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Apple Tops Holiday Sales With 44 Percent of All New Device Activations (macrumors.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mac Rumors: Apple's iPhone and iPad were the most popular mobile devices gifted during the holidays this year, according to new data shared by Yahoo-owned mobile analytics firm Flurry. Flurry examined device activations by manufacturer between 12/19 and 12/25, finding Apple devices to be twice as popular as Samsung devices. 44 percent of all new phone activations were Apple iPhones, while Samsung smartphones accounted for 21 percent of activations. Huawei, LG, Amazon, Oppo, Xiaomi, and Motorola trailed behind with between two and three percent of activations each. Google's Pixel smartphone, which came out in October, did not make Flurry's list. Last year, Flurry released a similar report, and Apple devices made up 49.1 percent of all device activations, while Samsung devices came in at 19.8 percent. Phablets, or smartphones and tablets ranging in size from 5 inches to 6.9 inches, continued to grow in popularity. In 2016, the phablets category, which includes the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus, 6s Plus, and 7 Plus, was responsible for 37 percent of total device activations. Medium-sized phones, like the 4.7-inch iPhone 6, iPhone 6s, and iPhone 7, were responsible for 45 percent of all activations. Activations of full-sized tablets, like the iPad, have continued to wane. From Flurry's report: "While Samsung is slowly growing in popularity throughout the holiday season, up 1% from last year, Apple devices continue to be the gift to give. Holding the third and fourth positions for activations are Huawei and LG; which is remarkable, as both manufacturers do not have an individual device within the top 35 devices activated. Their high rank is likely due to the fact that they have wide variety of devices and affordable options (hundreds of phablet and medium phones) for consumers to choose from."
The majority of new device activations (roughly 56%) was Android phones.
lucm, indeed.
Fixed the headline.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I'm sure the Chinese slaves who work in Apple sweatshops for $3/hour will rejoice. It will ensure them many more months of working 64h/week before they earn more than they spend on basic living conditions.
It would cost $12 per device to Apple if they were to ensure a decent wage to those workers but that would slow down the insane piling of money in Apple offshore accounts so it will never happen.
Thank you Apple and Apple customers! You all contribute to making the world a better place.
lucm, indeed.
I don't recall activating my new Android tablet, whatever that means.
Where do I sign up?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The interesting figure is that Samsung *increased* their new activations, going from 19% to 21%, in the same year that they had to recall every single one of their new phones because they exploded. Meanwhile, Apple activations went down again. I mean, it takes a real optimist to spin that as a win for Apple.
And it's a long-running trend.
2014: Apple 51%, Samsung 17%
2015: Apple 49%, Samsung 19%
2016: Apple 44%, Samsung 21%
Now all Samsung has to do is ship a phone that doesn't explode or doesn't catch fire and they'll probably get a tie with Apple within a year or two. All of this after Apple had a complete monopoly in this market just 5 years ago. They'll probably end up in business textbooks as a case study of how companies can go from winners to total obsolescence within a same decade.
lucm, indeed.
We had three iPhone 4S units in the family. All of them started to exhibit battery issues about a month ago. One had a dangerously swollen battery (which, according to Apple, is apparently "normal"). The other two refused to hold a charge. All three devices were happily running iOS 7.1.2.
We took them into the service centre, and had the batteries replaced for ~$100/pop. They were good solid phones, and in stellar condition for their age, so why should we upgrade?
Apparently Apple thought otherwise. I wasn't told this beforehand, but apparently "standard procedure" is to upgrade the software on the device prior to installing a new battery. Something about diagnostics- the tech basically said it was bullshit, the diagnostics from the older iOS software was identical to the new diagnostics, except for the version number- which Apple refuses to accept, and therefore will not ship the service centre a replacement battery.
So we got all three devices back with new batteries... running iOS 9.
Now they're virtually fucking useless.
It takes a good 10-20 seconds to open the phone app. I can have exactly one tab open in Safari, switching to any other tab causes that page to reload (which is great for my 3G data plan). Switching to another application causes the new application to re-launch itself (presumably because it got terminated in the background). Switching back to Safari will cause Safari to reload the active page. Before, I used to be able to have 3-4 apps open at the same time (without having them get terminated by the OS) and 4-5 tabs in Safari no problem.
Likewise, the new OS seems glitchy as fuck. Mail used to work fine with all my business IMAP accounts, now it's a crap shoot if half my inbox even loads (and it's a coin toss as to which half shows up). Even iCloud is a mess, some things are getting synced, others aren't. Almost nothing is working 100%. I've tried doing factory resets and setting up the phone from scratch, but it never makes any difference.
We've purchased exactly one replacement phone (an iPhone 7). The shit show that came with that (had to upgrade iTunes, except the new version of iTunes required us to upgrade the OS as well, which broke a whole bunch of other stuff)... I don't know.
We've still got a week to return that phone, and I honestly think we're going to do that and just switch to Android.
I'm tired of Apple's shit. It's pretty clear that a large part of their business comes from planned obsolescence and forcing people to upgrade, rather then producing products that people actually want to go out and buy. And I've had enough. They can ram their activation and adoption numbers up their ass for all I care.