Posted on 01/16/2015 11:11:53 PM PST by Swordmaker
Remember when Samsung was the new Apple? Well, that little bit of wishful thinking has run its current course, and now it's time for the next "new Apple." It's a company called Xiaomi, and you may have seen all kinds of coverage on the company's new (supposed) iPhone-killer, the Xiaomi Mi Note.
This device is a sleek beauty with specs that best many of the specs in the iPhone 6 plus. And it's cheap, at roughly $370 in China. The iPhone 6 Plus is roughly a grand.
Here's a promo video for the device:
You Tube of the Xiaomi Mi Note.
Like most of Xiaomi's smartphones, the Mi Note is a great looking device. It's one of the best looking Android phablets on the market at any price, let alone the dirt cheap price point Xiaomi charges.
But make no mistake about it. It's no iPhone-killer, and Xiaomi itself is no Apple. Xiaomi might be a new Samsung, but I have my doubts about even that. Allow me to explain.
Xiaomi got its start in the Smartphone business (like Samsung) aping Apple. The CEO of the company held press events modeled after Apple's, and he dressed like Steve Jobs. The company's early products often (though not always) looked like Apple's iPhones, enough so to get Sir Jony Ive riled up.
In response to a question about this so-called "Apple of China" at the Vanity Fair Conference in October, 2014, Sir Jony said,
I'll stand a little bit harsh, I don’t see it as flattery. When you’re doing something for the first time, you don’t know it’s gonna work, you spend 7 or 8 years working on something, and then it’s copied. I think it is really straightforward. It is theft and it is lazy. I don’t think it is OK at all.
In a word, Sir Jony: word.
Well, two words. Theft and lazy. Those two words cut to the chase. When you're stealing—or at least borrowing—from your betters, you're not an Apple. When you're lazy—when you don't go through the hard steps necessary to invent stuff on your own—you're no Apple.
You're more like a Samsung.
Apples and Oranges
But even there, Xiaomi comes up short. All of the issues between Apple and Samsung and their epic patent war aside, Samsung pays royalties on standards essential patents (SEPs). Of course, Samsung has a vested stake in the SEP system because it owns so many SEPs, but the point is that Xiaomi doesn't yet pay.
That has flown in China, but it's already having problem in other markets. The company got several models thrown out of India, for instance, because it wasn't licensing a variety of patents necessary to be an accredited player in the smartphone market. Things are only going to get worse for Xiaomi as it tries to expand.
Xiaomi's prices (in China) are cheap not because it's magically better at designing and copying than everyone else, but because it's not paying all of its betters who make smartphones possible. I'm not talking about Apple, here, either. I'm talking about the work-a-day industry stalwarts who developed the technologies that become part of wireless standards.
China's IP laws are lax, especially when it's non-Chinese IP. Outside of China, the Samsungs and Ericcsens and Qualcomms and Nokias of the world get paid for their work.
OK, there's also the fact that, like Amazon, Xiaomi doesn't care about margins, but I think that's less important than Xiaomi's IP practices.
Xiaomi is playing a low-margin bottom feeder game of copying where it can, coasting on the rest of the industry where it can, and slapping retreads on a production jalopy and pretending its an Apple Edition Rolls Royce. Heck, Xiaomi doesn't even make its own operating the system. The company's devices run on Android.
That's not how to be an Apple, and the only people claiming otherwise have no understanding whatsoever of how Apple does what it does. To these folks, there's little difference between making something that looks like an Apple device and Apple making the real deal. Such people can't help it. It takes a bit of effort and some contemplation to realize why Apple is unlike any other company out there.
Reality Bites
Xiaomi's reality is that in order to enter most western markets the company is going to have to pony up to the SEP table. That means higher prices on its devices, eroding the company's perceived value outside of China. Again, that doesn't make Xiaomi the new Apple.
Companies like Xiaomi are little more than another flavor of every other Android maker out there. Each new player does something better than the others, gains a little share, maybe makes a little profit for a while, and then is usurped by the next. In the meantime, Apple keeps on truckin’.
Xiaomi can take share away from HTC, Samsung, LG, and every other Android Tom, Dick, and Harry, but that doesn't make it a threat to Apple. As Forbes's Tim Worstall put it, Xiaomi isn’t even in the same business as Apple.
One more thing: I said up front that the Xiaomi Mi Note looks good and has impressive specs. Both are true. But many Apple competitors have had some specs that are better than Apple's at one time or another, at least on paper. Some win here, some win there, but where Apple competes—at the high end of the market—it's about the experience. It's about how the device works as a whole.
There's nothing about the Xiaomi Mi Note that will change this part of the equation.
Xiaomi will enjoy success in China, as long as success isn't measured in profits. If it cleans up its IP act, it will enjoy (some) success in the rest of the world, too. But that success will come at Samsung's expense, not Apple’s.
Samsung spent about 10 times more on advertising in 2012 or something than Apple did.
Samsung is the worlds biggest advertiser apparently.
I would rather buy something from South Korea than from China or San Fransicko
That is a lot of verbiage griping about a company “trying to be like Apple” when its clearly not being like Apple.
Xiaomi don't play that!
Ah, but Xiaomi is trying to be like Apple. The CEO of Xiaomi has even done keynote addresses wearing jeans and black turtlenecks emulating Steve Jobs. . . when he was showing Xiaomi phones that looked exactly like iPhone models down to the Android skins placed on the phones.
