Apple Profit Falls 22% But iPhone Sales Are Up 251
New submitter marcushoward writes in with news of Apple's quarterly results. From the article: "Apple on Tuesday reported fiscal
third-quarter revenues of $35.3 billion and profits of $6.9 billion, or $7.47 per share. The revenue number is basically even with Apple’s results from a year ago, but its profits were off by almost $2 billion. Revenues were mostly in line with Wall Street’s expectations of $35.09 billion and slightly above its earnings per share expectation of around $7.31. Apple itself had predicted revenues between $33.5 billion and $35.5 billion."
Compared to this quarter last year, sales of Macs are about even, iPad sales dipped slightly (14.6 million vs 16 million), and iPhone sales are up quite a bit (31 million vs 26 million).
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What's interesting about this story, at least for me, is that iPad sales have tanked. Maybe that suggests that Android on tablets has matured somewhat from the early days of few, clunky tablet apps, and that tablets are commodities now too.
No, it rather means that people are finally understanding that a tablet is a novelty. The only time I hear someone talking about how great their iPad (or other tablet) is when they are talking about how much their (less than 10 year old) kid enjoys it
Re:Margin compression (Score:4, Insightful)
tablet's are a partial novelty, but they do have a specific function; they replace the need for portable computing (notebooks, laptops, etc). To think that it's just some toy people purchase is extremely ignorant of the usage.
Re:Margin compression (Score:4, Insightful)
Its not a replacement for portable computing... Its a replacement for portable netflix, web browsing, and stupid little kiddie games/apps.
Re:Margin compression (Score:4, Interesting)
Its a replacement for portable netflix, web browsing, and stupid little kiddie games/apps.
That IS portable computing for the majority
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Its a replacement for portable netflix, web browsing, and stupid little kiddie games/apps.
That IS portable computing for the majority
Indeed. Pathetically, the nuisance is missed to most self-proclaimed computing geeks.
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Tablets are Entertainment Consumption devices. Reading, Music, playing games, surfing the internet, youtube etc etc etc.
They pretty much suck as content creation devices. You can create using them, but if your business is creation of content, you're not going to be served well by a tablet. iPad with Keyboard and case is 2/3 as expensive as a low end MacBook. Guess which one works better for which?
iPad $500 + $100 professional style case w/keyboard = $600
Macbook = $930
If the price difference for a general co
Re:Margin compression (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a bit like arguing that a computer's a terrible content creation tool because it's no good as a woodworking lathe or sewing machine. No, a tablet's no good for doing multi-track video editing. (Most single-display computers aren't any good at it either.) However it's a remarkable tool for gathering, organising and triaging information. (Papers, the science literature tool, is its killer app in my environment.) It's the swiss army knife of desk references. It's an x-windows client I can pass around at a scientific meeting. It's the world's least annoying way to deal with email.
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It's the world's least annoying way to deal with email.
This one true.
---
Send from my iPad
(Which is why this message is so short.)
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That's a bit like arguing that a computer's a terrible content creation tool because it's no good as a woodworking lathe or sewing machine
If you bought a computer to replace a lathe or sewing machine you probably would have that complaint. Fortunately nobody does that because it's a stupid idea (and a pointless analogy). There may be a handful of things a tablet is better at than a computer (I'm unconvinced of any of them) but there are a million things a computer is better at than a tablet. Nobody would genuinely refer to that as a "replacement".
Can we stop with this pointless defense bogging down every discussion that involves tablets?
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What do you think most people use computers for? There's a reason computer use exploded around the time the web went mainstream.
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Besides, web browsing is how a huge nu
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they replace the need for portable computing (notebooks, laptops, etc).
Well, that all depends on what you do on the road really.
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These days I'm using my laptop more like a desktop and my tablet more like a laptop. I barely ever use my laptop unless it's plugged in and connected to an external monitor. Heck, the battery could die on it and I might not even know. And yes, I still use my desktop computer. It performs the same function it always has - high powered workstation with huge monitors for serious work.
