Very funny, adorno. Let's see, 798 million Androids plus 294 million iPhones, and 45 million windows phones (LOL, they had to revise that downward to 35 million after returns!) . . . that totals 1.137 Billion smartphones by the end of 2013. By their own figures, they have 263 million smartphones missing!
Who made those, adorno?
The Phone Fairy??? White Box Elves?
Not too accurate, don't you think? Are they just bad at math, or counting?
First of all, adorno, iPhones are NOT the only iOS devices out there, even though they are woefully undercounting them. Your report is counting iPhones, ignoring iPads, iPod touches, and AppleTV. . . millions of devices.
Secondly, here's another reason for the discrepancies. . . Apple is the only manufacturer to actually report REAL numbers of devices sold through to end users. The rest merely report, if they report at all, volume of product shipped into the market, not sold. In fact, as was revealed in court documents in the Apple v. Samsung lawsuit two years ago, SAMSUNG LIED about their numbers of their Galaxy Tab tablet shipped by a factor of SEVEN:
"The original Galaxy Tab arrived in 2010, and Samsung sold 262,000 units in the US, after claiming they had shipped over 2 million units. From the fourth quarter of 2010 through the middle of 2012, Samsung sold 1.4 million Galaxy Tab and Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets, generating $644 million in revenue. — Source: Macgasm.com, August 10, 2012 (Before you attack the source as Apple centric, there is multiple sourcing on this including the Court documents.)
If Samsung lied about this flagship product, how much did they lie about their shipments of other products? Since Samsung and other Android manufacturers are not traded on the US Stock Exchanges, they are not required to submit audited Financial statements to the US Securities and Exchange Commission proving what their management and officers claim in their public statements or reports. Apple is.
How much are the other manufacturers similarly exaggerating their shipment figures?
Thirdly, better than 40% of the so-called Android market is attributed to un-named "white-box" manufacturers who do not report "shipments" at all. . . nor are their devices ever "activated" by Google or any other activation service, or connect to an official store to be counted. They are essentially TOYS. Many of them are merely "imputed" to exist, have been created to inflate the number of Android devices by the organizations who are paid to "count these devices. Nobody seems to be able to find these un-named white box Android devices.
Finally, these figures are SO FAR OFF THE MARK, they are ridiculous! At the middle of 2012—in June 2012, to be specific—Apple had submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission of the United States Government reports showing Apple had manufactured, sold, and activated total of over 410 MILLION iOS devices. That was SIXTEEN MONTHS before this idiotic guesstimate was published which was apparently pulled from some ANAL-lyst's or journalist's nether orifice! He certainly did not bother to do due diligence in his research.
Look at this evidence, just four months after that idiotic article you cut and pasted which was dated February 6, 2013:
Oh, look, here's another, just THREE MONTHS LATER than the last one:
Then, we have:
And no, the rate of iOS device retirement and failure is not enough to reduce that number by much. People DON'T throw iOS devices in drawers to languish, when they can sell them for hundreds of dollars on eBay or hand them down to family members because they are still useful.
You keep your softshoe dancing up, adorno. Apple sold 250 MILLION just in the last fiscal year alone. . . and not all users upgraded in one year, adorno! In fact, the average iPhone user does not upgrade every year. . . or even every two years. The life cycle of an iPhone is FAR longer than Android phones. iPhones are not just turned off and tossed in drawers when a user upgrades. They are either handed down to a family member or resold to be sold again. . . as an iOS device in another country. Your reports are totally bogus. I will go with the reports that APPLE puts out based on their users. NOT some analysts wild ass guesses.
You are citing an estimate made in FEBRUARY of 2013, almost TWO YEARS AGO. Do you seriously think this market has stood STILL in that time? It has not. Quit citing antique guesses by ANAL-lysts.
