csmart 472 Report post Posted February 18, 2012 Today I came across an article on cnet.com titled 'Why Apple is winning?' The article praises Apple as if there is nothing beyond that. It also highlighted short comings of Windows, Windows Phone, Metro UI and Adnroid. This is the same author, who few months ago, was all praise for Android against Windows Phone. To me, it seemed more of a PR work from Apple. Now coming to the topic, lets discuss really Apple is that great. Since the launch of iPod to iPad, most of us have used one or the other product of Apple and mostly 'iProduct'. What are your feelings? Ease of use Ease of data sharing and syncing with other devices (PC/net etc) User interface liking Simplicity cost of ownership I had used Mac about 10 years ago and after that never really get a chance. That time, I was coming from Windows 98 and found it to be good enough and learning curve was low. During that time I was using both Windows and Apple. Recently, about 3 months ago, I again got a chance to use Macbook Pro. I used for 2-3 days and then found there are lot many things to learn. On PC, I can work with closed eyed but not with Mac. May be its new environment and never used. But I also found that Mac limits the access to various settings. though they were not that essential and for most users, those settings never make sense. My nephew also has iPod (2nd gen) and I always make fun of him due to limitation like non sharing of files and need iTunes. Further, upgrading itunes is also headache. Download ~85 mb and then install it. Any problem in syncing htrough iTunes, be assured to loss your data. Even one of my friends had same problem. She lost all her pictures and never got it back. After that she never touched her iPod. I've seen those who used Apple products, they simply feel windows is useless. But I beg to differ. Many are so much engrossed with Apple that they feel uncomfortable with other products. I also fail to understand why Macbook Pro is more expensive than a laptop of similar configuration. They use same Intel processor and what differ is OS. I always argue in favor of windows because its easy, cost and getting help is always easy. while for mac, you have to visit service centre. Many argue that you do not need any help for Mac. THey do not have virus problem, they work out of the box with other products like wi-fi netowrk etc.(also mentioned the same in cnet article). But then today's PC industry is because of Windows and not Mac. If there was no Windows, there would not have been Dell, Acer, Lenovo etc. even our Rimweb would not been there. There are many developers developing windows app, thanx to VB. There is entire PC based eco system for development tools to user software. we have wide range of hardware that we can select and similarly for software. The main idea for this topic, bloody Apple has $90 Billion in cash and stock prices are up by $100 in a month. Its profit is sky rocketing. A company is in consumer product but not FMCG and still so much of cash. Definitely there is something about the prodcuts. Either we hate it or love, Recession or boom, Apple don't give sh**t about it. It has mastered the art of marketing and creating hype for its products. I want it, you want it, everybody wants it. Why Apple is winning Source Apple is on a tear: shares up over $100 in a month, big product launches looming and a massive untapped market of tablet and computer buyers. Here's why it won't slow down anytime soon. Apple's killing it. The reasons are simple.(Credit: James Martin/CNET ) Call this column "confessions of a reformed Apple hater." I've spent the better part of my career insisting that Apple products were not for me--this after my first job in tech was reviewing them for the now-defunct Mac Home Journal. The company was too controlling, the prices too high, the forced upgrade march too abusive, the closed system too limiting. Now, just a week ago, I traded in my fourth Android phone (a Samsung Galaxy Nexus) for an iPhone 4S, which just about completes the cycle of Apple in my life. I bought a MacBook Air to replace a balky HP laptop running Windows Vista. I own an iPad because, well, what other tablet would I own? I have an iPod Touch almost solely to power a Bose sound system (and because I wanted to Facetime with my son back before I had the iPhone). And the other day, when my mom was complaining about startup times, printing, and wireless networking, the words, "you should get a Mac" were out of my mouth before I could stop them. Apple is winning. It's doing much more than winning me over, but I think my experiences point, in part, to why Apple is currently and will keep winning well into the near future. Look at the numbers alone. Apple stock is up almost $100 in just the past month, reaching an all-time high of $509 this week. As Dan Frommer points out at ReadWriteWeb, the company has been riding a decade-long growth period, increasing revenue every year at an ever-increasing pace. Apple's stock price reached a record high in February, breaching the $500 a share mark for the first time. The company is making that money on products that are the vast minorities in their market-share categories: Mac sales hit an all-time high of 5 million, which still rates at maybe 6 percent of estimated global market share. The iPhone clocks in at 23.8 percent of the global smart phone market, according to Gartner. The iPad is the obvious exception here: it is its market, and when you add its sales to global PC sales, it's a big part of the reason that Windows is headed for sub-90 percent market share. Now, I know 90 percent might sound perfectly enviable, but once the dominoes start falling, they fall fast. Internet Explorer market share dropped below 90 percent in 2005, and is now estimated to be an astonishing 33 percent--with Google Chrome set to surpass it soon, by some estimates. Windows