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If all you do with your laptop is read email, browse the web and watch video then yes it is a replacement. If you do any content creation on your laptop then the iPad is a piss poor substitute.
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But if all you do with your tablet is read email and watch video then a smartphone or phablet is even better.
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If all you do with your laptop is read email
Reading email? Sure. Writing email? I don't know about the rest of you but I certainly have no desire to type out my emails on a virtual keyboard...
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You'd be surprised. I could touch-type with my thumbs within a month, and I'm not exactly an avid texter. I imagine hunt-and-peck people might have a problem with the lack of feedback though.
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I could touch-type with my thumbs within a month
At at most a fifth of the speed and probably a lot slower. I use all ten of my fingers and not just two of them when typing emails on a keyboard. I imagine someone who couldn't type at all might not notice a different though.
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"As for the iPad, shipments were down 14 percent year over year, but when adjusting for reductions in channel inventory, the true drop-off was just 3 percent. Um believes iPad sales were likely soft in the U.S. and Europe, as Apple high
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No, it rather means that people are finally understanding that a tablet is a novelty.
Precisely. SmartPhones are useful and as soon as alternatives were available the market for those grew rapidly, as people find the concept useful and they'll buy it from any supplier so long as quality is comparable.
Now think of the iFad: one rarely sees Android tablets out there, even though they are as good as iPads. In fact, most people seem to prefer Phablets.
Why? because fads are tied to one supplier, e.g. any of the trendy labels in fashion on a given year, and it is not about the shirt, but about own
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Now think of the iFad: one rarely sees Android tablets out there, even though they are as good as iPads. In fact, most people seem to prefer Phablets.
The Android tablets that are sold, especially the "phablets" as sold because they are cheap. And cheap mostly means terrible. They end up unused, and THAT'S why you don't see them out there.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/usage-study-shows-ipad-proves-to-be-the-one-tablet-to-rule-them-all/story-e6frfro0-1226684205587 [news.com.au]
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More likely market saturation rather than competition. Basically at this point most people who want a tablet have one. And unlike phones, people don't seem to be as in a rush to replace them with the latest and greatest. I know a lot of people who bought iPads as attempted laptop replacements and found that it almost worked. I know I went out and got a new laptop.
Ironically I'm on my iPad at the moment waiting for people to arrive and get a meeting started. The presenation and everything is on the iPad
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More likely market saturation rather than competition. Basically at this point most people who want a tablet have one.
In 3 years? Don't think so. The truth is that the year ago quarter was boosted by the new Retina iPad 3. And the 6 month ago quarter was boosted by the iPad Mini. This last quarter didn't have a new iPad, so of course it isn't one of the peak sales quarters.
The next iPad will come out this quarter or next, with iOS 7, and once again it'll be a record quarter for iPads.
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Maybe people don't talk about them because they stopped being novelties and started being an unremarkable part of the computing landscale? I don't talk about how amazing computer mice are any more, but that doesn't mean that they're a novelty that's destined for the bin.
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Well either way, it may just indicate market saturation. When you introduce a new product, nobody has one, and everyone who wants one buys one. After a few years, many of the people who want one already have one, so you sell fewer of them.
Even if they're a novelty that are only used by 10 year-olds, that's still a market, and lots of people were buying them and happy with their purchase.
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I used mine for college to take notes on and read textbooks via Kindle. Now, YOU might not see a use for them (and I was that guy 2 years ago), but that doesn't mean they're just for games.
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Then listen closely, I am basically the same age as you. and try as I might, I have not found a compelling use for a tablet, They are too expensive for their limited ability.
Though you can use them for some work functions they are not work machines. The are content consumption devices and that is how they were designed from the ground up. The problem with android and windows tablets is that they try to be more.
