image Tom's Guide
Posted on 04/18/2018 11:54:17 AM PDT by Swordmaker
Apple remained the most profitable smartphone brand through the fourth quarter of 2017, according to a new market research report.
The Cupertino tech giant managed to capture 86 percent of the total smartphone market profits Q4 2017, even though the premium handset segment didn’t grow as expected, according to a new report by Counterpoint Research (via CNBC).
Additionally, the iPhone X accounted for 21 percent of total revenue and 35 percent total of the profits made by the entire industry in the fourth quarter — allowing Apple to grow about 1 percent, year-over-year. That’s despite the fact that the premium flagship was only available for two months of the quarter, Counterpoint noted.
For context, the iPhone X generated about five times as much profit as more than 600 Android manufacturers in the same time period combined. And the device isn’t done doing well for Apple.
“The share of the iPhone X is likely to grow as it advances further into its life-cycle,” Counterpoint Analyst Karn Chauhan said. “Additionally, the longer shelf life of all iPhones ensured that Apple still has eight out of top 10 smartphones, including its three-year-old-models.”
The analyst added that these devices generate much more profits than those made by competing OEMs. Some of those competitors include Chinese manufacturers like Huawei, ZTE and Oppo, who are all stepping up their brand by including more devices aimed at the premium sector (which, as a result, are selling for a higher average price). Still, Apple and Samsung lead the industry in terms of total profits.
Apple CEO Tim Cook previously stated in an earnings call that the iPhone X was the company’s biggest seller through every week of the critical holiday shopping season. He added that the popularity of the device continued into February and wasn’t restricted to the holiday period.
Of course, Apple does not break down iPhone sales on a per-device basis. But in February, the company announced that it sold 77.3 million iPhones, about a 1 percent decline from the previous year. On the other hand, the higher price of this year’s lineup did manage to drive higher profits and revenue.
Counterpoint’s research seems to run contrary to the handful of reports that suggest Apple has seen mediocre sales and low demand for its flagship iPhone X.
While not all of those reports are of verifiable accuracy, they still line up with an overall industry-wide trend of declining smartphone sales. As CNBC points out, the global market has likely already peaked due to longer replacement cycles. Due to that, Apple’s Services business is slated to dethrone the iPhone and become the firm’s largest driver of revenue growth.
While Apple’s smartphone sales may be slowly declining overall, it seems that its flagship product isn’t quite done making money for the firm.
I am sorry you had such a problem with Apple and UPS. I'm sure the problem comes from crooks trying to scam Apple with the same kind of "Lost shipment" story. UPS tossed a $1500 Apple MacBook over my back fence when it had a signature required delivery and then claimed they delivered it to my front door and GOT my signature! The box fell down behind my wood pile and it took several days to find, in the meantime I had already started the same song-and-dance with UPS, but only worse. They claimed I had not only gotten it, I had signed for it on their little computer thingy. They even sent me a copy of my "signature," an illegible scribble that was by no stretch anything close to my signature. So I do sympathize.
On the other hand, I have been present when one client took a two year out of warranty Mac notebook into the Genius Bar because of a problem and Apple replaced it free of charge with a brand-new $2500 off-the-shelf one because they couldn't fix the problem. They even transferred all of his data for her. She got the Fairy Godmother department. You apparently got connected to the department of dirty tricks...which is very rare with Apple.
My experiences and strong recommendation is to give them another chance to connect you with the Fairy Godmother department.
I made no attempt to "refute" him because I have no interest in his religion.
Android devices are updated regularly. I have no idea where you got the impression--except maybe from iSheeple--that they aren't. I just had an update two days ago to the Moto G5 Plus, and that phone is unlocked, OEM. My S8 is updated all the time. My wife's S6 is regularly updated. My rooted Google Pixel is updated regularly. Yes: OS and security patches when needed. And I would not say they're updated more or less often than my iPhone X.
Not necessarily true. Apple has brand new iPhones priced from the iPhone SE at $349.00 to the maxed out iPhone X at $1149.00 with steps at about $100 increments in-between. You buy a new phone in the Samsung Galaxy line and you will pay close to the same range. . . for slower processor phones that don't have as much of a full support ecosystem backing them up.