Lots of cash? Where? They reported only the equivalent $7 million in profit for the entire year of 2014. Where is the "lots of cash," DennisW? You never let those difficult things called facts get in the way of your Apple bashing, do you?
What you are ignoring is that patent infringement is RETROACTIVE and they will reap that if they attempt to sell their products in the rest of the world. The owners of those intellectual properties WILL prevail and will exact their payments retroactively for the sales made in the past. This has happened before and the penalties can be extraordinarily HUGE. Samsung is still fighting one through the European court system that if they lose will cost them EVERY CENT they made on sales in Europe! That's BILLIONS of Euros. . . and that's just on a couple of patents they were found to have infringed.
Operating Guerrilla fashion now gets you no-where if you want to break into legitimacy later. That's like a Porn Star wanting to win an Oscar. It ain't gonna happen. Thailand is a huge enforcer of patent law. . . and the rest of the world is very much in line with IP. . . because they want to have THEIR IP protected too. You really don't know what you are talking about. Keep blithering. It makes you looks so foolish.
He's infected with the BabbleFish form of MAPS:
Swordmaker's and Kathy's proposed diagnosis for the new ICD-10 addenda:
90210 iOS Munchausen's Apple-Plexy Syndrome (MAPS), The overwhelming compulsion to post negative, judgmental, aggressive, and false commentary on any website thread related to Apple products wherever found, including phobic reaction to projected Apple user euphoria. First and subsequent encounters.
If your words were prophetic about the HP Touch Pad, where is it? Belly Up. HP dropped it 49 days after they released it. As a prophet, your prophetic abilities are not as good as Xiaomi's profits.
The real problem in the Android market is differentiation. With those razor-thin margins, and having to pay legally required SEP licensing, there isn't much room to differentiate in hardware design or software. In the Android market, where customers are wiling to accept "just good enough" producing a "superior quality" phone is not going to be the differentiator. They have to come up with a gimmick. Xiaomi's was making phones that mimicked Apple's phones in looks and screens. . . if not operations. Their idea was they could sell their phones to people who wanted to look like iPhone owners but who could not afford iPhones.
Their advertising budget that year was over $14 billion. . . however, the media purchasing was only about $4.6 billion. The rest was spent on astro-turfing, blog spamming, and trolls. . . including some I think who post anti-Apple junk on FreeRepublic.
They did waste of a lot of money on that
Samsung pays me one million a year to post here. How much does Tim Coooks pay you?
If I was in China and (most of Asia) I would buy Xiomi. CRAppple stuffs too expensives, greedy Cupertino liberals! I doubt CRAppple can block Xiomi sales in places like Burma and Thailand. They will be sold black market anyways....lots of them
Xiomi prolly sell well in nations like Uruguay, Brazil, Bhutan, India. Stupid rich Americans have a distorted view of what the rest of the world wants in a smart-phone. And all that patent BS is not enforced in the third world and second world (Uruguay is Second World nation for example)
WAKE UP AND PAY ATTENTION. DENNIS!
Apple is not blocking the sale of Xiaomi's phones. Where is ANYONE Apple is even trying to block Xiaomi. Ericsson/Sony is the prime holder of the patents at issue, but CISCO, Microsoft, Samsung and many other technological companies that hold the PATENTS that Xiaomi has IGNORED are the ones blocking their movement into other markets.
Xiaomi does not sell well on any blackmarket in the nations you mentioned. The black market flows the other way, INTO CHINA and it is iPhones that are being smuggled in. China has a 17% value added tax that must be paid.
As for your statement "If I was in China and (most of Asia) I would buy Xiomi.(sic)" Of course you would. You take every opportunity to bash Apple, and frankly, by extension, American business. As for your comment in another thread about Samsung paying you "a million dollars a year", I would not be surprised at all that you were a paid agent for a foreign agent, and that that was one of the few times you have been truthful in these threads.
If you have such a distorted view of America and Americans, why don't you move somewhere else and do what YOU do best. . . support non-American companies at all cost against America. . . must be that million dollar payment. Move to South Korea.
They still are. Their 2014 advertising budget is not much smaller. . . and their entire profit for 2014 was only the equivalent of $25 billion in US dollars. An advertising budget that is 56% of your profit is, shall we say profligate?
very
but I guess it keeps a lot of South Koreans employed since Samsung is about 20% of their GDP
Apple never makes things. They assemble and pimp them to its loyal dupes. Apple is a marketing, advertising and distribution machine
Samsung makes stuff
You ARE delusional. . . and now an obvious and self-admitted paid agent provocateur, a troll, for the KOREAN economy against AMERICAN economy interests.
I’ve got many friends and acquaintances in engineering and R&D at Apple. Wait’ll I tell them they aren’t doing anything. They’ll be surprised to hear that.
Where is the hands on stuff such as actually making a chip or an LCD screen? Where is it dooooood???
Apple does none of this while Samsung does, so Sammy has my respect. They will get my money before some alleged Americans hucksters at Apple do. Anyway CRAplle brings in boatloads of foreign HB1 tech workers same as the other Silicon Valley companies. CRApple’s loyalty to American workers and American labor is zilch
I suppose some of the clowns on top are Americans at Apple
I already told you Samsung pays me one million a year. How much does Apple pay you???
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