A smartphone company that only has 1 model, no 3G, no 3rd party apps, and no push email. What sales can it possibly do against entrenched companies like Microsoft, Palm, Nokia, and RIM?
Apple iPhone grabs 28% of U.S. smartphone market; ahead of all Windows Mobile devices combined.
Canalys estimates that Apple took 28% share of the fast growing US converged device market in Q4 2007, behind RIM’s 41%, but a long way ahead of third placed Palm on 9%. This was also enough to put Apple ahead of all Windows Mobile device vendors combined, whose share was 21% in the quarter according to Canalys figures.
(Source- MacDaily News)
(And this is up significantly from Q3 2007, when Apple had 19.5% market share in the US. Of course, you can’t go too far back because the iPhone just launched in June 2007.)
Meanwhile, the Cupertino-based company’s combined shipments of 2.32 million iPhones during the fourth quarter were also good enough to place it third in the worldwide smartphone market, ahead of Motorola’s 2.3 million unit shipments, but behind RIM’s 4.0 million and Nokia’s 18.8 million.
(Source- Apple Insider)
Meanwhile, the company last quarter crept its way onto the list of the world’s Top 10 handset vendors.
(Source- Ars Technica)
Perhaps even more telling than the market share numbers, is that the iPhone mobile browser share was many times higher than that:
Google on Wednesday said it had seen 50 times more searches on Apple‘s iPhone than any other mobile handset…
(Source- Financial Times)
So now that we know the answer to the question I led this post with, let’s twist that question around a bit:
-What happens when Apple actually has more than 1 model?
-What happens when Apple has 3G?
-What happens when push email is available?
-What happens when 3rd party apps are available?
-What happens in a couple of years when today’s iPhone is 10x more -powerful, or when the iPhone product line starts at say $199?
‘Wow’ comes to mind (and by that I don’t mean Windows Vista.)
Apple vs. Microsoft- Vaporware vs. RDF?
One of the most intriguing differences between Apple and Microsoft is the completely opposite approaches they take to announcing new products. Microsoft typically announce early, and more often than not delivers late. Apple likes to keep things secret, and then wow the market with a big press event. (Microsoft tries to do its version at CES every year, but Bill never seems to generate one tenth the excitement.)
What does this tell us about the respective companies? Microsoft is typically more concerned about leveraging Windows and maintaining dominance. It new products are typically legacy-oriented. It never has any surprises up its sleeve, so it may as well announce early.
Apple is totally different, not just from Microsoft but from most all high tech companies. If you read about product development within Apple, you see how obsessive they get about product development, how much they CARE. How else would they take Palm and Microsoft TOTALLY by surprise?
We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.
- Palm CEO Ed Colligan, commenting on then-rumored Apple iPhone, Nov. 16, 2006
There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.
- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, April 30, 2007
But wait, there’s even more.
It’s not just a phone, it’s a platform.
And it’s called Cocoa Touch, not iPhone SDK, not iPod SDK.
Yes, Apple did come out with a new phone and a new iPod, but more importantly they came out with an entire new OS, one that kicks Palm OS and Windows Mobile to the curb in terms of usability AND power. An OS whose importance was significantly shrouded by lack of support for 3rd party apps. But that shroud has been now lifted, and the future is now in clear sight.
All many of us were hoping for/expecting/wanting were native iPhone widgets (analgous to Dashboard widgets in OS X). What we’re actually getting is 3 or 4 levels above and beyond. As I said before, the iPhone is the first teleputer.
The SDK includes everything you’d expect from an Apple environment, including the UNIX-based internals of OS X. In addition, developers will have access to Keychain, Bonjour, SQLite and Core Location as well as a mature, Quicktime-based media layer including video playback, Core Audio, Core Image, Core Animation, PDF rendering, OpenAL, and OpenGL ES. Cocoa Touch gives developers access to the hardware and interface, including Multi-Touch events and controls, Accelerometer, View Hierarchy, Localization, Alerts, Web View, People Picker, Image Picker and the integrated Camera.
(Source- Ars Technica)
The Cocoa SDK and the iPhone ‘OS’ is the first mobile platform that offers the depth of a full desktop OS. It is the first ‘next leap’ as we have jumped from the mainframe to the desktop to the laptop and now to the handheld. The significance won’t become clear for another couple of years, until developers really learn how to develop for this new mobile platform and really take advantage of this beautifully crafted UI (but they’re chomping at the bit, judging by the big names that have announced plans to develop software for the iPhone.)
