Could the profits that are currently driving Apple at some point shift to instead support vendors like Samsung and Huawei who offer cheaper access to new tech faster, in a sloppier but "good enough" beta technology form?
Samsung Electronics is a multibillion corporation that leads the world in producing advanced displays, solid state storage and other components; builds an astounding array of home appliances—including the majority of the world's high end televisions—and has built smartphones for many years before iPhone even appeared. So why is the company handled like a small child when makes sloppy, incompetent mistakes?
Without Apple buying its 5G modems in annual volumes greater than 200M units, Intel had little chance of staying afloat in competition with Qualcomm. However, the Open Handset Alliance of Android phone makers are a bigger casualty of the deal, because they're losing the strongest marketing point they've had to rival iPhones in ten years: exclusive access to Qualcomm's leading 5G modem chips.
Two years ago there was no shortage of media coverage imagining that Apple's entire hardware business was about to be eclipsed by a new voice-first world where Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant and perhaps even Microsoft Cortana would shift consumer and developer attention away from iPhone apps and toward stationary Internet connected microphones running ambient "skills." Why didn't that actually happen?
As a company, Apple has shifted dramatically over the last eight years since the passing of Steve Jobs. This week’s "it’s show time" event was a primary example of this, being the first to focus entirely upon non-hardware product offerings while introducing a series of celebrities talking about their new projects to create content that has nothing to do with the computing technology that has always defined Apple. What’s going on?
A decade ago Google's Android platform targeted the stars: first swaggering into Apple's iPhone market, then aggressively following iPad into tablets, and more recently jumping into wearables-- this time well before Apple Watch was even announced. What's stopped Android from succeeding anywhere apart from replacing Symbian, Windows Mobile, or Java on lower-end phones?
It’s almost "show time." That’s the phrasing used in media invitations to Apple’s March 25 event, where the company is expected to unveil its subscription packages for video, news, magazines, and games. It appears Apple is continuing to "pull the thread" to see where the future of television leads, and it sure looks like that future is tight integration between iOS, Apple TV and HomePod.
Music streaming service Spotify has elevated its disputes with Apple into a full blown anti-trust complaint filed with the European Commission. But Spotify’s public case, as detailed on its website, is misleading and covers up the basic reality that Spotify wants to do business at Apple’s expense without paying for it.
After dumping support for its last remaining Android Pixel C tablet last spring, Google is starting off 2019 with another major retreat in its hardware lineup--including the cancellation of various concepts in development
Despite desperate concerns once voiced about the price of iPhone X, Apple's modern Face ID models have proven to be the company's most popular phones. In part, that's because buyers know they can invest in the latest iPhone and later resell it to buy the next new model because iPhones retain a resale value much better than premium-priced Androids
Media coverage from this year's MWC Barcelona, née Mobile World Conference, has worked to establish a narrative that Apple is dangerously behind other companies in releasing support for 5G mobile networks and the foldable screens that enable a phone to convert into a tablet. Yet the last decade of MWC shows that vendor announcements aren't really worth very much.
Over the past two decades, Apple has proven capable of exercising its rapidly lithe, innovating ability to take its existing technologies and create new computing forms that retain its influence over the most commercially successful and strategically important markets. That winning strategy of the past also appears to be the best suited for the future of iPhone
Over the past two decades, Apple has proven capable of exercising its rapidly lithe, innovating ability to take its existing technologies and create new computing forms that retain its influence over the most commercially successful and strategically important markets. That winning strategy of the past also appears to be the best suited for the future of PCs.
As Apple begins a new year of operations, a media narrative is unfolding that Apple must ditch its reliance on premium hardware--and particularly iPhone--to desperately scramble its way into Services for the scraps left behind Netflix in a world of commodity devices. But the reality is actually a lot less dramatic for Apple, which has already proven an unusual ability to deftly adapt to changes in the industry
Apple has faced onerous challenges in the past from powerfully entrenched adversaries that once looked like they might derail the company’s advancement, including Microsoft, Nokia, Google, Motorola, and Samsung. But today, with no real competitors standing in its way, will Apple’s premium-priced trajectory get knocked out of alignment by a recession in China and global aftershocks? Here’s a look at Apple’s future informed by its recent past.
A glance at the writing that passes for financial news headlines today might make it appear that Apple is entering 2019 with troubled sales, intense new competition emerging in China, and a weakening economy where nobody can afford to buy its expensive products anymore. The solution held up by many pundits is so old that it sounds comfortably soothing: iPhones should be cheaper! But they’re wrong, here’s why.
Court testimony from Apple's Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams has laid out that Qualcomm has repeatedly flexed its monopoly control over the cellular industry in its dealings with Apple, demanding that Apple not only pay to license its patents, but also cross-license all of its own intellectual property above and beyond requiring a 5 percent cut of the total cost of Apple's products plus exclusivity in sourcing all of Apple's mobile chips.
Once again, Apple stole the attention of CES this year without even appearing as an exhibitor, thanks to a series of announcements from Samsung-- now incorporating support for iTunes video playback in its smart TVs-- and a series of other television makers incorporating Apple's AirPlay 2 wireless streaming in their products, including LG, Sony and Vizio. This news was cynically portrayed as a "strategy reversal" and a new effort at "copying Microsoft" by the Wall Street Journal in a piece chock full of errors and backward logic.
Bloggers hired to write about Apple for a major American newspaper are telling stories of an arrogant fall from grace by the world's leader in smartphone profits, centering on the new iPhone XR--a model that ostensibly failed to live up to its hyped expectations. However, that entertaining story is really a contrived bit of fiction that isn't based in facts.
After Apple restated its December quarter revenue guidance to account for weaker than expected iPhone demand in China, members of the tech media have cranked their clickbait content generators up to 11 to take full advantage of AAPL panic season. Unfortunately, what they are writing is almost entirely ignorant gibberish that has nothing to do with actual events.
While Apple's critics are scrambling to portray its restatement of guidance as some sort of evidence of a "lack of innovation" or "pricing that's too high," the reality is that it's simply evidence that President Trump's tariff war on China has hurt a key Apple market. Apple has never been better positioned-- and its competition is now performing so badly that any one of them would love to be in Apple's shoes.
