Slashdot Mirror
Huawei Surpasses Apple As the World's Second Largest Smartphone Brand (theverge.com)
According to analysis by consulting firm Counterpoint Research, China's leading smartphone marker, Huawei, surpassed Apple's global smartphone sales for the first time in June and July. The company is only behind Samsung in sales. The Verge reports: Figures haven't been released yet for August, though Counterpoint indicates sales for that month also look strong. However, it's worth noting that with Apple's new iPhone releases just around the corner, the iPhone maker is almost certain to get back on top in September. Researchers at Counterpoint also point out that Huawei has a weak presence in the South Asian, Indian, and North American markets, which "limits Huawei's potential to the near-to-mid-term to take a sustainable second place position behind Samsung." Its strongest market is China, and it's also popular in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. Still, Apple doesn't have much to worry about; Counterpoint says the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus remain the world's best-selling smartphones, while Oppo's R11 and A57 claimed the third and fourth spots, respectively, followed by Samsung's Galaxy S8, Xiaomi's Redmi Note 4X, and Samsung's Galaxy S8 Plus. Surprisingly, despite overtaking Apple in global sales, none of Huawei's phones appear on the Top 10 list.
" Surprisingly, despite overtaking Apple in global sales, none of Huawei's phones appear on the Top 10 list. " only surprising if you are ignorant of the market. Huawei make a shit ton of different model phones. They could easily become Number 1 and never have a phone in the top 10. haven't touched their phones myself but I hear mostly good things about them, it is their tablets that interest me.
> Huawei, surpassed Apple's global smartphone sales for the first time in June and July
Why would most people and Apple fans purchase an iPhone in June or July, provided that the new iPhone is to be announced a few weeks later?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
polymer polymore polyman..cease fire stand down,, some still calling this 'weather'?
Who are you? Huawei?
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
a quality ~4 inch Android 7 or 8 phone with OKish specs, not priced at hundreds of €, and I hope this segment is where Huawei can step in, because the other manufaturers sure as hell won't. They only sell 5+ inch phones and it's like walking with a tablet in your pocket.
I finally managed to wean my wife and kids off iPhones, which were ruining me with each upgrade cycle / theft / breakage.
Android has finally gotten "good enough" to be a viable iPhone competitor, and the Huawei phones are great at less than half the price.
> *Rebrand ( stupid auto correct)
I guess you've to be glad it doesn't make "Rembrandt" out of that.
I can't wait to see a guy tries to fit a new 20" Huewai Smartphone in their pocket.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
DACA....is CACA
Use the "smart" phones at your own peril, subjects.
You misspelled "Samsung" there.
That was my high school's rallying cheer.
Just before a new release and in the dying days of Apple's current flagship model, some article pops up saying that they've been overtaken and their sales are dropping/tech being eclipsed by some new phone/are the cause of impending thermonuclear war.
Compare like for like across the sales cycle. As the summary says, look again in about October'ish or whenever the new phones from Apple are available for purchase. That is - if you actually care about such things as which global position your phone manufacturer has.
" Surprisingly, despite overtaking Apple in global sales, none of Huawei's phones appear on the Top 10 list. " only surprising if you are ignorant of the market. Huawei make a shit ton of different model phones
Yup, my reflexion too.
It's easier for Apple to be top selling phone - even if they sell in much smaller volume - when they basically only sell one single phone in 2 variations.
Huawei might sell a much bigger total volume, but divided by hundreds of models, none of the phone will individually beat any of the top 10 sellers.
Same situation with operating system regarding iOS vs Android:
back then's Apple smartphone were the top seller, but Android was (and is still today) the most popular OS even if no phone with it did beat any phone with iOS.
simply there were dozens of android phone manufacturer, so even if total installation did beat iOS, none of them did individually beat Apple in volume.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Nokia did that too, I hear it worked out great for them.
It *did* work great for them back in the dumb-phone and feature-phone era.
Management just completely fucked up everything afterwards regarding smartphones :
- They dragged the aging symbian platfrom way too much. ("But hey, it has always worked until now, so it's a safe bet !") (~yeah sure. And maybe Palm should have stuck to PalmOS even longer~)
- They let go the R&D departement which was until that point striving to make nice smartphone/tablet OS (the Meamo/Meego line with N700, N800, N900, and the first large scale public N9, etc.) and would have actually helped Nokia become relevant in the smartphone era. ("But hey, it's burning money, let's leave the burning ship for shareholder's sake !") (on the other hand that team manage to escape the burning ship on a small jolla (pun intended by them) to survive and put an interesting OS on the marked)
- They decided to ged in bet with Microsoft. ("But in the business world you're never wrong to go to Microsoft !" (Or was it IBM ?~) )
End result :
"we didn't do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost"
They kept doing stupid shit that would sound "a safe bet" to an MBA, but didn't make any sense.
