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On the iPhone and Apple's Meteoric Rise To the Top
zacharye writes "Friday marks five years since the world first got its hands on a smartphone that would turn the industry on its head. In five short years, Apple went from the ground floor to being the most profitable company in the smartphone business by a staggering margin. Apple and Samsung — two companies that weren't even on the smartphone industry's map a few years ago — are now the only two major global vendors making money, and the split was estimated at 80/20 in Apple's favor last quarter. That's 80% of smartphone industry profits in less than five years with just five different smartphone models under its belt during that span."
Alright gentlemen we have a fine flame war in store for you tonight.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
with just five different smartphone models under its belt during that span."
That's a significant part of the reason for it, right there.
I wonder if this will continue for Apple.
iOS 6 is a yawner. Yes, what we need -- more facebook integration. Already, there is a backlash against FB. The latest Android announcement had some cool items in it including another method of protecting against piracy that does not depend on if a device is not rooted.
The Retina Display Macbook Pro has a cool screen, but cannot be repaired or upgraded.
Mountain Lion?
Jobs's RDF is gone.
What Apple needs to do is start figuring out how to get themselves enterprise-friendly without losing their consumer market. Enterprises buy stuff in such large chunks that a few good contracts are a lot better than lines around the building of hipsters.
First, redo the Mac Pro. Make a chassis that works like a tower, but can have a rack drawer attached so it can be slammed into a standard enclosure. Offer not just 8Gbs FC cards, but NICs with enough packet offloading power so FCoE is workable.
Second, make something like BES but for managing iPhones. Yes, Exchange can do a lot, but having a dedicated policy management server that can handle data transmissions, perhaps even backups of phone devices would bring a lot of revenue.
Third, the ARM processor supports worlds. In this day of BYOD, offer iPhones and iPads with a "work" partition and a "home" partition. That way, the employee only needs to type in the long password when accessing the "work" side, and the Exchange erase only blows that out. It also allows for apps to only see a subset of data, so the FB app isn't able to access work contacts.
Fourth, make an antipiracy mechanism similar to Google's LVL or new encryption mechanism in Jelly Bean. That way, apps don't have to rely on the fact a device is not jailbroken. As an added bonus, more money can be spent on features, not anti-jailbreak BS.
Fifth, make a business friendly Mac desktop that can push the Dells and Compaqs out of the offices. Take an iMac, toss the camera and mic, and sell that as a business PC with service plans to follow. Lots of cash there to be made, as most companies would switch to Macs if they could, only for the artistic value of the machines.
"Better, faster, stronger," Apple could have easily lifted those Kanye West lyrics for their press release announcing the coming of the iPhone 3GS in 2009.
*facepalm* Sorry, I know its a minor detail, but Daft Punk originally wrote "Better, faster, harder, stronger", and Kanye sampled it (with permission) for his song. They have a cameo in his video, which is an awesome tribute to Akira for those that haven't seen it.
*watches Daft Hands and Daft Bodies on youtube*
Sorry, but it seems "meteoric rise" has been used a lot lately and it's almost as if people are being tested to see how stupid they are.
Actually, it's a test of how quickly some people jump to erroneous conclusions without bothering to check if there is a reasonable explanation they simply don't know about. We could call it the "true knowledge test for males between the ages of 15 and 30".
The phrase "meteoric rise" has been in use at least since 1865 - and, given the context, it makes perfect sense.
#DeleteChrome
I am a phone geek. The cell phone that I like the best. Actually the best cell phone ever made, in my opinion is the Nokia N9. Now dead, no longer made, it's corpse used to make shitty Lumia's. It could have been the 3rd leg in the cell phone triad.
But, it isn't about technology. The people that buy cell phones aren't the real customers, but the companies that suck user information and sell it.
The Nokia N9 is like the 2002 BMW E39 M5. the last of the great road cars where you could actually shift it, and trurning off the traction control really did just that.
So, long Nokia. The N9 could have been a stellar hit.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
People forget this now, but the iPhone did not support apps when it launched. Jobs didn't want third-party code on the iPhone, and tried to assuage the demand with web-based APIs for accessing phone hardware. App support was only added over a year later with iOS 2, coinciding with the launch of the iPhone 3G, as Apple and Jobs conceded to the inevitable.
I think you're selling him short. The guy had the courage to enforce his own very strong opinions, that luckily were very user-centric, but also knew to back down from time to time. I don't agree with most of his choices, but they did work and push the envelope. On the other side, MS seems a prime case of community design and political choices, probably knowing what the market wanted (Metro !), but failing to push courageous solutions in favor of preserving their markets and counting on their strength to force bad-ish solutions down our throats. Smartphones and tablets are a prime example: MS was there first by a wide margin, but marred the experience by trying to use their desktop interface, failing to spot the allure of a fully locked-in, proprietary ecosystem, and relying on OEMs for hardware, apps, cloud.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.