How Big Will the iPhone Become?

palewook writes "Combine the best elements of an iPod with a BlackBerry's addictive usefulness, and you may just get Apple's Next Big Thing. Around 2009, when the lower cost version of iPhone appears, Business Week believes the yearly market for iPhones could be over 10 billion dollars a year. Its an interesting prediction; if those numbers come to pass, iPhone could become a bigger source of revenue than the traditional iPod. 'The answer may not come until 2009. By then, Apple should have begun creating lower-cost iPhone variants to reach consumers scared off by the introductory $499 price. It also will probably have moved into overseas markets and cut deals with more carriers to utilize higher-speed wireless networks. So while most analysts look for Apple to sell around 3 million units this year and 10 to 12 million in 2008, many figure that 20 million will move in 2009.'"

Re:Predictions

[Richthofen80]

I doubt that iPhones are going to sync with Corp. email so easily. The reason Blackberry has such a great sync with corporate email is because businesses have their own blackberry management servers (I don't know if the servers live at RIM or at the the local company's site, though) that tie into the corporate email servers. iPhone is not being launched as a business product, or as with a business 'edition'.

iPhone will probably have POP3 access to mailboxes like most current smartphones do.

I think small business/independent businessmen could use iPhone no problem; but they have to manage their own contacts and keep their own address book. Corporate Joe working at a firm with more than 100 users will probably just continue to use the solution handed down to him via his company; and the only decent enterprise system right now is RIMs.

Re:No Verizon, No iphone

[CensorshipDonkey]

I believe they approached Verizon initially, as they did a lot of carriers. However, Cingular was the only network at the time who were willing to partner with Apple on Apple's terms: Apple was to design the phone, control every aspect of it, and prevent the network from stuff their own software and logo all over it. That may seem reasonable from the perspective of a hardware designer, but must networks were used to stamping all approved phones with their own software/logo/etc. Blame Verizon for declining a reasonable partnership.

Its all in the data plan

[KevDude]

For me, whether or not to get an iPhone all hinges on how much the data plan is going to cost. I'd gladly pay $1000 or more for a single device that could be a usable network terminal, music player, gps, and phone, but I'm not going to pay 30-70 dollars every month for the life of the device to use it.

Considering that decent home broadband is now 25-60 dollars most places here, I really can't see paying more than 5-10 dollars for the bandwidth, and maybe another $5-10 for the portable aspect. But then isn't that already built into my base cell plan? So we'll see if AT&T comes up with a reasonably priced plan or not.

Eliminating Schlepping the MacBook

[BoRegardless]

Using an iPhone may indeed let me leave the MBPro in the office much of the time. For these types of users, iPhone makes a BIG difference with the iphone in a pocket rather than a ten pound bag with charger and extension cord. People hereabouts have complained about only 1 cell provider, no 3G, no 20 gig memory, no EU sales, but to fully debug everything before going global, Apple has picked it right to limit it to N. America. Obviously the rest of the options will come, as the 3rd party applications will. Hey, the phone is not even out, and everyone has statements about various forms of failure. If you want to see failures, take a look at all the losing products from MS over the last 10 years. MS has existed profitably because of two long standing products, and those financed the losses on all the "new" products.

I'm not convinced

[hairykrishna]

The ipod was a huge success because it was introduced before a lot of people owned portable mp3 players, it looked better than the competitors and (most importantly) most of the alternatives had rubbish interfaces. None of these things are true for the phone market.

What do I know though? I won't pay over the odds for a piece of technology just because it looks cool. I don't think I'm the target market.

Re:from Apple.com

[AKAImBatman]

quick and effective texting on my motorola Q now means i can text without looking at the keys - as tactile response allows me to fly over the keypad.

Ugh. I can't imagine using a Q for texting. Nokia makes a variety of keyboard phones with much better interfaces. I don't know what else you're using your Q for, but you might want to look into a few of the Nokia units next time you upgrade.

the iphone has one potential dealbreaker for me and that is the lack of buttons. texting outstrips voice by orders of magnitude - for a long time abroad (Europe, for example) and a bit more recently in the US.

Apple is well aware of the issue, and has installed predictive text software combined with an automated spell checker. It won't be possible to tell how effective the software is until the iPhone is released, but if the demos are any indication it's worth giving Apple the benefit of the doubt.

It is possible that Apple will screw up on texting, but I don't think it will impact the iPhone's sales much. There's a huge market of people who are interested more in the other features of the phone than its text input capabilities. For example, the ability to visually navigate your voice mail is a big selling point for me. In comparison, I barely ever send text messages. (It's 100x easier to temporarily excuse yourself from a meeting and hit "dial".)