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For $229 you can buy a computer the size of a small book that connects wirelessly to the internet. If you can't find interesting things to do with something like that I worry for your imagination. I'd already dreamt up a dozen uses for something like that when I was a teenager and it was a ridiculous space-age fantasy.
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Though you can use them for some work functions they are not work machines.
Tell that to pilots and doctors for example.
If your work consists mostly of sitting at a desk doing keyboardy things, then of course a tablet isn't much good for you. But not everyone's work is like that.
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Not margin compression. Bussiness cylces, dividends, and investment in facilities (they are making some macs in the US now, they are building a new campus, they are gearing up for a new product line)
One biggy is that apple took out a loan to pay their dividends. 3% of their stock prices is about 15% of their margins! so it might be the whole 22% of profits.
Apple doesn't seem to be discounting much and the cost of production is going down mostly. I think maybe people are substituting some cheaper devices
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The other side of the story is that the iPhone is getting cheaper. It was released last year and wasn't cutting edge at the time. At this stage it gets sold cheap with bundles, much like similar age phones like the Galaxy S3.
It shows that there is demand for a cheap but current iPhone, even if it is significantly less powerful spec wise than the competition. I expect Apple will launch such a phone that is basically an iPhone 5 when the iPhone 5S is released.
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Tanked? It was a 10% drop...
WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
The industry analysts and pundits have been predicting this for ages
Ages huh? 15 years ago Apple was “beleaguered”
that while Apple led for ages
The iPhone went to market only in 2007. *Six* years ago, Apple was late to that game. It was only that the other players were caught with their pants down.
reaped windfall profits as a consequence
Their insane margins were more a testament of Tim Cooks logistics expertise, the reason Steve Jobs hired him.
Google would barge in, turn smartphones into a commodity, and crush Apple's margins
Maybe in bizarro land. Apples only competitor is Samsung. The rest of Android phones replace the feature phones of old.
the PC market, where nowadays, it's impossible to make serious money on PC hardware
Uhm, except for Apple?
What's interesting about this story, at least for me, is that iPad sales have tanked.
Tanked. Yeah, right. Yoy 16 to 14.6 million. With FQ3/12 being the quarter with the brand new retina iPad.
Wish /.mods would cut back on dope.
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Sorry, but HTC hasn't been able to keep up with demand for the One, so I'd say that HTC is back in the running. Just because they didn't go insane-advertising-huge-prestock doesn't mean they aren't selling like crazy.
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They haven't been able to keep up with demand for the One because their component suppliers looked at their past performance gave them a low priority, so they literally couldn't make them.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/19/4122798/htc-one-delayed-because-of-component-shortage [theverge.com]
Re:WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, but HTC hasn't been able to keep up with demand for the One
Sorry, but that's because they had manufacturing issues with the camera, not because demand is insanely high. In fact, sales [bloomberg.com] were below expectations [dailytech.com], causing them to lose a rank or two in the smartphone market, and the One's sales are actually expected to drop off sharply in the next quarter [gsmarena.com], which would lead to an even greater decline. The One had a lot of promise, but has failed to deliver on it.
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"The industry analysts and pundits have been predicting this for ages: that while Apple led for ages, and reaped windfall profits as a consequence, there would be a stampede into the smartphone market, and Google would barge in, turn smartphones into a commodity, and crush Apple's margins."
Wake me up when this happens. So far it has not. Apple sold MORE phones this quarter than before with a 36%+ profit margin. Apple makes more profit in smart phones then all other players combined. Sure, it is time for
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Is that where we are now? Every new tech product goes from profitable business to lost cause in five years because Google wants more eyeballs to serve ads to?
Re: Margin compression (Score:2)
In this quarter last year the retina iPad was released. In this past quarter there was some inventory draw-down in anticipation of future models, and no new models. Actual iPad sales appear to be pretty steady, and there's certainly little evidence of overwhelming moves to Android. If anything, the worry would be the tablet market saturating earlier than some expected.
