Fantastic Kindle Commercial
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Amazon is doing it right.
Market Categories - iPhone vs. Galaxy S
The Android vs. iOS debate has many oft-repeated narratives that color the perception of the people subscribing to them. You can often tell what camp a person is in, and whose opinions they follow, by looking at these. “Apple makes more profit than anyone” “Android is the winner by market share” “iOS has high quality apps” “Android is an open system” …
One popular narrative is “Apple needs to make a … because someone else is successful with it”. This is mainly repeated about three different categories: A budget phone, a “Phablet” (larger sized phone, screen diagonal of 5 inches and up) and previously a 7 inch tablet.
Hence the rumors of a cheaper iPhone, or a bigger, phablet-like iPhone, or sometimes both. Both a cheaper phone and a phablet could be good categories for Apple to get into, especially a cheap, smaller iPhone aimed to replace the feature phones and low-budget Android phones that are currently replacing feature phones, perhaps an iPod Nano + Phone (but I’m fantastisizing, for fantastisizing is fun) would be something I’d like to see. I digress, back on topic.
This stems from people seeing only whole categories, rather than sub-categories. They look at the tablet market over all and Apple has to worry, because 7 inch tablets sell. Or even more prominently look at the whole phone market, and compare the Galaxy S line and the Galaxy Note line to the iPhone, when they don’t directly compete, as they are already separated by a “non-negotiable” feature (the size of the screen). The fact really is that, not just of course in profit, but also in market share, Apple is the uncontended winner in the 3.5 inch and 4 inch phone category (similar to how they are currently the uncontended winner in the 10 inch tablet market). That means Apple has a growth opportunity by attacking the 4.5+ inch market.
Now, for comparison Apple’s strategy with the iPod (which now has 70% of the market) was to start from the high end and then extend its business to lower price points (Mini, Nano, Shuffle) and different high end form factors (iPod Touch)
Now there is a new example of this strategy, the iPad Mini.
The problem is that, except for Apple, no one discloses any useful numbers in the tablet business. However some high end estimates can be made. Lets start with the Nexus 7. Google kept giving vague numbers in the first couple months how many they might have sold (500 000, 600 000, 1 000 000…) and it appears that they have sold a maximum of 4.8 million (http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2013/2/19/nexus-7-maths). The Kindle is likely outselling it and some estimates I’ve read are around 11 million (some of those are of course 8.9 inch devices). Samsung apparently “doubled” its sales of tablets to 7.8 million in the last quarter (of its whole line, whether that includes all Notes or just 10 inch Notes I don’t know) but it is like they won’t have sold much more than 15-20 million altogether since they started selling tablets.
It appears that Apple became, in just one quarter, not just the biggest seller per quarter, but also the biggest seller overall (or close to) of tablets in the 7 inch category. Beating out Google (who has been in the market for 6 months), Amazon (14) and Samsung (28) despite being severely supply constrained throughout the period and the competing devices being sold at miniscule margins or even at cost. And more than that, it seems very possible that within a year they could be the absolute majority seller of 7 inch category tablets.
Taking this information from other categories I would say that it is not Apple that has to make a phablet or a budget phone or a watch or a TV, but instead it is its potential competitors that have to hope and fear that Apple doesn’t, as it would likely eat their profit (if they have any)…and then their market share.
Not “Samsung is successful in that category and now Apple HAS to react”, but
“Apple can react, and if they do, you probably don’t want to be their competitor”
What’s wrong with Games today?
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(via Guess which icon for the game Juggernaut is iOS and which is … on Twitpic)
Apple’s walled garden keeping terrible movements in gaming in check.
About App Icons
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Interesting thoughts on App Icons, what makes them effective, styles you might use, etc.
(via Mantia » About App Icons)
An iPhone Is Stolen, Then Restolen - NYTimes.com
Maybe there is some merit to the “increase in crime due to Apple” claims.
How You Turn Music Into Money in 2012 (Spoiler: Mostly iTunes)
Keating made 97% of her revenue through people just buying her music, whether through physical sales or digital download. Spotify subscribers pay their ten bucks a month for the service, and that even feels like a healthy little monthly gift to music-making. But it’s not nearly as helpful to the artists as buying an album or a song from iTunes, Bandcamp or Amazon.
Fascinating look at the revenue split of an independent musician.
More Marco Arment
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http://www.marco.org/2012/07/26/not-just-geeks
First of all, geeks are a very large and influential market. As one big example, if not for geeks, Firefox would never have started to catch on in 2004 and broken Internet Explorer’s reign. We installed Firefox on every non-geek’s computer we could find. And while we were there, we set everyone’s search engine to Google instead of Yahoo or MSN, and we made fun of their AOL email addresses until they switched to Gmail. Our preferences matter.
Just cause funny!
iPhone 6 - iPHONE 6!!!
Marco Arment’s Review of John Siracusa’s Mountain Lion Review
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This is not a quick read, so it’s a good opportunity to try a read-later method such as Safari’s Reading List, which Apple invented completely on their own.
I just love Marco Arment. Check out his review of John Siracusa’s review, and, of course, check out the Siracusa’s review itself.
