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Apple Devices To Reach Parity With Windows PCs In 2014
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Horace Dediu writes at Aymco that in 2013 there were 18.8 times more Windows PCs sold than Macs, a reduction in the Windows advantage from about 19.8x in 2012. But the bigger story is how Apple's mobile platform including iOS devices has nearly reached the sales volume of Windows. In 2013 there were only 1.18 more Windows PCs than Apple devices sold. Odds are that in 2014 Apple and Windows will be at parity. Dediu says that the Windows advantage itself came from the way computing was purchased in the period of its ascent in the 1980s and 1990s 'when computing platform decisions were made first by companies then by developers and later by individuals who took their cues from what standards were already established. As these decisions created network effects, the cycle repeated and the majority platform strengthened.' There was concentration in decision making in the 80s so a platform could win by convincing 500 individuals who had the authority (as CIOs) to impose through fiat a standard on the centers of gravity of purchasing power. Today, with mobile products there are billions of decision makers. and the decision making process for buying computers, which began with large companies IT departments making decisions with multi-year horizons, has changed to billions of individuals making decisions with no horizons. Companies have become the laggards and individuals the early adopters of technology. 'Ultimately, it was the removal of the intermediary between buyer and beneficiary which dissolved Microsoft's power over the purchase decision,' concludes Dediu. 'The computer has become personal not just in the sense of how it's used but in the sense of how it's owned.' Finally, all the above is almost moot, given the rise of Android, something that is beating both Cupertino and Redmond alike."
ABCco writes that the number of apples and oranges sold in 2014 will also reach parity!
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Apple apparently sold around 260M devices in 2013.
I can't find a full year for Samsung, but they sold 117M phones in Q3 alone.
Q1: 64M
Q2: 70M
Q3: 117M
That's 251M in just 3 quarters. Phones only, no tablets, no laptops.
Apple sales include Mac, iPods, iPhones and iPads.
PCs have a longer lifespan, they are way overpowered for what most people use them for. I have a five year old 3GHz 64-bit AMD box. It is still quite usable, I upgraded the video card recently, about $150, and it is still quite usable for gaming. I have no compelling reason to replace this five year old PC.
In contrast every two years I can get an iPhone upgrade for free with a two year contract, sure its not the latest generation hardware but its a free hardware upgrade. Or I can splurge and spend $200 every two years and get the latest generation hardware.
You can't directly compare PC vs phone sales if PCs are on a 6+ year purchase cycle and phones are on a 2 year purchase cycle. Keep in mind that these are not competing devices, they are complementary devices. Most people are going to own and use both PCs and phones.
Tablets muddy the waters a little but they are still mostly complementary devices. Not many PC users can switch completely to tablets.
Wins what? I never understand why people pick a tribe and then pray for the destruction of their foes.
We only win when there are multiple viable choices available. Once someone 'wins' their focus turns to consolidation and not to innovation.
Not really.
Because while Androids outsell Apple 4:1 or more, there's a very strange thing going on. Mobile web traffic has iOS using TWICE the amount of data over Android. Or, put another way, 1 iOS user consumes as much data as 8 Android users.
On the spending front, it's about 1:1 iOS:Android - i.e., for every iOS user that buys stuff online, 1 Android user buys stuff online. And even with that, iOS users spend more.
And finally, advertisers apparently prefer iOS users - willing to pay up to twice as much per impression to an iOS user than an Android user.
I don't know what the vast majority of Android users are doing, but it certainly isn't contributing to the ecosystem. It would be more like Mac and PCs, except it appears the vast majority of PCs were used only to play Solitaire as their sole function - leaving the few Mac users being ones to actually use their computers. Then again, the vast majority of PCs are probably used in a similar fashion - surf the web, send email, do facebook, shut down PC....
Of course, given that most Androids are crap-droids that people are buying to replace their featurephones, I guess it makes sense - the phones sell, but they're only used to talk and text. No web browsing.
Makes you wonder, when reports of the average cellphone bill being close to $150, that most people are really paying for plans they're not using. They see shiny Android, they may browse the web the first few days, then boom, the phone's just a phone.
Even Samsung's flagship phones barely crack 10% of the Android market, and Samsung owns about 90% of the Android phones out there, so for every S4, they sell 8 other "budget class" Android phones.
OTOH, the good news is, developers don't have to worry about those phones - most users will probably access the Play store once or twice, then forget about it. Google's metrics only measure the last 3 or 4 weeks, so the vast majority of phones reported would be active users (the ones who probably bought an Android phone to use as a smartphone, and not a fancier featurephone that cost less).
Yes!
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At 3:1 or 4:1 though, Android will handle that by the end of this year.
Android may have already passed Windows installed base. Gartner estimates there were 1.63 billion Windows PCs in the world at the end of 2013, and that around 850 million Android devices sold in the same year. Android sales in 2012 were just under 800 milion, up about 35% from 2011.
The global average lifespan of a moble device is hard to find, but most estimates put it at around 22-25 months. Adding the numbers suggests Android has already passed Windows, or at the very least achieved parity with it.
I'm not sure why we're discussing Apple in this context at all. I guess we just like also-rans here...
My iPhone can do everything I can do on my workstation. The screen is too small to be productive at some tasks, but it can do everything.