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Two points:
1) iPad sales didn't tank. They were down, but that's to be expected considering they had a major product release (the 3rd gen iPad which introduced the retina display) that helped to drive sales in the year-ago quarter, but no corresponding release this quarter to drive sales similarly. If anything, I found it astounding that sales were only down about 10%, given that they're working with a nearly 9 month old product (the 4th gen iPad was released late last year), rather than a brand new one wit
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What's interesting about this story, at least for me, is that iPad sales have tanked.
It's really too early to be able to proclaim that. The drop in sales could be attributed to the fact that there was no new iPad model released this quarter whereas there was one last year. Sales always spike when there's a product launch and languish when one is expected in the near future (presumably this fall).
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What plane do you live on? The iPhone 5 was barely distinguishable from the 4? (...) Only a buffoon can't spot these differences a mile away.
Not the AC that wrote the text, but I want to contribute anyway. I'm by no means an ignorant when it comes to phones and stuff, but I'm not following the checking all the pics and following all the news on new phones. I guess I would call myself average on this field.
With that said until you described the differences (which I may now use to recognize it), the only way I knew to distinguish both was based on the connector. Small on the 5, big on everything else.
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Replying to myself... always nice! At least it's for a clarification about the state of the world when it comes to iPhones.
I knew, unlike what my previous comment indicates, the differences in the size of the screen. But, quite frankly, they seem minute enough that I can't distinguish them unless they are next to each other. Individually, I can't spot the screen differences (once again, I haven't had enough time with either to figure that out).
cyclic (Score:3)
Apple's cyclic not a steady force. I'm looking forward to the Liquid Metal Iwatch. I worry a bit about the smaller iphones. On the one hand they boost new sales in foreign markets (pity Nokia) and probably spike sales everywhere. But they will canibalise some new sales of the older higher margin phones. Or will they? perhaps they will have higher margins. Or perhaps people who save money on the smaller one will pick up an ipad. Or perhaps sales of the full sized iphone are saturated anyhow so there's little to canibalize. All I know is that they won't lose money!
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Apple doesn't have a choice: cheap Android and Windows Phone devices are becoming highly competitive on price, both with less demanding, mainstream users and more technically proficient, hack-seeking buyers. So those sales are going away. The only question is whether they're going to go to rivals, or to Apple's own cheaper product. It's just another part of the product cycle; I recall that Apple made more money on the iPod Mini/Nano than they ever did on the classic iPod, although it was exactly the same ki
New MacPro, iPhone 5S, retina iPad Mini (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder how many people are in the same situation as I am? I'm a self confessed Apple fanboy, but there just wasn't much reason for me to give Apple any money last quarter.
I won't replace my iPhone 4 just now because there is bound to be a new model along soon. I can't replace my 2008 MacPro because they don't sell them in Europe any more, and even if they did, it would be foolish to invest in another cheesegrater when the black bin has already been pre-announced. I like the idea of a tablet, but I'm waiting on the inevitable retina iPad mini. For me Apple isn't tanking, they are just deferring revenue.
There's zero chance I'd consider (Score:3)
using anything other than MacOS on the desktop/laptop right now, but as Jobs himself once said, the post-PC era is upon us, and weirdly, that's where Apple is struggling a bit. After a burst of market innovation during the second half of the '00s, they've basically said "pass" the last several product cycles.
My first iPhone absolutely floored me and there was nothing else like it on the market. Same with my first iPad. But early this year I replaced my iPhone 4 with a Samsung Galaxy Note simply for features
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Sales are down, for everything except the iPhone. Not cynic, just stupid.
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Yes, you will have things like the weaker app market, however Apple is offering iPhones going back to the iPhone 4 yet which is free on contract. So while Apple still gets paid for that phone the amount they are making from the sales of the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S to the carriers is likely significantly less than the iPhone 5.