Oh BS, TexasGunLover. Seriously? You think that because Android has 2.4 Billion active devices they are somehow BETTER than iOS with 1.3 BILLION??? One single company which has 38% of the installed base of mobile devices compared to the competitions' 600 manufacturers' 62% installed base, many of which are really NOT smartphones but rather mere feature phones or even dumb flip phones and candy bar basic phones, or even embedded devices?
So now you trot out the logical fallacy of "everybody likes" Android, so it must be the best. That's Argumentum ad populum, i.e. because something is popular, it must be better. If everyone is jumping off a cliff, should you do it too?
That's like making the assumption that just because more people eat at McDonalds in any given day than eat at fine restaurants, McDonald's food is better. Or, another analogy, more people buy all the cars that sell under $50,000 than those that buy cars over $100,000. . . so the under $50,000 cars are somehow better than a luxury car.
Has anyone ever told you that you lack any semblance of logic?
I've provided you first hand data from a fortune 100 company over 20 years with hundreds of thousands of devices, millions of support calls and repair tickets.
You personally did all that. I'm impressed. NOT even a little bit. . . because YOU didn't do that. YOU weren't the VP of IT. You haven't provided first hand anything. Did you ever even get a trouble ticket for a Mac at your location? I doubt it. If you did, you wouldn't have had a clue what to do with it. You provided an anecdote without any data. The plural of anecdote is not data and repeating the same anecdote in post after post after post doesn't give it any more status as data.
You don't name the company. You gave FALSE data about the number of Mac failures in relation to other computers. "Tell a lie about one thing, then you can't be believed about anything else." — Judge Judy.
I on the other hand provided Links with HARD DATA from a named company, IBM, which has PUBLISHED THEIR RESULTS. . . which had a company official, an officer, speak publicly about those results and even report them in their Financial statements at the annual meeting of Stockholders, which puts it on record for Sarbanes Oxley Act fines and punishments if they were lying about the results. Yet YOU blithely dismiss those HARD FIGURES as if they simply don't exist, or are somehow the "conjecture of iSheep." Right, sure, a VP of IBM is an iSheep.
i IBM is finding they don't have to be stuck servicing those "millions of support calls and repair tickets" for all those problematic PCs, Texas. because they are making the problem go away by getting Macs. . . but then you never bothered to read what IBM is saying about how they are saving over $50 million dollars a year by switching to Apple Macs, did you? IBM found that only 5% of their Mac users are calling in for tech support compared to 40% of their Windows users each year.
That comports with my experience in my business. That's a HUGE savings in IT costs, Tex. But YOU don't want to hear that because it shows you've been backing the wrong horse.
Read what Android researchers in Germany said on April 13, 2018. They found that many Android Manufacturers CLAIMED to have updated, but merely reset the update calendar, showing they'd installed an update, but HAD NOT.
These ANDROID RESEARCHERS said that many actually did update, but many more did not.
By the way Fred, get back to us next year about your Moto G5 Plus and tell us if Lenovo updated it during the NEXT year. Now it’s just one year old. Samsung is pretty good about pushing users to update. . . but there are over 600 other Android makers. How is THEIR record of updating their products? Their record is no where near what the four of five top Android manufacturers is in getting updates out.
As I told the other poster: I don't respond to you, because you're a headcase. Your religion is of no interest to me.
You ARE delusional, Fred. I don’t use insults like you guys do. . . You obviously don’t have any facts to rebut the linked article, so you slur them and me, the messenger who merely pointed out what they found. Bad form, Freddy.
Must be a widespread conspiracy of iEvil. Here’s another source citing WIRED from April 12, 2018:
Some Android device makers are lying about security patch updates
by Alex Wagner, PhoneDog, April 12, 2018Security patches for smartphones are extremely important because many people store personal data on their devices. Lots of Android phones out there get regularly security patches, but according to a new report, some of them are lying about the patches that they've actually gotten.