(And the biggest part of these decision was taken by microsoft shills such as Elop)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Xiaomi are releasing a ton of very good new phones at a fraction of the price of flagship phones from other countries. Back in the day cheap Chinese phones were really bad, but the Xiaomi ones actually have decent build quality and software. The Redmi 4x has 4gb ram, 64gb rom and an octocore processor and costs less than $200. That's sufficient for most users. They also have higher spec models that cost more, but still a lot less than the flagship models which do very little to justify the extra price.
As much as I dislike almost all phone manufacturers, I will still grudgingly trust Apple more than the others when it comes to securing my private information on my devices against apps, 3rd parties, and hackers doing things that I don't know are being done. Huawei -- what do you want to bet that they take any of that shit seriously? Cmon, even Google doesn't police its apps and infrastructure well, what are the chances that a down-the-rung OEM does?
It might be an old source, but Apple seem to still trounce Samsung on profit margins...
God knows how though, samsung's phones are expensive to buy and cheaply built compared to Apple's. Maybe labor costs are a factor...
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
No nokia ignored the smartphone market and clung to a dying OS that nobody wanted way too long to the point they were reliant almost completely on dumb phone market,
Not correct. Nokia very much did NOT ignore the smartphone market. The problem was that their product offerings were not well aligned with what it turned out customers actually wanted. Nokia was for a long time the number one seller of "smartphones" even before Apple introduced the iPhone. The problem was that once people saw the iPhone the game was different after that and Nokia wasn't able to catch up. They were selling smartphones the whole time but the problem was that they weren't selling the smartphones that people actually wanted post-iPhone.
Then Nokia made the asinine decision to announce the switch to Microsoft's OS close to a year before they actually had a product ready to ship. Basically they announced that their current products that they were selling were dead on arrival so who is going to buy a phone with an OS you know isn't going to get updated or supported?
It's "easy" (for lack of a better word) to sell lots of units if you don't give a shit about making a profit. The tough bit is to make a lot of profit while still selling a lot of units. So far only Apple and Samsung seem to have figured out that trick in the smartphone era.
You forgot; felony ebook price fixing, planned obsolescence , patent theft, media blacklisting. apple is still number 1 in all those things.
I think I can help Huawei move past Samsung into first place. All they need is a friendly, catchy slogan...something that will really speak to people. How about...
Huawei: at least you know our back door is for more than batteries.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Why do these DACA people prefer to live in a 70% White country over a 100% Mexican country?
i'm not surprised , got my wife a huawei last year and it's a stunning handset , very perfomant , gorgeous display and at a price that cant really be argued for long .
Why would most people and Apple fans purchase an iPhone in June or July, provided that the new iPhone is to be announced a few weeks later?
Millions of people (including Apple customers) don't actually give a shit about having the latest and greatest. My father has an iPhone and it's a fine choice for him but he's never been on the latest version. He's always 1-2 editions behind whatever the latest is and he's fine with that. There are millions of people just like him. For someone like me or presumably you, you are correct - I would not buy a new iPhone three weeks before a new version is released because there is a reasonable chance I might upgrade if I like what I see.
[...] planned obsolescence [...] apple is still number 1 in all those things.
Google stopped providing Android updates, on the Nexus 5 two years after it was released, and security updates another year later. I bought mine a year after it was announced, giving me two years of security updates before Google gave me the finger.
Meanwhile, my daughter's iPhone 5S (bought used for about a hundred loonies) is still receiving updates, even though it was released a month earlier than Google's Nexus 5.
Maybe labor costs are a factor...
iPhones are made in China, while Samsung has shifted most of their production to Vietnam. So they should win on labor costs.
I've heard anecdotally online and from friends that Huawei's support is sub-Samsung. Meaning you'll get a few security patches, and maybe an OTA point release upgrade for Android, but that's about it.
Could be wrong, but usually support is the first thing to be cut to make a tablet or phone cheaply.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
At first, that line is reasonable. Instead of gambling on a flagship model, you do a diverse form of gambling.
And i guess it worked out, the massive amount of lineage forking in Nokia models is sorta amazing, and so is the ascetic.
But this isn't what is talked about, what is talked about, is how Nokia in a post iPhone world, made a bunch of terrible decisions, allowing Microsoft to eventually buy out the phone part, and then waste it, and nobody was the wiser.
