The willful swallowing of unsourced rumors continues unabated! Today, Byte’s Larry Seltzer takes a giant swig!
“Apple Not Dictating Terms Anymore”.
The news yesterday …
News!
… in the Wall Street Journal that disappointing iPhone 5 sales have let [sic] Apple to cut orders from suppliers is the latest in a series of news events that herald the waning of Apple’s dominance in the smartphone market.
It’s like the Silver Surfer of news events! But, define “dominance.” Because Apple still dominates in the one metric that matters when evaluating companies in a capitalist society: profit.
Similar effects in the tablet market may come slower, but they will come.
Because. And it will kill Apple. Even if developers keep making iOS apps first and Apple continues to take most of the profit. Because market share is winning. Because.
Unlike the iPad in the tablet market, the iPhone probably never [sic] a majority share of the smartphone market.
Probably? You couldn’t look that up? But, anyway, it dominated it. And now it doesn’t. The End.
Apple can’t just make something and expect to sell all it can make anymore.
Although, that’s exactly what happened with the iPhone 5 for two months. But it’s a total loser now, because these two guys—we don’t know who they are but they couldn’t possibly have any ulterior motives—said so.
Look, it makes more sense if you shoot yourself full of horse tranquilizers and drink this bottle of NyQuil first …
The news describes iPhone 5 sales as good, not great.
Unsourced rumors are just like news, if you use your imagination!
If anyone’s the leader in the smartphone market now, it has to be Samsung, which just announced that the Galaxy S3 has sold 40 million units in 7 months. In 2 years and 7 months since its launch, the Galaxy S line has sold over 100 million. Wow.
Larry, when coming up with that statistic, did you pause to think for even one second how many iPhones Apple’s sold over that period? Because it’s more than twice that. FYI.
Now Samsung is the company drawing fawning praise lately …
From people like Larry.
And Samsung is just one of Apple’s problems. Nokia reported strong, and growing sales of Lumia Windows Phones in the 4td quarter. At 4.4 million in the quarter this is still well-behind the Galaxy S3 pace …
And a remarkable pittance compared to Apple. Somehow Nokia is not a problem for Samsung, though. Just Apple.
If you’re not getting this then maybe you need to chug more NyQuil.
… but Windows Phone 8 was only available for most of the quarter, and clearly it’s a growing presence. And then at the end of this month BlackBerry 10 finally will launch, and who knows what will become of that.
The growth potential is possibly non-negative!
This spring we need to have an iPhone 6 (or 5S or whatever) with exciting new features, or Apple’s market share and mind share will almost certainly take a beating all year.
“Mind share”? Is Seltzer channeling Terry Tate, Office Linebacker?
The annoying thing is that unless Apple has a blowout quarter, people like Seltzer will say “See?!” without evaluating whether what they said made a lick of sense. Seltzer doesn’t even bother analyzing what the rumors said, he just takes them as “news.” It’s happening.
And if Apple does have a blowout quarter, they’ll simply shrug and insist its doom will be coming one day and one day soon—just mark my words! In other words, it’s business as usual in Apple rumor land.