That's all well and good
But are there any Samsung branded Gas Stoves?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/24/iphone_gas_stoves/
Why! Yes there are!
http://www.samsung.com/uk/consumer/home-appliances/cooker-hobs/gas
Apple’s efforts to dominate the largest mobile market in the world are being frustrated by old foe Samsung and its own stubborn refusal to bring out a 3G device compatible with market-leading network China Mobile. According to Gartner stats picked by Bloomberg, Apple still languishes in fifth place in the smartphone market in …
Worlds largest population, largest provider in that country.. potentially millions of new customers... just how much extra cost would there be to develop the required gadgetry to get it working?
At 30% markup on the things, I doubt any extra cost of the phones would really make much of a dent in those profits... do you?
In The Beginning Apple chose to go with GSM then UMTS (rest of the world) ahead of CDMA2000 (USA). Clearly they'd decided to pursue the majority market first, for understandable reasons. But you'd have thought that the attraction of a few hundred million extra customers would be appealing, even for Apple.
It does seem to call into question the depth of Apple's engineering outfit. If Samsung and everyone else can spare a few engineers to shoehorn in a TD-SCDMA baseband into their phones, why can't Apple? Are they lacking staff in their engineering department? Did they not consider the different basebands when they designed the kit? Are they now find themselves having to make big changes to the internals to accommodate the different chips (if that is in fact necessary...)?
Having said that, it's hard to question anything about Apple's strategy when they've got $90billion in the bank.
The person Android owes its dominance to the most is Steve Jobs. Had he not been so arrogant and greedy with the US Carriers at the iPhones launch, he would have cut deals with Verizon etc and Android would have been a minority player, jostling for relevance the way Symbian and WP7 is today. No, the master knew best and was incapable of swallowing his pride, to the extent that when it finally did arrive on those carriers, Android had such traction it was unstoppable.
It did have something to do with net neutrality as well. Jobs wouldn't cave in but google did on mobile devices at Verizons insistence
http://gizmodo.com/5605310/google-just-killed-net-neutrality
and many other links if you care to search. Google have been evil a long time and people have short memories
I think it's more that Android brings a decent interface to products across the market, from the budget end upward and in a variety of combinations. Although they've made concessions recently, such as continuing to offer the 3GS for free or almost free on a contract, Apple primarily target only the premium end of the market, with a single product.
Sure, Verizon were first to give Android a big push as something larger than the individual manufacturers combined and in that sense Apple's strategy may have given Android some early momentum, but Apple was never going to overwhelm Samsung, Motorola, HTC and a bunch of others combined.
For the same reason that many people buy expensive watches (a Rolex?) and then don't set them to the correct time - a very common phenomenon over much of the world, particularly South East Asia, Carribean and Latin America. It is a status symbol, nothing more and nothing less.
As evidence of this, I offer you fake Rolexes as well as fake iPhones.
... the 2G bit. Sure, they are probably provided for use on a2G network, but my own experience is that 3G in China is surprisingly good, even out in the boonies. Wonder if people might, you know, do the obvious.
Or perhaps the knob end earlier on talking about how ' they' are all mental for shiny shiny is right.
Just because is conceivably profitable doesn't mean it's worth pursuing if the opportunity cost is high. I can safely assume that only a smallish fraction of those 650m people would buy an iPhone if it worked on TD-SCDMA. Pushing through billions of dollars to prototype, build and maintain another series of iPhone (which would only work in China) for something that'll yield a marginal return - and generate a perpetual support burden - is money that could be better spent on other stuff, which is more likely to net a bigger payoff.