Posts by cloudgazer

MS was different because they'd actually licensed much of Apple's IP for windows 1.

From wiki:

'Apple listed 189 GUI elements; the court decided that 179 of these elements had been licensed to Microsoft in the Windows 1.0 agreement and most of the remaining 10 elements were not copyrightable'

Sony have been using chiclet keyboards for as long as Apple, maybe longer. This keyboard has a significantly different layout to a Mac, and the recessing is about as different as it could be.

There seem to be plenty of reasons in this review to not buy this laptop (90 minutes battery life!), but looking too much like an MBP really isn't one of them

It makes perfect business sense when you realize that Apple doesn't make profits on OS sales, they make profits on hardware sales. This is pretty extreme in the case of Lion which costs about $30, and that's for a full installation, not an upgrade - and not even a single machine installation - you can use it on multiple machines in a residential household. It's not even just a desktop edition, it comes with the full server edition. For $30.

So the difference is that MS lets you license windows for anything, but the licenses are extremely limited - generally locking to a single motherboard - whereas Apple restricts the category of devices that OS-X can be placed on, but gives an extremely broad license so that Apple users have fewer license headaches to worry about.

In the US (where those figures apply), it's Samsung. Globally I it's still Nokia, though their swan-dive is in full progress, so probably not for long.

See for instance

http://www.asymco.com/hire-me/vendor-bubbles/

rounding

They're all rounded to nearest %. Suppose I have 3 firms with equal share, 33.3333% each, rounding to nearest I'd only get a total of 99%.

Erm, no. The 'haters' you mean were presumably Apple haters. They said that Android would take share from Apple, but as the article makes clear, that isn't what is happening. Both Android and Apple are building share in the total handset market. Android is building it faster, so the smartphone segment is growing as a whole. As a result Apple is holding steady in smartphone share. The fact that they're holding steady in the quarter immediately preceeding a big product update is actually pretty impressive.

iPhone sales grew 143% YoY last quarter, the iJuggernaut is still chugging along pretty nicely.

not the best survey

Comscore arguably have the best US handset survey out there, certainly it's a far bigger population, n=30,000

They show Apple down at more like 24% back in August-2010, but rising steadily since then. They got a big bump when they acquired got distribution through Verizon, and they've slowed in the last quarter, but it's quite possible we'll see them breach 30% with the iPhone-5.

No. MS can't give Samsung's non WP7 products protection from Apple. This is just giving Samsung protection from MS.

Apple don't break out sales by product and region. But given that the market in the US is quite mature their growth is unlikely to have been 140% YoY there, implying it's higher still in the markets in which it competes with the SGS-2, which was pretty much everywhere else.

There are limits to how fast any firm can ramp up supply and build carrier relationships, and Apple has been running up against them - maybe in a few more quarters it will be saturated and we'll see the top Android handsets impact their unit sales, but it hasn't happened yet.

'If MS force this, it will mean that you can't install any of their older OSes on new hardware.'

You can't use existing builds of those OSes no, but there's nothing stopping MS producing a signed version of XP and making it available to enterprise clients. It will screw consumers trying to run old OSes, but mostly MS doesn't believe you have a valid license to your old OS anyway - except running on the old hardware it came with.

Did Samsung release any other phones into the US market between Feb 2011 and the end of June? If not then Apple isn't being selective, they're simply following the rules.

Maybe eventually, but we're a ways off that hitting. Even in a big developed market like the US, smartphones are only about 50% of the total market, so there's plenty of room for both Apple and Android to grow. Plus there are all those RIM and Nokia customers with itchy feet.

Apple and Google will continue to grow their markets fast for a good few years yet.

'Most Android users probably want an iPhone but went for a copy-cat Android because of price.'

Not in this user population they didn't. UBS specifically stated that the sample was of high income consumers.