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How Big Will the iPhone Become?
palewook writes "Combine the best elements of an iPod with a BlackBerry's addictive usefulness, and you may just get Apple's Next Big Thing. Around 2009, when the lower cost version of iPhone appears, Business Week believes the yearly market for iPhones could be over 10 billion dollars a year. Its an interesting prediction; if those numbers come to pass, iPhone could become a bigger source of revenue than the traditional iPod. 'The answer may not come until 2009. By then, Apple should have begun creating lower-cost iPhone variants to reach consumers scared off by the introductory $499 price. It also will probably have moved into overseas markets and cut deals with more carriers to utilize higher-speed wireless networks. So while most analysts look for Apple to sell around 3 million units this year and 10 to 12 million in 2008, many figure that 20 million will move in 2009.'"
Dimensions 4.5 x 2.4 x 0.46 inches / 115 x 61 x 11.6mm
I doubt it will get much bigger. Maybe a little to fit a 3G radio in a future revision.
Next question.
How about we wait until they've sold *one* until we predict that they'll sell 20 million 2 years from now.
"while driving and in numerous situations where I don't want to LOOK at the phone"
Please get a bluetooth headset and a phone with good voice dialing if and only if you must talk on the phone while driving.
Heck if the IPhone stops people from using their cell while driving it may save thousands of lives!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Now that slashdotters never RTFA, we're ready for the next step: only read the title. You, sir, not only deserve a +5 Funny, you truly deserve a +5 Insightful for this discovery.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
Maybe, but the big breakout happens if that's NOT true. Remember, there were lots of MP3 players out there when Apple stomped them. They did so by making a techno-geek device into something everyone _trusted_ they could actually use. And that's what "Apple" means now. That's important, if it is the case that people are not buying smartphones because they are too geeky (or people believe they are), then this could really smoke.
Their bullet points are:
Managing the phone number list is via the operator by talking to them or sending them an email or fax (or manage it yourself online soon).
They even have a "simple" phone where you just have the list of numbers, no dial buttons.
Its only available in the U.S. right now, but its a great idea for a service, and I believe Samsung makes the phones.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
...I don't think the iPhone is going to be big at all.
The ipod was/is huge becuase it was a relatively early entrant in a market that was just on the verge of exploding in size, and it was hugely advertised and hyped, and there wasn't any real competition for at least a couple of years. The tie-in with iTunes helped too.
The mobile phone market is completely different to this. Completely. There is an enormous existing market which has already been through most of its rapid-growth phase. There are huge, competent companies churning out amazingly sophisticated models of all types (just this quarter, the SonyEricsson W880 and the Nokia N95 are great examples), and they are refreshing those models at a furious pace.
The mobile markets differ around the world, but the Western European model essentially removes the purchase price from the end-user. I haven't paid more than $100 US for a new phone in eight years, and I'm a technophile who upgrades every year, ususally to a high-end just-released model.
Apple have no experience at making phones. They make stuff which can be good to use, but that's hard in the phone world. Above all, phones have to be good phones first, then be good ipods, then have other stuff they do well. My SonyEricsson W850 is a very good phone, a great walkman, and also lets me browse the Internet at broadband speeds in a decent way, has good Java games available, a decent-enough camera, a torch, alarm clock and so on. It's very hard to get right the phone bit, and nothign of what I've read about the iPhone tells me it'll be any good at that. It's not 3G which rules it out for many technophiles including myself, too.
Apple might talk about a low-cost verion in 2009, but the others will have cheaper phones that do far more in 2007, let alone 2008 or 2009.
They might be moderately successful in a niche in the USA, (and in the mobile pheon world, the US is a niche), but I cannot see it becoming widely successful elsewhere. I might be wrong - it might have a neat feature that'll make it a must-have - but I'll be very surprised if they do - and the second it's out, the competitors will be throwing together better competing phones.
Ok Apple fan boys go ahead and mod me troll.
