in general, aren’t buying apps, aren’t buying subscriptions, aren’t using paid-wifi on the road, etc. Android may have more users, but Apple has the users that are spending money.
Just thought I’d contribute this story about Apple’s Black Friday sales. Somebody’s still buying!
This touches on another interesting side-effect: Handmedowns.
For Christmas, the kids are getting our old 3GS’s with the simcards removed. They’re what amounts to be an iPod Touch when the cell service is disconnected. They’re a little scratched up, but they’re fully functional, and in a case look brand new.
Our old iPods ended up going to other relatives…who ultimately bought Apple products, not when the devices failed, but when they decided they wanted the New Apple Hotness.
The neighbor’s car was broken into the other night. The only thing stolen? An iPod. Her statement “It’s a good thing they keep getting the oldest iPods we have, there are four others in the family.”
Our family has 2 10 gigers, 2 32 gigers, 3 shuffles, 2 GS’s, 2 iPad 1’s, and 2 iPhone 4s’s. We have a iMac, an old Mac Mini, and my office issued PC is a Mac Book Pro.
We can’t be alone. Call me a fanboy? Meh. I liked Microsoft products until Vista came along…I hated that Microsoft made you relearn the same crap in the Enterprise, just so they could keep selling product. Apple hasn’t yet pissed me off enough to make me want to jump ship. Is it a prison? Perhaps. But it’s a NICE place to stay.
So, are people leaving Apple in droves? I can’t say. As the Worlds Most Valuable Company, the lead is theirs to lose.
Another thing. I don’t know about Android, but it’s stupid easy to hook iOS devices up to a wifi network. This saves me a lot of money because, as long as I use wifi, I can’t go over my data plan limit, which I sometimes did with my Blackberry. This is extremely awesome because I use some apps that rely on the Internet to work, and it’s great to be able to use them without having to sweat an overage.
And, truthfully, Siri is a godsend. I use it to find information and do little tasks when I can’t do it myself, like when I’m driving. All I have to do is push the home button, tell it what I want, and it’ll happen. It’s a handy way to do these things safely and without too much hassle.
It’s about the same process on Android - search for networks, pick the one you want, type in a password and you’re connected.
I really have no horse in this race - I just think it’s important to note that there is more than one valid metric for comparison, depending on the flavour of question.
My brother-in-law just got an iPhone and was showing all of us Siri over Thanksgiving. The only question the damn thing answered correctly were “Where can I find a McDonald’s?”
Oh, it also had pre-programmed responses to cheeky questions like “What are you wearing?” and “Take off your clothes.”
I wonder what all you were asking it. I’ll admit that Siri has been a little hit or miss (it is still in beta), and the network disconnections frustrating, but it’s been a really tremendous resource the majority of the time. The one that blew me and my friends away was when we had been joking with someone in the group via passive aggressive comments to Siri:
Joe: Siri, Clara needs a stick pulled out of her butt.
Siri: I’ve found the following lawn and garden stores near you.
Clara: 
Joe: Siri, now we need to buy Clara some balloons to cheer her up.
Siri: I’ve found the following party supply stores near you.
Again, lots of kinks to work out, but the potential is real.
Bolding mine. That’s because the carriers and the handset manufacturers have to okay it first. HTC, for example, peppers Android with the Sense UI, and then gets it to the service provider, who then pushes the software to the user. It goes through two gates where Apple’s doesnt.
It’s easy to forget what the world was like, pre-iPhone 1. Apple performed some AMAZING feats that no-one had been able to, prior…some of them:
- Online registration from home…with no waiting on hold.
- The phone was unsullied by the carriers with crapware…and the features Apple promised were available upon launch…unlike other vendors which show a phone, only to have the carrier cut the stuff out
- The bandwidth was unlimited
- The device automatically made a backup with your computer…no extra software necessary
- A Real ‘meat stick stylus’ operating environment
- Sensors to make butt dialing impossible, automatically change screen orientation, and change screen intensity based on ambient light
- a REAL Web Browser
Yeah, multitasking, apps, tethering and the like were still in the future, but the first phone was a quantum leap past anything any other manufacturer had pulled off.
I had this phone: HTC Wizard - Wikipedia
I upgraded it myself to Windows Mobile 6 and put up with the missing features and buggyness because there was no freeking way HTC would release an update to a phone that had already been sold.
But you know…what have you done for me lately. :rolleyes: