This is most relevant to my personal opinion. If your argument is they are peaking and can't innovate anymore who replaces them? They dominate smartphone profits which is why I wanted to discuss their competition despite TS saying it has no relevance (lol).

it's a whole different market compared to 10 years ago when they destroyed nokia and blackberry. comparing blackberry's $6b revenue with apple's $260b is a joke. you could argue about nokia's position in 2008.

in my view you would need 3 things: disruption of the product with the same impact as widespread mobile internet and touchscreens had, an ecosystem that can match apple's and a brand that can match apple's.

plus tim cook or whoever must be asleep at the wheel. i don't see it.

I didnt “steal” anyones tweet lol. I copied and pasted information.


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That's $6 billion a quarter. Nokia pulled in $70 billion a year in a much smaller market.

That's a certainty. Only question is timing.
That already exists. It's called Android. Only thing missing is polish; all the functionality is there.
They said the same about Blackberry, an untouchable brand widely loved. There's nothing special about Apple's "brand". Ask how Huawei is liked in China, for example.

Why My Chinese Dad Switched From an iPhone to a Huawei
Chinese iPhone users are poor while Huawei users are rich, according to research

Apple doesn't have a great brand. They have a nice bit of hardware designed in 2008 and barely changed and inertia. This is exactly like Blackberry - which probably a stronger brand in its heyday. Once the hardware starts being second best or not cutting edge, the brand goes down the toilet.

Why were Blackberry and Nokia "asleep at the wheel"? Why did they fail? And what is special about Tim Cook? He seems to be making a bunch of stupid decisions.

whatever. they came close to that for maybe 8 quarters. apple has been printing cash for years now.
that's just garbage, apple is just the most valuable brand in the world in basically any study you can find - by a margin. blackberry never came close in widespread adoption.
the ecosystem, nokia or blackberry never had that. i'm quite tech-savvy and made the switch to android pretty early. most people i know stayed with apple and i don't see them going anywhere else anytime soon. it just works for them, no reason to switch.

Apple vs Android ecosystem is a good discussion, the threat of the Chinese makers in Huawei, Xiaomi especially overseas in emerging markets is a good discussion. There are always risks but let's face it, you can go back to page 1 after Jobs stepped down and many of the same arguments are still going on about innovation/management. It's not just about making a comparable ecosystem/product, it's making it profitable (which everyone outside of Apple is still struggling to do).

The minute that a company makes a technological leap equivalent to going from a mini keyboard to a touch screen they'll all switch.

Yeah. Or Google or Microsoft gets there first on a solid partial AI system (Apple software team is full of lower end coders)

Android ecosystem will never be as polished as Apple’s. It’s just not the focus of Android development. The different clientele also means less “polishing” goes into the apps for Android. I ran an S9+ and iPhone 8s plus side by side for almost two months. There would literally be ads on the S9+ but not on the iPhone for some websites. Google can’t really fix this. It’s literally webmasters making the determination that Android users are cheapos more used to or more tolerant of ads.

The biggest threat today isn’t Android itself per se. It’s WeChat bypassing the Apple App Store, essentially boring a tunnel in Apple’s walled garden.

And WeChat is starting to reach into non-Chinese speaking audiences. Alipay/WeChat pay with their basically zero setup cost (just print and laminate a QR code) is starting to be accepted at major retailers.

Meanwhile, US credit card companies/processors (even including pretty tech savvy ones like PayPal/Clover and any of those you see in hippy coffee shops) are still dicking around with iPads with custom mounting hardware and proprietary software that end up costing a grand per POS station.

This doesn't deal with the point I'm making. I'm not saying apple sucks, I'm talking about optimism and expectations. They lowered expectations and the stock took a dive. It's rallied hard from the lows and after earnings confirmed the lowered expectations were accurate. Bad news about guidance turned in to good news on the earnings day. Same story different reaction

I wasn't trying to deal with the point you were making. Just posting some numbers in the Apple thread.

I'm an apple hater but TS love for microsoft is irrational, microsoft is dead in the phone market and they ll need a miracle to come back in the next 10 years, Windows 10 got significantly worse in 2018, The surface Line is great hardware wasted by windows 10 lack of decent touchscreen applications and ton of bugs.
While Apple released a game changer with the ipad pro latest iteration. If next year apple stop ****ing their customers by not allowing mouse usage and external storage on the ipad they ll be far ahead from any other competitors(if they dont i suspect chromeOS will catch up with them within 2 years).

Run a pixel 3 next to your iphone and you ll get a more realistic comparaison, Samsung is ruining their customers experience with a ton of bloatware that isnt representative of android echosystem.