I'd suspect a lot of the increase in iPhone sales likely came on the lower profit margins for the iPhone 4 and 4S which would work to eat in to the overall profit of the company. Stil
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Re:Cynic...? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not one of these people who beat on the idea of capitalism but I do see it as a failing of the perception in that endless growth just isn't possible in the long term. Sadly it's endless growth that drives a majority of today's investors. Most of today's investors don't see their dollars as a building block to better companies with long term goals and good public relations, they see their dollars are something they need to "flip" fast to make it worth their time. That's been a failing of the Wall Street economy for several decades and it only gets worse as time trods on.
Apple will take a hit because of this. It's not because they're technology is weak but because there is enough competition in their field that push investment dollars to the short term gains. And this isn't to say other players in the field aren't really offering anything but their long term outlook is secondary to what they'll offer up in the next quarter or two. Apple hasn't planted itself well enough as a long term solutions company to keep the market interested like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft did. They'll survive and maybe make a bigger comeback some day but they will have to suffer through this lull like every other market leader has to from time to time.
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Why does Apple need their money in the first place? Doesn't it have a problem with having too much cash as it is?
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The endless growth isn't possible in the long term meme is kind of silly. A company that is growing often does so by cannibalizing sales from other companies, which means its becoming dominant in its space. So while it's growing, other companies are shrinking. A company that is beating its competition, or is about to beat it, is far more valuable than a similar company (in size and profits) that is losing to its competition.
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What I mean is that when investors look for growth, they aren't doing so with the expectation that an individual company will grow forever. However, they do have the expectation that there always will be a company somewhere that is in the midst of growth.
right on the money (Score:5, Insightful)
This is also the reason why manufacturing industries in America have shipped their jobs overseas. Once a company has reached its peak growth in sales, leadership is under pressure from investors to continue to demonstrate growing profits. So, they look around and quickly seize on their own labor force as ballast.
The American workers are / were thrown overboard to expand profit margins and satiate investors' demand for "growth".
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we could see a big market crash again, perhaps worse than ever before.
That's over a hundred years away. People said in the '70s that growth was going to stop and we'd all be eating dirt. It didn't happen. Why? Because the world doesn't just consist of the U.S. and Europe. Massive growth in Japan, China, and India over the past 5 decades has fueled greater earnings on Wall Street than ever before.
So what happens when we can't count on growth from Asia? Nothing -- we still have Africa and South America for cheap labor, a rising consumer class, and vast (mostly untapped) reso
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The short-term focus on the other hand, and willingness to sacrifice long-term for the short payoff, yes, that seems positively stupid a
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They are showing growth (Score:2)
What it comes down to is that businesses, regardless of actual profit, are largely looked on as weak by investors if they're not showing growth.
Apple did show growth - 1%. That's after about half a year with no new products introduced. And of course there are a large array of things coming up in the fall, you'd have to be a fool to not see the real growth has merely been displaced.
Apple will take a hit because of this.
Stock's higher than it has been in weeks. Even institution investors cannot continue t
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Google announced their quarterly figures last Thursday, profits up 19%. Yay! Except the haruspexers in the financial press were expecting more and the share price fell off a cliff, down about 4% on opening Friday morning. Same with MS last week, bottom-line numbers up quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year but the share price tanked although only to about the level that it had been a few months ago.
Re:Cynic...? (Score:5, Informative)
Apple (headline) profits fall, just as they are being asked to pay tax.
During the depths of the recession they were able to negotiate really sweet deals on their huge purchases of components. Those contracts expired, and they're now having to pay more, but they certainly can't raise prices. Of course they explained all this and warned investors of the coming drop in margins about a year ago, but much easier for the irrational Apple-haters to ignore the perfectly sensible explanation from Apple itself, and start looking for strange conspiracies instead...
Re:Cynic...? (Score:5, Funny)
It's more like this:
Everyone else is losing money. Apple makes $6.9 billion. Die, Apple, Die!
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I'm pretty sure Samsung made a few bucks too.