But without corporations pushing their email to these devices you won't get the blackberry user base, and lets face it most big corporations haven't liked anything else Apple up to this point so why change for this product?
Now the home user? The reason most don't have a smart phone is that they just don't need it. Most of the regular phones on the market already do far more and are alot more complicated than people want them to be. The average person is going to ask why they need to upgrade to this expensive phone when their normal phone does far more than they ever wanted it to do.
So there will be a bunch of apple fans and tech geeks that buy this initially then it's sales will plummet and Apple will can the project.
Ok I'm done burning my karma now.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I hate Verizon for the same reason - locking out phone features which only benefit Verizon. I just got a RAZR V3M and Verizon deliberately disabled the OBEX function (Object Exchange) which was enabled on the V3C. OBEX lets you browse the phone's file system, recover pictures, plant MP3 files as ringtones... But NOOOO!! Verizon turned all that off so they can sell your pictures back to you, sell ringtones etc. Everything the phone can do has been disabled and turned into a paid service. I'm done with any company that starts abusing customers.
Most of the stuff on
In 2010 Slashdot will be full of people lamenting that it has become impossible to buy a simple ipod without all the useless phone functions thrown in.
Nuffsaid
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Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
This story seems to provide a pretty reasonable background on the deal: How Steve Jobs Played Hardball In iPhone Birth: In Deal With Cingular He Called The Shots; Flirting With Verizon . It provides some clues as to the complexity of the negotiations that Apple engaged in. It doesn't cover everything, though.
1. Retail channel
There were many big problems to solve simultaneously, perhaps including one that couldn't be solved any other way, than partnering with at least one carrier: consumers today buy cell phones from wireless providers. That meant that Apple had to get the iPhone into wireless stores to really break into the market with anything other than a hobbyist handset maker niche. AT&T has over 2000 stores in the U.S., apparently. Other large wireless providers are similar in scale of retail presence. Wireless providers have stores in airports, big malls, little malls, downtown areas, inside of other stores like Radio Shack, Costco, etc. Apple couldn't build that kind of retail network in time to sell the iPhone, it needed to get the device into places where people were already looking for phones.
2. Give and Take of Negotiations & Shaking the Industry
I suspect that Apple would have preferred to be able to secure deals with multiple vendors in the U.S. However, the cell phone industry is seriously distorted, globally, not merely in the U.S. The handset makers think that the wireless carrier is the customer, which is the ultimate cause of cell phone suckage. Cell phones are camels designed by committes of people who have never even imagined a desert oasis, let alone been to one. Apple probably had to grant a period of exclusivity to Cingular / AT&T in order to get the rest of the things Apple needed for the iPhone to be an industry shaker -- which it already has been, despite the fact that it won't even be in consumer hands for a few more weeks. And Apple got a whole lot of stuff, some of it unprecedented including changes to the provider's network to support "visual voicemail". Companies like Verizon, even though they may provide good service to their customers, also are wed to the distorted market. They perceive bluetooth as a competitive threat, and cripple it in their phones to lock their customers into their ringtone sales engine and into paying extra to transfer photos from the phone to their computer. Apple's insistance that the iPhone not be hobbled by the carrier led Verizon to say "Thanks, we'll try it our way." But the Djinni is out of the bottle, on June 29. As consumers learn what these devices can really do, they'll be demanding blue tooth sync, 802.11 connection to their PCs, and other iPhone features from Verizon. Verizon will see its subscriber base shrink if they don't provide similar, un-hobbled capability to their customers.