Believe it or not, Nintendo presents an interesting comparison at multiple levels. Their new home and portable consoles both incorporate brand new control mechanisms. It took awhile for developers to take advantage of the Nintendo DS touchscreen and Nintendo Wii sensor controller. There were concerns that those were gimmicks to cover up inferior hardware (similar to concerns about iPhone’s lack of 3G, etc.) Both the DS and Wii have SIGNIFICANTLY inferior graphics hardware compared to their competition, normally a KILLER in the video game market. Just as lack of 3G and 3rd-party apps led many to write off the iPhone. It’s easy to do quantitative comparisons of feature lists, but is much harder to compare user interface and user experience.
Many, many millions of units sold later (and many, many millions later in profits), we see that they were revolutionary all along. I have noodled around with my daughter’s DS, and it enables all sorts of new types of games that simply weren’t possible before. There’s cooking games, surgery games, brain training games, even a game where you get to draw the character you are controlling onscreen.
The Cocoa Touch platform will be just like the DS and Wii in terms of enabling new user experiences. And not just for games (although there will be plenty of those too.) This new SDK/platform/OS will ultimately power more than just iPhones and iPods, it will enable a whole platform of products, products we haven’t yet seen or even conceived.
Just the basic IDEA of the iPhone UI trumps Palm and Windows Mobile by at least 2 or 3 levels. Even the glass screen, little physical details like that, show how much work Apple put into getting the entire user experience right. The way screens ‘bounce’ when you scroll all the way and hit the end- not only does that look cool, it provides clear visual feedback that the user intuitively grasps (rather than the scrolling just stopping, and the user wondering if his finger was not being recognized.) It’s these things that truly enable a mobile platform, so that instead of feeling like you’re navigating a compromised, squished down device, you’re using something that was built from the ground up to do exactly like it does. More screen space is not necessary even if the option was there.
It’s the kind of new product that can only come when the designers completely throw out ALL old assumptions about how the device should work, what the best way to do it is, how things worked on other similar but not the same products. Windows Mobile was a glaring example of how not to do it- the designers took in a lot of baggage from both Palm OS and Windows desktop OS, and it took quite a few iterations before things finally got usable. Palm could have come out with something like the iPhone, but they have carried ‘baggage’ from the original Palm OS and carried it over to smartphones. The Treo is great- if you want something that is like a PDA but can make phone calls. Many people expected an iPod-like Apple phone, with possible even a click scroll wheel, that’s another example of baggage. It’s all almost to the point where the simplicity belies what you can actually do with the iPhone- if you don’t have to navigate through 4 different submenus, then it can’t be that powerful or fully featured, can it?
Of course, now that the iPhone has been out 6 or 8 months, everyone is coming out with their own take, complete with pretty touchable icons and glass screens. But Cocoa Touch is out of their grasp- how can a hardware maker such as Samsung develop a operating system and software platform like Apple can? Of the two other companies that might have had a shot, Microsoft isn’t experienced at hardware, and Palm was too busy releasing successively slightly tweaked versions of its original Treo 600. I guess that’s not surprising, as the once leader of handheld devices missed out on 2 other big ships as well- messaging and music/multimedia. Now they’ve missed out in the one market they were actually trying in.
Short term, long term, how about the mid term future?
The other aspect of this looking forward, is what kind of hardware power we’ll be seeing in 2-3 years? Let’s conservatively say 10x the CPU power and storage space- what can Apple do with that? The iPhone is already a pretty amazing device, and does far more with just the basic UI than most have ever even tried, and does it very smoothly with little response delay. The iPhone offers not only mobile versions of desktop applications, it offers mobile applications that are just as good as desktop applications, and thus actually BETTER than desktop applications because they are mobile. Mobile Safari. iPod instead of iTunes. ActiveSync ON THE PHONE, not tied to the desktop. And it will only get much better, very quickly.
It’s not just a phone, it’s a platform. And it’s not just a SDK, it’s the future.
P.S. One final point- Although I have focused on Apple, its the technology they are bringing to the table here is the most important thing. They will lead for the next few years but what happens after that is unknown, just as Apple led with the first consumer-level desktop GUI. Many elements of Apple’s original Macintosh GUI can be seen in Windows today, just as many handset makers are now copying elements of the iPhone UI. The iPhone/Cocoa SDK represents the same step forward on a mobile platform. When all is said and done, Apple will be recognized as one of the great innovators in mobile computing, regardless of what company is leading this market 10 years from now.