Sure, I can't access a bash prompt on localhost, unless I jailbreak it, but I definitely have an ssh client and have logged into my server many times... even solved a catastrophe once using just my phone, vi works surprisingly well using the iOS keyboard.
This is nothing. Last year Americans bought 309 million Windows PCs, but they bought over 11 billion paper clips. It is clear that Microsoft has lost its stranglehold on the paperclip/Windows PC market.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Don't get confused about this; There are two tribes here; "slightly open" and "closed" and which one wins will make a real difference. This is a question of total control. Android already has clones and fully viable internal competitors (Amazon's kindle systems; chinese ones, etc). IOS to a large extent and Windows 100% arew becoming closed systems in which large media companies and "approved" developers will have special powers nobody else shares.
Currently Microsoft is subsidising every phone they sell. They pay for marketing for Windows 8 and demand that it is the only operating system mentioned on PC suppliers sites. If Microsoft ever gets to 30% market share there will be a massive closedown and that investment they are making now will have to be recovered.
Google saw this some time ago and realised that, when Apple or Microsoft get complete control of the market their search will be locked out of almost every new device. They are now somewhat on the side of freedom and openness just because they realised that closed and locked is a trap for them. That doesn't make them good, and the fact that their backs are against the wall may make them dangerous, however compared to their competitors they aren't "evil". Hope they win, because if anyone else does there is no chance of another competitor arising ever again.
The interesting thing about Android is the amount of money involved. E.g. in the UK
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Mobile-Phones-Smartphones/zgbs/electronics/356496011
Top selling phones seem to be between £158 (Samsung S3 mini) to £369 (Samsung S4). Now the lifetime is 24 months. So people spend £10 per month to keep their smartphone up to date. Most people don't do this explicitly, rather their telco sells them a plan for much more than £10 a month and gives them a 'free' upgrade every so often as a sweetener.
Now for PCs
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Best-Sellers-Computers-Accessories-Laptops/zgbs/computers/429886031/ref=zg_bs_nav_computers_1_computers
Prices seem to be £300-400. On the other hand I bet the replacement time is longer. Many people mention 5 years. That's £5 or so a month. So they'd need to spend significantly more on laptops to get to the level of cash they spend on phones.
So it's plausible that people spend more money on keeping their smartphone up to date than their PC.
In fact that's quite plausible. Most people seem to have horrible, sluggish laptops but the very latest smartphone.
Of course if they bought one of these every five years it would work out differently
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Apple-13-inch-MacBook-2-5GHz-Graphics/dp/B008BEYEL8/ref=zg_bs_429886031_6
#6 on the best seller list and £855. So that would be £14 per month assuming you replace it every five years. Incidentally this is one of the reasons why Mac OS taking over from Windows is not a good thing. Most people could get save money by buying one of the vast number of Windows machines compared to buying one of Apple's limited selection of admittedly very high quality machines. A small selection of high end machines means you probably need to spend extra cash to get all the features you need because of the cheapest machine lacks a few.
Of course Microsoft are doing their best to fuck up Windows, so it's not that surprising that people are jumping ship for Mac OS. Windows OEMs must be pretty pissed off at this.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
If you look at Betamax it was regarded as being a bit better than VHS but was less widely licensed. Betamax started off with almost all of the market but gradually lost it because Betamax machines tended to be expensive.
I'd say the analogy is pretty good. High end but proprietary system gradually loses market share to more open, cheaper competitor.
You can buy a very good, cheap Android handset from one of the zillions of Android OEMS. That enables Android to gain market share amongst people who can't afford a more expensive iPhone.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Apple is to Betamax as Android is to VHS.
Interesting comparison, depending on what you mean by it. As someone there at the time, I think it is a myth that Betamax was a better product. It had somewhat better image quality, yes. But a video recorder that couldn't tape a full movie without you returning home from your dinner to turn the tape before leaving again is not a superior home video technology. Depending on whether you are positive or negative to Apple, this could be interpreted as "typical Apple, you are using it wrong" or very unlike the user-friendly Apple user experience.
Another reason VHS won is more directly similar to Apple vs Android. VHS won because it was an open standard a myriad of manufactors freely adopted, Betamax wasn't - it was controlled and licensed at significant cost. Because of this obvious stronger consumer appeal, they got the content owners betting on them, including porn (another myth).
Actually that's also how the PC won over the Apple computer: First, by demand of IBM, there were two manufacturers of the processor, enabling competition on the processor side (that's ultimately why now the x86-based architecture is dominant). Second, the PC design was open (although that was only because in the beginning, IBM didn't really believe in the PC), so there was competition also in the PCs themselves.
With respect to VHS being 'open', that wasn't the case either. I'm pretty certain that every VHS recorder sold included a license back to JVC. Now, it's true there were far more manufacturers of VHS recorders but Sony was not the only company to produce Betamax machines. Sanyo and Telefunken also produced them and there are probably others I'm not aware of.
There are far too many myths regarding this sort of thing, each markets had different issues. The practical reality was that Betamax probably was a better product in many respects, certainly the majority of Sony machines were built as premium products. Also, Betamax generally had features before they appeared on VHS (shuttle search, peep search HiFi - not just stereo - sound). However, none of these were enough of a factor in it becoming dominant. VHS, with more manufacturers was often a product you could find cheaper and still had enough features. Although you can have a long argument about picture and sound quality, if Betamax was better, it wasn't enough to make enough people choose that product.