is losing out primarily to tablet and smart phone sales--exactly the areas where Apple keeps selling increasing numbers of devices. And while Android quickly caught and passed iOS in market share, it lost ground to iPhone 4S in the fourth quarter of 2011. What's happening here is that Apple products keep getting better--and selling better as a result--and Microsoft and Google are simply giving away the race. Here's how. Apple's killer strength, as everyone knows, is its laser-like focus on "insanely great" products, coupled with its ability to build an iron-clad ecosystem that just keeps selling more Apple products. And in a time when tech is simultaneously getting more pervasive and more complicated, Apple's focus on simplicity and usability has never been more relevant. "It just works" is all I, at least, have time for when it comes to my tech. Which leads us to Microsoft and Google. Microsoft has all the pieces of a good ecosystem play, from the operating system to the browser to the software to the game console to the phones to the search engine. Yet none of it ever seems to come together in any cohesive manner, and if anything, it just keeps getting more complicated. Take Windows 8, Microsoft's forthcoming operating system. It will feature the Metro interface on top of the Windows 8 interface. Metro is designed primarily for tablets, but it will feature prominently on PCs as well (and across the Microsoft landscape, really), and Microsoft is making a major apps push for the Metro experience. Mozilla, for example, will build a Metro version of Firefox. But Metro is not Windows, and Metro apps won't run on the Windows 8 (Metro's underlying architecture is WinRT, as opposed to Windows' Win32). Nor will they run on older versions of Windows, according to discussions at Microsoft's Windows developer blog. Clunky for developers, limiting for users. And that's not all. At least right now, a Metro app also won't run on the Xbox OS, even though they both use the Metro interface. And it won't run on Windows Phone, despite its Metro interface. Now, there are rumors of a unified development environment, and it's apparently relatively easy to port Windows Phone apps to Windows 8 (although not vice versa). But rumors and half-simplifications are all we've got at this point, and the rest of what we've got is a mess. And we have that mess at a time when most Windows users tend to see Windows as a necessary evil that's slower to boot (help us, Windows 8!), uglier, and more insecure than the quickly evolving Mac OS. Then there's Android. The good news is that very recent research seems to suggest that fragmentation is becoming slightly less of an issue--mainly because the Android universe has settled on either Android 2.2 (Froyo) or Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and a relatively similar set of phones. But Ice Cream Sandwich is rolling out, albeit slowly, and it will introduce yet another version of Android for developers to contend with. And if developers get annoyed with a platform, you, the consumer suffer: you don't get as many apps, and the apps you get aren't as good. Or, you're not sure whether the app you got works with the version of Android you're running: there aren't many apps yet that are ICS compatible, for example, so if you get your long-awaited Ice Cream Sandwich update, you might find that a few of your apps no longer work--again, a headache you're simply not going to have on iOS. You don't have to think about it--and for a lot of tech fatigued consumers, including me, that's great. But even worse than fragmentation is the fact that Android is still more complicated, in the same way that Windows is, to operate and troubleshoot. If something goes wrong with your iPhone, you take it to the Apple store, or, at least, forum posters are all talking about the exact same hardware, OS version, and most likely, problem. Dive into Android related forums for troubleshooting information and you're quickly talking about custom ROMs, .apk files, or instructions like this, which I was given as a possible solution for 4G connectivity problems on my Galaxy Nexus: "dial ##778# > edit mode > pw:000000 > modem > rev.a >change ehrpd to enable > menu > commit > reboot." Seriously? Android tech support.(Credit: CNET,Screenshot, Molly Wood) Tech is mainstream, at this point, and for a lot of people, it's become essential and indispensable. So, given that, computers shouldn't still be this hard. Apple has always understood that simplicity and usability were crucial to user happiness, and although they sometimes simplified (to the point of unnecessary restrictiveness), the simplicity combined with increasingly robust capabilities is a winning combo in this complicated and busy world. And like I said, it's all upside for Apple, at this point. The software woes that kept people from buying Macs are subsiding--even in the business place. No more contending with awful versions of Microsoft Office, trying to hack Exchange to work with a subpar email client or the hilarious Outlook beta. Companies and users are going cloud-based, so software compatibility doesn't matter as much anymore. All you need is to dump Safari for Chrome and you're good to go. (Ironically, Google's cloud services could inadvertently sell more Macs!) Or, as our news editor Jim Kerstetter put it here at CNET, "Windows Vista drove my family into the arms of Apple. Now we have a Macbook Pro, a Macbook Air, three iPods, an iPhone, and an Apple router...not to mention two sound systems with iPod docks. Why? Because they don't ****." Sometimes, that's the simplest reason of all. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
amitnsonu 72 Report post Posted February 18, 2012 (edited) i don't know whether Apple is best or not but damn sure that Apple is the costliest. I can never own a latest iPhone because of high prices. Edited February 18, 2012 by amitnsonu Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