According to a study by Security Research Labs, some Android phones are missing patches that they claim to have. Wired explains that SRL tested 1,200 phones from more than a dozen phone makers for every Android security patch released in 2017. The devices tested include ones from Google, Samsung, Motorola, LG, HTC, Xiaomi, OnePlus, Nokia, TCL, and ZTE.
The study found that outside of Google and its Pixel phones, well-known phone makers had devices that were missing patches that they claimed to have. "We found several vendors that didn't install a single patch but changed the patch date forward by several months," says SRL founder Karsten Nohl.
The number of missing security patches on phones varied between device makers. For example, Google, Samsung, and Sony devices were found to be missing 0 or 1 patches on average. Xiaomi, OnePlus, and Nokia devices were missing 1 to 3 patches on average, while HTC, Huawei, LG, and Motorola were missing 3 to 4 patches on average. Devices from TCL and ZTE fared the worst, missing an average of 4 or more patches that they claimed to have.
When asked for comment on this report, Google told Wired that some of the devices tested may not have been Android certified, meaning that they aren't held to Google's security standards. Google also noted that Android devices have security features to make them more difficult to hack and that, in some cases, a device maker may have simply removed a device's vulnerable feature rather than patching it.
"We’ve launched investigations into each instance and each OEM to bring their certified devices into compliance when we’ve been able to reproduce their findings...[but] each instance really needs further investigation," Google said.
This report is a pretty big deal for Android devices. As I said before, security patches are a big deal because a lot of people store private, personal data on their phones, and so it's important that those devices are secure. And while it is very possible that some devices tested by SRL aren't Android certified and that some devices may have just had their vulnerable features removed, it's also possible that there are some instances in which an OEM said that they had updated a phone with new security patches when they actually hadn't. —Source: Android Device Maker’s Lying About Security Patch Updates.
Oh my, Fred, Your vaunted Motorola is on the list of lying manufacturers! Tsk, Tsk, Tsk! Three to four MISSING SECURITY UPDATES? Who can YOU trust?
How about from the horse’s mouth? Quoting from the researchers YOU CLAIM ARE BOGUS iEVIL shills:
"On Friday at the Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam, researchers Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell of the firm Security Research Labs plan to present the results of two years of reverse-engineering hundreds of Android phones' operating system code, painstakingly checking if each device actually contained the security patches indicated in its settings. They found what they call a "patch gap": In many cases, certain vendors' phones would tell users that they had all of Android's security patches up to a certain date, while in reality missing as many as a dozen patches from that period—leaving phones vulnerable to a broad collection of known hacking techniques."We find that there's a gap between patching claims and the actual patches installed on a device. It’s small for some devices and pretty significant for others," says Nohl, a well-known security researcher and SRL's founder. In the worst cases, Nohl says, Android phone manufacturers intentionally misrepresented when the device had last been patched. "Sometimes these guys just change the date without installing any patches. Probably for marketing reasons, they just set the patch level to almost an arbitrary date, whatever looks best."—Source
Do you realize how high your petard has just hoisted you? I hope you packed your parachute correctly.
Like I said. There is how iSheep feel, and there is reality. The fact is, Apple is no longer a player, either in the mobile space (less than 20% market share in a duopoly) and, as always since their inception, less than 8% market share in desktop computers. Simple, measurable facts.
“You sound like Chicken Little... and have just as much credibility.”
ok, you went down the personal attack path. You have absolutely no idea of what I know. I’ve been writing and designing code for over 35 years, across many OS’s, at the server level, down at the embedded device driver level, and everything in-between. I have a global team working for me on projects you probably wouldn’t even understand.
My last post was reasoned but I’m done with this due to your inability to be civil. You’re an Apple zealot and blind to what the current landscape trends are.
You’d think between FReepers that a civil tone would be maintained, disappointing.
LOL! Fuzz, I started coding in 1967, so your attempt ad ad hominem is mis-directed. If you felt I made a "personal attack," I apologize. It was not intended to be.