Your post is not addressing the arguments of sjbe, so its a terrible post.
All our Apple widgets get their update notifications about the same time (within 24 hours, faster if you tell it to check). My Nexus 6 seems to get OTA updates about 2-3 MONTHS after I see a press release about it.
Earlier this years there was a mandatory down-rev from 7.1.1 to 7.0. Now 7.1.1 is back, but after 3 weeks since the press release I still have no update, even when I manually tell it to check, and I don't expect it to show up for many more weeks.
I had very sour Android experiences from Sony and Samsung with lower end phones (still more phone than I needed if they didn't have so much crapware that they broke themselves), so I went with a pure Google solution with the Nexus 6 (as pure Google as was available at the time), and frankly the whole experience is still lousy compared to my wife's iphone experience. So while Apple's products are outrageously expensive, the just is no equivalent after-sales experience to be had in Android land.
Waiting makes even more sense if you're not buying the latest.
True but people often don't care that much and need a phone right now. If you aren't concerned about whatever is in the next one and you need a phone today then you are probably going to buy a phone today even if you could save a little by waiting. I'm not saying it's the most sensible course of action but a lot of people simply aren't that concerned with their smartphone.
Let's see how Huawei (the name just trips-off the tongue!) fares against Apple in about a month, after the new iPhone models are debuted...
https://www.apple.com/apple-ev...
The timing of this Slashdot "News" article is quite well orchestrated. Just like the FUD Article regarding Apple's alleged "Production Issues" also seen today on Slashdot.
Nokia proved that being first mover isn't always an advantage.
That was well understood loooong before Nokia but your point is quite correct.
Nokia never really was very good at certain types of software, specifically the user facing parts of it. I owned a series of Nokia phones for several years and the interfaces on their phones were poor for anything but the most basic of phone operations. They routinely build phones which technically had features like email or web browsers but they were so awkward to use as to be useless. It's what I call checkbox marketing - they could claim they had that feature without lying but the actual feature was nothing more than the most minimal version of it imaginable - useless in the real world. I bought a Nokia "smartphone" around the same time as the early iPhones. On paper they were roughly equivalent but in actual use there was no comparison. The email and web browser on the Nokia were effectively useless. Eventually they started making phones more in the model of the iPhone but by then it was too little and too late.
I think the problem was that Nokia thought their customers were AT&T, Verizon, etc. Apple (and later Google) understood that the real customer to worry about was the end user, not the wireless phone companies. Nokia designed phones that physically were solid or at least interesting hardware-wise but they never made the investments (until too late) to do the same for the software. At the end of the day that is what killed them along with some weapon's grade stupid management decisions relating to Microsoft. The hardware in the iPhone and comparable Android phones isn't anything Nokia couldn't do. The secret sauce is the software and the network effects (ecosystem) that go along with it. There wasn't room in the market for more than 2 or 3 platforms once the network effects took hold and Nokia didn't figure out the right formula until it was too late to matter.
I'm still not convinced that the decision to go with Windows Phone was particularly bad.
The decision was fine. How they executed it was profoundly idiotic. They announced that they were switching to Microsoft in February 2011 but didn't have an actually product with Microsoft's system until November 2011. Basically they told everyone they were killing off their current offerings nearly a year before they had the replacement ready to ship. That's just weapon's grade stupid especially given how little traction Microsoft had managed to achieve against Apple and Google.
If they'd gone with Android, they'd have been stuck in a race-to-the-bottom in a market with razor-thin margins were Google is the only company that makes serious money.
Google doesn't make serious money off of Android and never really has. Look at their financial statements if you need proof. Samsung does ok but Android for Google is more of a defensive play to keep competitors from locking them out of the mobile ad market where they actually make their money. Kind of like Amazon's tactics with Kindle, they don't have to make money on Android directly to have it be worth their while. That's why Android phones can be done on the cheap because Google doesn't need a big markup unlike Apple or Microsoft. (the downside being that they have every incentive to track you closely and sell your information to advertisers)
The surprising thing was that Microsoft, a company that achieved a monopoly position by doing everything in its power to encourage third-party development for their platform, completely failed to attract third-party apps to Windows Phone.
I don't think it's so shocking since they were really years late in getting something competitive with iOS or Android to the market. I don't care how dominant you are, you cannot give competitors like Google or Apple that much of a head start. And the market dynamics in mobile are different than the ones in PCs where Microsoft achieved their dominance so it was never going to be an easy translation for them.