Niches

[SuperKendall]

their computer business? Niche.

Really? When you look at the areas of largest growth (Laptops) Apple is doing extremely well, like 15% of all laptop sales in the US. That is more than a niche as it's a higher percentage than other large computer makers manage.

Why do people assume that just because a market with a huge degree of locking factor (desktop computers) Apple has made slower headway than the wide open music player market, that Apple can be any less successful in a market where it's equally easy to change devices (now that we have number portability). Sure some people are in contracts they cannot get out of, but all contracts expire eventually. And when they do there is a high degree of device fungibility. Apple has shown they can thrive in that environment.

Does "Not M$" == "Bad for Business"

[EccentricAnomaly]

1) No synching with Outlook. 2) No synching with enterprise email services.

isn't IMAP enough for this? I've never used an outlook mail server so I don't know what other stuff it does... If you're talking about calendaring stuff I think that is in the works with leopard's iCal in terms of syncing with meeting maker at least.

Do all of the 'bad for business' arguments really boil down to issues with MS proprietary stuff?

My next phone!

[gone.fishing]

Until last week I would never have dreamed of owning an iPod or iPhone now, I am seriously considering the iPhone. What caused this change? My daughter graduated and for a graduation present, I bought her a 30GB iPod. I've always felt that while Apple products have some unique features that they were overpriced and not all that much better than their other-brand or no-brand counterparts. I've never been one to pay extra for style or "bling" and that is exactly what I thought Apple brought to the party. Still my daughter was celebrating a major accomplishment, she wanted an iPod and I wanted to give her a special present for her big day.

The iPod surprised me. I was impressed with virtually everything about it. I liked the simple controls. The sound clarity was top notch. The screen was crisp and clear. Even the battery charged quickly! "Fit and finish" were awesome. I went out to the iTunes store and bought Alice Cooper's "Schools Out" and made that the first song put on the iPod (a symbolic gesture); even that was faster and far easier than I expected! In little time at all I had 500+ songs on it (and told her the rest of her CD collection was up to her to put on).

Now, I'm a believer. While paying several hundred bucks for a tiny electronic object that is nothing more than an entertainment device still feels kind of steep, I can finally understand why many (including my daughter) like it so much. When I started seeing the iPhone commercials, I was very impressed and really think that Apple may just be the company with the experience and foresight to actually build the right all-inclusive portable device for communications and entertainment. While I may balk at the hefty price, I have to say that I am at least tempted and can certainly understand why some people will rush out to buy one of these "phones" (they really aren't a phone anymore, that is just one of many functions). I'll probably wait for a few months but, I think that my next phone will probably be an iPhone.

Re:Does "Not M$" == "Bad for Business"

[djdavetrouble]

At our enterprise, we have several thousand people using lotus notes.
We are locked into Blackberry big time.
Our experimental imap server went away 2 years ago.
Noone is interested in maintaining another device / email system
for an enterprise with enough complications. Already there is one
guy who does almost nothing but blackberry stuff full time.
They got to the enterprise first, and we are stuck with them.

Re:Answer: It will be gone by 2009

[aztektum]

Preface: I worked as a service jerkoff for Sprint for over a year and dealt with a lot of dumb customers trying to learn their devices. Now on with the show!

The thing that kicks ass to much about the iPhone is the effort Apple has put in to designing the UI to REMOVE much of complication from doing things. It takes half a dozen key presses do anything other than get to the contacts list or open a text message on most phones.

I'm all about function over form and function is where Apple kicks ass. That said, there is no way I'm going to switch to Cingular/AT&T whatever. Among wireless providers, they can kiss my arse. If Verizon hadn't turned down Apple I might have switched to them. Oh wells. I should say I only stuck with Sprint after leaving because I have a cheap plan with everything included.

2 year = no sale

[Duncan3]

The iPhone is awesome. Everything my iBook has including WiFi for VoIP.

Too bad they partnered with AT&T so at minimum it's going to cost you 600(+tax) plus another $100/month at least. At $3,000 for a phone that won't even work in my house, or lab, or many other places because the monopoly AT&T has no reason to make it work - I live in silicon valley so even less reason AT&T should make anything work. AT&T can just go screw themselves and take Apple along with them.

When you can buy it without the completely useless AT&T plan, it will sell faster then they possibly make them for many years to come.

Poor Apple, gonna catch an STD getting screwed by a dirty whore like AT&T.