I said you sounded like Chicken Little, not that you are. As for credibility, that's because we have heard this same litany for too many years. . . and it has NEVER come to light, Fuzzy. Not even once in twenty years. For such a claim to become reality, the proof is going to have to be extraordinary to be credible.
Too many times we've heard the same impending malware horror stories only to find it is coming from someone who has never used Apple products and only understands the Windows third-party anti-malware protection model, or an anti-malware company with something they are trying to sell to Apple users, always something at best unnecessary, at worst something that actually does harm to Apple's built-in protections.
fuzzyLogic: Hackers will always target the most deployed systems, which is Android and Windows, period.
No, Fuzzy, it isn't and it certainly isn't "period." You are preaching the "Security by Obscurity" canard about Apple products. It simply is not true.
I posted above several examples of true computer viruses written to exploit almost microscopic installations, yet you have maintained that people who write malware only write to target the largest targets. That is just not true, and there are a LOT more examples. Hackers write malware to target MONEY, so they attack the MOST VULNERABLE SYSTEMS, and sometimes they attack for notoriety, and the most notoriety, especially in the hacking community, can be gained by hacking the supposed un-hackable. Ask Charlie Miller.
It is well established that Apple users are wealthier and have more disposable cash than PC users. That's where the money is. Target Rich Environment. It's also well established that Macs and iOS devices have a reputation of remote impenetrability, so there's your notoriety component, attractive in two ways for hackers. . . yet they've gone un-penetrated even though 99% of Macs are not protected by third-party anti-malware and an even higher rate holds for iOS devices. Yet there are 150 million to 250 million unprotected, naked Macs and 1.3 Billion iOS devices in the wild, very attractive numbers for any malicious hacker to target. Why haven't they, Fuzz?
Given those facts, the percentage of Apple iOS devices installed base ranges from 38% to 43% of the installed base of 3 billion to 3.7 billion mobile devices. It's not the SALES market of 18% to 20% reported each quarter. Among teens in the US, it was just reported 10 days ago that iPhones have an 82% installed base, and growing.
Hackers have been TRYING to write malware to hack into Apple products. It has been the prime target for many years at White Hat conventions and usually they've been successful and won prizes. . . but they have not been general hacks translatable in to hacks applicable for use in the wild. Nor have they been ad hoc exploits conceived at the conventions, but rather the products of months of work that is merely revealed at the convention.
Apple pays good size vulnerability bounties throughout the year, not just at those contests and conventions and is proactive in closing any that are found.
In twenty years of trying, there have been only seven known true self-replicating, self-transmitting, self-installing, self-executing computer virus or worm candidates for Apple OSX, and every single one of them failed to work due to lack of a viable vector in the Mac environment.
One of those candidates, intended to propagate via bluetooth, was sent to a anti-virus company in the Silicon Valley. It took two Mac engineers from Apple, two malware specialists from the anti-virus company, and two knowledgeable, and well experienced computer journalists from Computerworld over six hours of effort just to get it to replicate itself and then send itself from one Mac to another and then it failed to run due to it being in protected non-executable memory.
The ONLY viable malware vector left is social engineering: Trojan horse applications, tricking the user into downloading and installing the malware himself. Even there, the Mac's built-in, daily updated, GateKeeper system will recognize all of the current known Mac Trojans and the eight known families of Trojan attacks and warn the user, requiring an Administrator's name and password to continue, not just a simplistic OK. Even those trojan attacks, if you look at the numbers of Macs that were involved in the infections are listed with under Zero to 100 computer affected. The highest reported one, which claimed 600,000 infected Macs, turned out to be a hoax, and actually had ZERO infected Macs.
Look at TexasGunLover's posts for personal attacks in this thread. There you will find them against ALL Apple users.
But, Fuzz, my FRiend, you need to reconsider your knowledge about the installed base of Macs and the iOS devices you write software for. You are completely missing data you should have or are misunderstanding the data that's been published about sales share, not installed base, which is, I admit, much hard to come by. Apple's devices have record of lasting two to three time longer than most Android devices and therefor have a much higher aftermarket resale value than Android devices, thus they stay active in use far longer than do the Android devices.
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