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Samsung did even better than Apple with over 8 billion in profit but their stocks fell sharply because they didn't "grow" as much as was expected. I can't figure out what the hell is going on with these people. Companies that suck ass go up while companies rolling in dough drop. Hell of a world.
Re:Cynic...? (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition to that, their product lineup has changed since a year ago. The iPhone 5 has significantly lower margins due to the higher cost of manufacturing than the iPhone 4S that it replaced, and the iPad mini, which they introduced to fend off competing small form factor tablets, has lower margins than its big brother. As you said, they've been advising investors right from the start that this would be happening.
On top of that, the retina iPads were still recent in the year-ago quarter, so it's actually pretty astounding that sales were even as good as they were this quarter, considering that they haven't had a major product releases in any of their product lines (other than MacBook Air) for a number of months now. Typically they space product releases throughout the year, but they've acknowledged that they're going to have a packed autumn this year, which could work out for them since they'll likely have a number of new product releases going into the holiday season.
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You are correct, you don't get it. Lame.
Better depends on use case (Score:5, Informative)
The Samsung Galaxy phone is better and any tablet in the world is better than the iPad.
Nothing against the Galaxy but "better" is a pretty ill defined term. For my Grandmother, who mostly wants to play solitaire and facetime with her grandkids, the Galaxy is a demonstrably worse choice. For your needs or mine it might be the better choice. "Better" depends on what you are doing with it.
As soon as people realize it has no HDMI, no micro-SD port, and no USB port for flash drives, they can go spend 5x less on a tablet that can or get the vastly superior Galaxy tablet for the same price.
There is a market for tablets with those connectors but it is, for better or worse, a minority. My several of my family members have iPads. Most of them would never use any of those ports and in fact most of them don't even know what an HDMI or micro-SD port is. That's not to imply that a tablet with those ports would be pointless. For someone like me they might actually be an attractive feature but I have no illusions that most iPad buyers would need or want them. Furthermore those extra ports add cost, complexity and opportunities for hardware failure. Furthermore there are other ways to accomplish things like file transfer, video display, etc without those ports so it is unclear why they would be necessary in most cases. You don't need HDMI to display video. You don't need USB to store or transfer files. I'm sure some people appreciate those ports but I'd wager a tidy sum that most of the time they go completely unused.
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As soon as people realize it has no HDMI, no micro-SD port, and no USB port for flash drives, they can go spend 5x less on a tablet that can or get the vastly superior Galaxy tablet for the same price.
Vastly superior? If by that you mean pixelated screen and lower battery life then yes, you are right. Try reading books on Galaxy Tab vs iPad and tell us with a straight face that there is no difference or that the Galaxy Tab is superior.
Six of one; Half dozen of the other (Score:2)
It depends on what your needs are. Apples mail client and calendar app are VASTLY superior to Android. You have to go all the way back to IOS ver 2 to have a worse mail client than Android 4.22. However, Firefox (and plugins) rock on Android. And Swype is a killer app.
For me, the decision to abandon my investment in IOS apps was easy when I went to a prepay phone. My Nexus 4 was half the cost of a new iPhone. The iPhone certainly is not twice as good.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as I dislike Apple's products and philosophy, I absolutely hate Samsung's philosophy. In my experience, it's either copying (much more than would be reasonable) successful products or throwing tons of crap at the wall to see what sticks (the galaxy cameras come to mind). Either way, their products are designed to what seem to be very poor standards with atrocious quality control.
Out of 11 Samsung products:
Two were dead on arrival (Ativ Smart PC Pro, a camcorder whose model I don't recall) - they did turn on, but were not in a condition anyone would call useful (dead touchscreen and autofocus, random stability issues, not to mention the fact that the tablet's replacement, like all other units I've seen, had plastic covering one of the keyboard dock's pins and a misaligned speaker grille).
One (40" LCD) developed some unusual dark areas on the screen.
One (Refrigerator) suffers from an ice dispenser button that gets stuck if operated with a single finger, its shelves' plastic is cracking and there's rust developing on some parts of the outside finish.