dkaile 1,051 Report post Posted February 18, 2012 Apple has the best hardware (at least in ipod's, laptops and All-in-Ones). PERIOD. Software, is a totally different issue. It lags in user friendliness, upgradability and ease of sharing. Is iphone the BEST? NOPE. Samsung beats it even in hardware in many areas and ease of Android is miles ahead. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
KapilAgrawal 340 Report post Posted February 18, 2012 (edited) Agree with Chirag bhai.. Its 100% write-up of Apple. But even worse than fragmentation is the fact that Android is still more complicated, in the same way that Windows is, to operate and troubleshoot. If something goes wrong with your iPhone, you take it to the Apple store, or, at least, forum posters are all talking about the exact same hardware, OS version, and most likely, problem. Dive into Android related forums for troubleshooting information and you're quickly talking about custom ROMs, .apk files, or instructions like this, which I was given as a possible solution for 4G connectivity problems on my Galaxy Nexus: "dial ##778# > edit mode > pw:000000 > modem > rev.a >change ehrpd to enable > menu > commit > reboot." Seriously? Its like asking people to hold on to a Phone with "exact same hardware, OS version, and most likely, problem". People want variety, Change. Just by launching 6 Models in over 4 years (May be more), Apple think they are the Winners. And if Apple is talking about .apk, Custom ROM etc than Android guys should talk about Jailbreak, Custom Baseband etc. And see Apple talking about 4G, While non of their Phone supports 4G. Nice Joke... It seems through this they are trying to hide their incompetence to launch a Variety of iPhone (may be 20-30 models) & IOS version.. Edited February 18, 2012 by kapilthio Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
rajanmehta 4,056 Report post Posted February 18, 2012 Lol.. That Cnet article really wins in stupidity sweepstakes. Haven't laughed so much in recent times after reading a tech article!!! You too need some laughs? Watch this VIDEO, it sums up brilliantly what apple is in few minutes like nothing else can.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2o1-_4yfAE Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
sunilromy 62 Report post Posted February 19, 2012 samajdhari se dekhe, dono ko side by side rakhe toh, apple vs samsung. keep brand value apart. toh I guess samajdhar admi reality jaanta hai Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
@v@nit 3 Report post Posted February 20, 2012 Samsung and others have better specs on paper but still iPhone is super smooth compared to these monsters even with 100+ apps. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
abhi.r 95 Report post Posted February 20, 2012 One of the reason is the kernel. Android runs on Macro Kernel, Symbian on micro kernel, and iPhone on hybrid kernel. It is said that Symbian has the best kernel and memory management among these. But still its dead. Ever wondered why and how Symbian is capable of running on such old hardware. Sent from my SPH-D700 using Tapatalk Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Karthik R 246 Report post Posted February 20, 2012 Speaking plainly, Apple is so successful because they don’t churn out lousy products like seemingly everybody else in the consumer electronics business. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Karthik R 246 Report post Posted February 25, 2012 Curious how much your iPhone actually costs Apple to manufacture? Asymco analyst Horace Dediu claims that each iPhone costs about $30, and that’s on the high side and greater than previous estimates of $8 per unit. So now, even with the most conservative estimates, we know that an iPhone generates about $650 on average, so however you slice it, the iPhone is a high margin device for Apple. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
KanagaDeepan 1,084 Report post Posted February 25, 2012 ^^^^^ It is always better to be apple's share holder than their customer.... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
KapilAgrawal 340 Report post Posted February 25, 2012 I do NOT understand why everyone is behind iPhone. I am using 3GS on 5.0.1 & I can bet IOS is the worst OS. You can't Attach a file if you are replying or forwarding a mail using stock mail app. Even Window 6.1's stock mail (2 years back) had this option. The best part about iPhone is touch. Its the best I have ever used. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
shadow 119 Report post Posted February 25, 2012 i always wondered ipod and iphone have almost the same specs except for the gsm radio for the iphone .. then why iphone price is 2X or 3X more than ipod ?? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
rajanmehta 4,056 Report post Posted February 25, 2012 Curious how much your iPhone actually costs Apple to manufacture? Asymco analyst Horace Dediu claims that each iPhone costs about $30, and that’s on the high side and greater than previous estimates of $8 per unit. That's not correct. Read the original article by the same analyst here >> http://www.asymco.co...cost-structure/ An iPhone generates approximately $650 in revenue for Apple. This figure has remained fairly steady over time. Using deduction from overall margins, it’s possible to estimate the gross margin on the product to be around 55%. That means that the cost of goods sold (COGS) for the iPhone is about $293. In the case of the iPhone the BOM has been fairly steady around $200 for a new model. That leaves quite a big gap to the overall COGS of $293.Could transportation, manufacturing and warranty costs really add up to $90 for an iPhone? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Karthik R 246 Report post Posted February 26, 2012 So "cost to manufacture" signifies the labour cost in the Cost sheets and labour cost is a very small part of the overall cost structure of the iPhone. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