3. HSPDA vs. EVDO
There's another interesting tidbit regarding the 3G network market in the U.S. that might be a factor. AT&T/T-Mobile/MISC GSM Vendors appear to be seriously lagging behind Verizon/Sprint/Alltell, which blanketed the U.S. Market with 2.4 Mbit EVDO data service many months ago. In fact this seems to be "common wisdom" amongst Slashdot / Gizmodo / Engadget geeks. As everyone knows, AT&T and the many other network providers around the globe are betting on the other major 3G network technology, HSPDA. What seems to have been overlooked, in the frustration with the slow pace of 3G rollout from the GSM vendors, is that HSPDA seems on the brink of crushing EVDO in terms of bandwidth. According to that wikipedia page "Current HSDPA deployments now support 1.8 Mbit/s, 3.6 Mbit/s, 7.2 Mbit/s and 14.4 Mbit/s in downlink." One of my gadget geek friends was able to confirm that HSPDA service is available in his
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
It's not about ssh, X Windows, or iWork. The current "smart phone" industry is providing people with a big heavy feature they don't presently want -- MS Office on their phone. Yeah, it makes for dramatic commercials where spreadsheets are edited at the last second before a big meeting and a billion dollar merger is saved. In practice, people running billion dollar mergers don't really care what's in the spreadsheet. They don't read them, they have people who have people who read them for them. This feature was added to smart phones by Microsoft because Excel is what they had lying about to sell, and because it makes for dramatic advertisements.
The iPhone is about a balance of features that people really want. Business people would love an iPod in their phone, because they spend a fair bit of time on airplanes, in hotels, in airports, in taxi cabs. They also would love an easy to use map system that could help them find a decent restaurant nearby. The Apple iPhone commercials don't look like they target business users, but they nail squarely what a business user wants from a phone. They want to carry less shit with them. They want to be able to quickly look up something on the internet, or bookmark something they heard about for reference later. They're going to buy an iPhone and their older iPod and Palm Pilot will be in a drawer.
The biggest thing, however, will be ease of use. If the Address book doesn't have some asinine limit of 500 contact numbers (it wont') and if it syncs easily and reliably (it will) and if the web browser really works and if Google Maps are easy to use on the iPhone, these things are going to be the hottest new business gadget since the original Palm Pilot.
It's about efficiency. Carry one or two fewer devices everywhere I go. Carry one device that's easy to learn and easy to use, rather than so hard to learn that many users don't even know about the advanced features and so hard to use that the advanced features they know about rarely get touched. Sending text messages, checking email, and placing and receiving calls need to work well.
A few business people I know are going to get an iPhone for one feature: visual voicemail (random access to voicemail queue). They calculate that the time and annoyance they will save with that single feature more than justifies the cost of the device.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Lastly, and the biggest reason why the iPhone is not for business. As systems administrator I can't remotely manage and secure the phones for my organization. If a Treo is lost and there are important sensitive documents on the phone I can simply erase everything on it so that any person they may find it on a park bench somewhere will not see that sensitive information. I can do this all wireless and in real-time.
There's no way to know about this until after the iphone is out... and with running OS X, Apple could concievably allow you to ssh into an iPhone or maybe even run remote desktop.... though I doubt they've had time to get such features ready for launch. But I see no reason why they couldn't in a year or so. I also bet the iphone can lock its data from the casual snoop like an ipod can already.Considering OS X for the desktop still lacks these advanced management, monitoring, and security tools I don't think the phone is going to get it anytime soon. I will admit, the day that Apple does close this whole I imagine their market share will rise much faster. Combine that with binary compatibility with Windows and Apple would have all it needs to become dominant. I don't see it happening though, Apple has always seemed content to be a smaller player in the field of business.
Did you write the above just to troll? OS X Server has had this sort of stuff for years... plus you can easily get ports of most of the Linux utilities as well. I thought this sort of stuff would be common knowledge by now. OS X is a Unix... the shared libraries are weird, but you can still port all of the wonderful FOSS stuff over.And "Apple" and Windows are not binary compatible, you can just dual boot Windows and OS X on a mac now.
p.s. I'm not a fanboi, just trying to understand the "iPhone bad for business" meme, 'cuz everyone I work with wants to get one for business... but we're kinda unique in not using MS Office much and using mostly Linux stuff instead.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.