One (Monitor, Syncmaster 940BW) has a driver issue (seriously. Google it and wonder how it's possible...) under Windows 7 where a driver is automatically installed that includes a bad color profile that causes White to be displayed as Yellow in color-corrected applications, unless a different profile is manually chosen.
One (Dual-SIM phone with crappy resistive touchscreen) was never a decent phone, but its touchscreen decided to crap out one day, for no apparent reason, making it impossible to use.
Another phone (Wave I think it was called... ) was a phone whose hardware showed potential but was running Bada or whatever that OS was called. Not pleasant to use.
Only 4 / 11 Samsung products never gave any reason for complaint (besides limitations that were obvious when buying it - like a screen that is at a fixed height - those were knwon and expected, so there's no reason to blame Samsung): Two 830 SSDs (one 128GB and one 256GB), another monitor (Syncmaster BX2450) and a Blu-Ray drive.
I'm sure someone can give me a comparable amount of Apple horror stories, but I'd bet that most of them are actually limitations that one knows they're buying - like support for newer versions of OS X / iOS being a gamble. The products themselves don't tend to start failing in unpredictable ways, most failures are predictable, in my experience.
tl;dr I won't be buying Samsung again anytime soon (and I wouldn't buy Apple anyway, so don't bother with that angle)
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Every iphone for a 3 year period had a screen that was roughly twice as likely to break as the one before it accordingly to actual phone insurance companies.
"A" screen? No, you're confused. The iPhone 4 has a glass back. Two sides that are glass accounts for the increase in dropping causing cracked glass. The screens themselves have not got more prone to cracking.
And in drop tests iPhones were far less breakable than Samsung Galaxy's.
The newest ipad has been officially rated heavier, hotter, and with a worse battery life than the one before it after they improved something that nobody was complaining about (the graphics power and screen res).
Yes, they vastly improved the graphics, to the extent of 4 times as many pixels. The best on the market. And that needs more battery power. Your premise is that if you assess that people aren't complaining about a particular thing
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Indeed, those are stupid issues. Partially because of them, I will not be buying Apple in the near future if I can avoid it. However, those problems are pretty much known beforehand (you could argue that the purple flare is a Samsung-ish problem).
This is a good troll post, please mod up (Score:2)
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
SD-slot / USB == iCloud
That's how Apple handles those issues.
Also, I don't believe any iOS battery is soldered; they all have detachable connectors.
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And I don't follow Apple products (shocker) but something somewhere has a soldered in battery. I don't care what it is because regardless, it's classic Apple design strategy.
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It's still 56x slower than my class 10 samsung micro SD card that's in my tablet (it's 70MB/s read speed). What a great improvement in technology!
You have to wait whilst it saves to SD card. There's no waiting to save to iCloud. Thats the difference between file system saving and background syncing.
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no micro-SD port, and no USB port for flash drives
Yeah, your Nexus 7 sure has that iPad beat in those areas. Er wait.
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And if screws is not your thing, then you can have Apple change it for you.
http://www.apple.com/batteries/replacements.html [apple.com]
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. I don't know any non-geek buying Windows PCs anymore. Everyone now wants a Mac desktop or laptop based upon superior usability.
Last time I checked Macs had about 10 or 15% market share worldwide. So either the world is 85-90% geek, or you need to get out of your basement more often.
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An awful lot of those PCs are bought by businesses and other organizations.
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Google has no clue when it comes to design, usability and customer needs assessment vs " fill it with geek features the average person won't use."
Uhm, that's why they license to third parties. They may not know about rounded corners and sleek looks but that's what other manufacturers are for. I've bought 7 Android devices in the past year. Most for developing software and personal use. In our house we have one iPhone 5 and that's getting traded out here shortly because my son hates the Apple "way." He hates the new App Store, iTunes is constantly giving him grief, me? I just download my mp3s from Amazon.. NO problem. I don't see apple cutting