sunilromy 62 Report post Posted February 26, 2012 btw, hardware cost might be less but the main development charges is on software, on the software programming for microcontroller (low layer) whichever apple use. which act as an intermediate and tells the hardware to obey the higher language of IOS technology. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
amtrag 20 Report post Posted February 28, 2012 Lol.. That Cnet article really wins in stupidity sweepstakes. Haven't laughed so much in recent times after reading a tech article!!! You too need some laughs? Watch this VIDEO, it sums up brilliantly what apple is in few minutes like nothing else can.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2o1-_4yfAE I did'nt read/watch that. But I can surely tell that it is Apple which is laughing its way to the bank. And that is what matters most. There is a need to ponder why Apple is able to sell despite of the presence of better (& cheaper) alternatives in the market. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
csmart 472 Report post Posted February 28, 2012 they are Champions in marketing and know where and how to hit at target (customers). IMO iPod was the game changer for Apple. they are able to convince people that there is nothing better than apple irrespective of price or what others are offering. people think only apple knows what is the best and they can provide it. others are "idiots". it is more sort of ignorance and also 'cool' factor irrespective of what others provide. Apple is also winning because of "no virus" Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
city02 63 Report post Posted February 29, 2012 apple has the best marketing, sales, profitability, and hardware design but not the best prices, value, technology or even the best interfaces which shows that cost, tech or UI is not the top 4 factors for success in consumer electronics! i hate apple's arrogance despite owning an ipad2 ... that's why apple will continue to ignore the indian market with its premium pricing and 1-2% mkt share and no itunes simply because they could not care less for such a small mkt size PS: the video posted by rajan has embedding disabled so its not viewable currently do you know that despite being the leading consumer company for some years, apple has never conducted mkt research to find out what its customers want! they think they know everything and this hubris will be their downfall ... 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
jatinjoshi 1 Report post Posted February 29, 2012 I don't own Iphone or Samsung Android but one thing every one agrees that credit goes to apple for innovation. Portable MP3 players were never heard before IPOD Phone without button was not thinkable before IPhone They have innovated Application market which support development eco cycle and Lastly IPAD They have the best Laptop and Desktop and all-in-one everyone copied from there product even on software part windows is poor mans mac os and Android is also poor man IOS Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
csmart 472 Report post Posted February 29, 2012 Apple is arrogant from the beginning. I was reading Job biography and he once directed Mac team to remove arrow buttons so that people use mouse. Apple wants to decide how user should, what they should use and not user. I also wonder how apple is able to hang on for iTunes without any competition. There was an app from Real networks but apple forced it closure. nobody is suing apple for its monopoly. why cant we have different software for syncing besides iTunes. Microsoft had to pay for IE. The same logic should apply to apple. Apple is like shaadi ka laddu. khanewala bhi pareshan, naa khanewala bhi pareshan.. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
kshah 452 Report post Posted February 29, 2012 So much of discussion about APPLE proves that apple may not be the best but you have to either LOVE it of HATE it. One can not be neutral about it. :-) Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
rajanmehta 4,056 Report post Posted February 29, 2012 PS: the video posted by rajan has embedding disabled so its not viewable currently After clicking play and then clicking on "Watch On Youtube", the video is viewable in a new youtube browser window. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Karthik R 246 Report post Posted March 1, 2012 Are Apple products the best? We can continue arguing taking sides But undoubtedly Apple shares is the best bet out there for investors. Their market cap just breached the sensational 500 billion $ mark. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
abhi.r 95 Report post Posted March 1, 2012 I don't own Iphone or Samsung Android but one thing every one agrees that credit goes to apple for innovation. Portable MP3 players were never heard before IPOD <-- Not an innovation by Apple, portable MP3 player was present in the market before. Apple just made it better and marketted it like its something new from space. Now the whole industry follows it as a benchmark. Phone without button was not thinkable before IPhone <-- Touch phones were available in the market, Apple again just made it better than others and now it's a benchmark for other phone manufacturers. They have innovated Application market which support development eco cycle and Lastly IPAD <-- Tablet PC was old concept, but again Apple made it better Now considered as a benchmark. They have the best Laptop and Desktop and all-in-one everyone copied from there product even on software part windows is poor mans mac os and Android is also poor man IOS Its never too late for anything, just do it better than others Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