I heard "Microsoft is dead/dead money" a lot when it was $25. Since then it's crushed the piece of crap, Apple, even while being dead in the phone market after new management killed it. Imagine if Microsoft had actually made a serious play at phones? Microsoft has crushed Apple for returns while totally failing in a couple of potentially huge areas. That should tell you everything you need to know about Microsoft.
Most reviews think the Surface kicks the living **** out of the iPad pro in terms of usability. Mostly because of the software.

Neither of that matters because Microsoft is a general software bet. Look at Azure for example. Their revenue is not what you think it is.
iPads and iOS and even Mac OS are crap for most people for most uses. Not much is going to change that.

I'm really quite lost at understanding why none of the big phone makers are smoothing out the rough edges in their phones. Android is a far superior system to the iPhone but it needs a facelift and what it needs is mostly cosmetic.

If phones become PCs Apple can't compete while Windows wins. As awful as it now.

Microsoft is telling its customer to pick iphones or android phones for the past 3 months hard to call it anything but flat out dead, they invested a ton in windows phone but got killed, they cannot come back in the phone market without making it possible to use android apps with windows phone no matter how much they want to invest.

Your view of surface vs ipad is pretty shortsighted, when you start using a surface you love it but the longer you use it the more the shortcoming are annoying you, you start to get some buggy updates, you notice that the touchscreen is barely useful, the pen is a joke compared to apple one, if you have a surface your best bet right now is to emulate some ipad or android.

The ipad pro is the opposite experience(I hate IOS), people notice that they can can do more every year with their ipad, the only thing slowing that progression is apple fear to cannibalize their macbook lines.
I ve seen a ton of reviews and you take at face value some unboxing video from people who didnt use the product more than a couple of days. The surface GO is the most overhyped device i ve seen last year. once you understand that you are stuck with a dumbed down version of windows that require you to use microsoft edge for everything becase apps are non existent it s not that appealing, it s basicly the equivalent of chromeOS 3 years ago on better hardware.

Im a surface pro user for the last 3 years because I need a PC as i do windows administration but the reality is that I d rather use my cheap android phone for everything else than my 1500$ surface pro because the real life experience is not anywhere as glamor as anyone hope when buying one.

What about the apple car coming in early 2020s? If that is a success it will push apple to new heights and beyond same old computers and phones. Of course it is just rumors for now.

1. Samsung sells a lot more Galaxy flagships than Google sells Pixels.
2. Pixel occupies virtually a non-existent market share of Android phones. And the discrepancy between Pixel (which I never personally used for more than a week) and other Androids highlights one of the main reasons Android phones lack polish: vendors basically forking Android with "bloatware" and not updating the phones.
3. I don't think the Webmasters are singling "Pixel" out for less ad treatment.

If I meet a girl and she has an android she automatically drops a level. I assume that is reciprocated.

Until that changes Apple will continue to win.

It's not complicated.

You misunderstand why google sell the pixel phone and how it affect the whole market, android experience is mostly an app launcher and most google applications, the pixel phone is mostly a proof of concept like Nexus Phones were in the past.

Samsung has great hardware with a few cool gimmick and a ton of useless services.

If you want a good android experience you have a ton of options and imo samsung is not one of them.
Samsung phone sale have been stagnant for the past 6 years while chinese brand are getting better every year, that's the real threat to apple not samsung.

This discussions has become pretty toxic but there are a variety of reasons why iPhones have a more significant competitive advantage then blackberry or nokia did in their peaks. We could get into a long debate about this but the biggest difference is until there are universal app stores, whoever has the largest user base creates a cycle of creating more content and therefore attracting more users which attracts more developers to use their platform for development. Phones will shift to operating system/gaming counsel status because of this where there is an impossible barrier to entry because you simply can not replicate the content on a new platform.

Despite this I think they are absolutely butchering their advantage by focusing on camera quality instead of functionality and increasing the price point for very little utility.

The iphone advantage is to be sold as part of a 5K$ package that include an apple watch an iphone a macbook pro and ipad + whatever the rest of the family buy which give them some good customer retention.
Their main issue is devices becoming redundant, the ipad will kill the macbook overtime and the imac, like the iphone killed the ipod. The apple watch will replace the Iphone at some point.

Hot damn, that's a hell of a lot of wrong in one post.

This is why Windows will win the days when phones become PCs? This is why Apple is doomed to fall prey to Android, which has 4x more users and growing?



(old data, but the numbers are about the same today).

The latter is actually a decent point. Apple is bound to its hardware. If massively overpriced iPhone sales fall in the next recession, which they will, their 20% current market share will get smaller and smaller, and once that happens, and developers will abandon them and a vicious negative cycle. The app store is actually an enormous danger for Apple and a source of bankruptcy.

Apple can't add functionality because it ruins the Apple experience and their profit margins (if they add storage, they lose billions in profits, if they add options, they lose simplicity). Blackberry had the same problem. This is how these things play out, hence the the comparison