Android now has approximately 1.2-1.4 billion devices out in the wild, so Apple has NOT surpassed the market leader, contrary to your assertion. They have been selling phones as fast as they can in the last year as well . . . and there are 225 manufacturers of their junk phones, most of which are not smart phones or tablets.
iPads are not "losing sales," adorno, they are just not GROWING as fast as they once did. There is a difference. They are still the highest selling tablets in a shrinking market. EVERY tablet is not growing as fast a they once did. The replacement cycle of tablets is far longer than is the replacement cycle of smartphones. Smartphones are on a two year exchange cycle but iPads, in particular, have developed a three to four year replacement cycle. Families with iPads are more likely to ADD iPads or other Apple products to their line-up than to replace the iPad they have. They do not wear out, nor are they obsoleted as fast as phones. As primarily consumption devices that are not telephone communications devices, even the first model iPad will still connect just as well with the Internet as it did on the day it was purchased. Yes, a newer one has a better screen and is faster, but that is not sufficient to cause the need to upgrade. Most ADD a new one without retiring the old one. My original is in the hands of my daughter. . . who handed it to her daughter, when she bought an iPad mini that would fit in her purse better.
My girlfriend is perfectly happy with her original Retina iPad from two years ago. Why upgrade? I am happy with my iPad Air. . . because i wanted something lighter when I read in bed. . . so I bought one and handed my older iPad 3rd edition down to my other daughter as a gift. NONE of these has stopped working. . . or been turned off.
Similarly none of the iPhones i have owned or my family has owned has ever been retired to a drawer. My girlfriend, however, has a drawer full of dead Android phones she had used before she upgraded to an iPhone. . . NONE of those is still being used. . . and everyone of THOSE Android phones is counted in the 1.2-1.4 billion Android phones shipped. . . but they are DEAD. Never, ever, to be used again.
So, again, your 1 billion is about the number of iOS devices "sold", and not the number of active installations of the OS. People do retire their old devices, you know, and not all iOS devices sold in the last 13 years will still be around to keep the number at 1 billion active users.
You keep tossing out that 13 year figure. . . and that is another error on your part . . . which I keep correcting you on. iPods up to the iPod Touch were NOT iOS. They were operating on an entirely different system. They are not counted in the 1 billion iOS devices sold. iOS devices sold are only counted since the iPhone was released in 2007. . .
iOS. . . Originally unveiled in 2007 for the iPhone, it has been extended to support other Apple devices such as the iPod Touch (September 2007), iPad (January 2010), iPad Mini (November 2012) and second-generation Apple TV onward (September 2010). As of June 2014, Apple's App Store contained more than 1.2 million iOS applications, 500,000 of which were optimized for iPad.[7][8] These apps have collectively been downloaded more than 60 billion times.[9] It had a 21% share of the smartphone mobile operating system units shipped in the fourth quarter of 2012, behind Google's Android.[10] By the middle of 2012, there were 410 million devices activated.[11] — Wikipedia Article on iOS
So much for your "13 year" distortion of facts. I told you I don't post anything which I cannot back up with FACTS. These are economic FACTS gleaned from statements and audited financial reports. . . unlike your cherry picked, irrelevant, un-authoritative, wishful thinking twaddle from know-nothing analysts who will write what ever the company who hires them wants to hear. Look up thread at Up Yours Marxists post #28 of the prognostication of IDC predictions that Windows Phone would have a 16.1% Smartphone market share would be THIS YEAR. . . and compare it to the ACTUAL 2.5% it really had this year, to know how accurate your ANAL=lysts really are. . . and give some thought about WHO pays the bills they send out for these fancy charts and reports. At least ABI was a lot closer to Windows Phone's market share than was IDC. . . but then Microsoft was probably not paying ABI.
But for you, just keep dancing your soft-shoe routine, adorno. The rest of us will keep laughing at you.
I again ask, why are you always so wrong?
One more comment, just four months before the article you got your data from, Apple released the iPhone 5. Since then Apple has sold 388,000,000 iPhones. Another one of those little inconvenient facts you don’t like.