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And how much money did the Galaxy S III earn on those 10 million sales vs iPhone? I'm no Apple fanboy, but it always amuses me that the Android boosters talk u

by fallous 14y ago

And how much money did the Galaxy S III earn on those 10 million sales vs iPhone? I'm no Apple fanboy, but it always amuses me that the Android boosters talk unit numbers while Apple continues their "BMW" revenues on product. Congrats, you sold 100 Beetles... our sales of 1 BMW generated more profit.

jarek 14y ago
Do you reckon the GS III is a low-margin product?
- fallous 14y ago
  No, but I doubt it has the margins of Apple hardware and it lacks the additional profit centers of the iPhone.
usaar333 14y ago
Unit talk numbers are very relevant, as it foretells how many people will be on each platform going forward. As a user or dev, I hardly care about Apple's profit per phone; I care about how large of an ecosystem I'm in.
nl 14y ago
And how much money did the Galaxy S III earn on those 10 million sales vs iPhone? I'm not sure if you are actually asking for an answer here - it seems you think you already know the answer. Samsung just had record profit last quarter, prior to the Galaxy 3 launch. They don't break down per phone profit & margin, but: Samsung's quarterly handset division profits nearly tripled to 4.27 trillion won ($3.8 billion), accounting for 73 percent of total profit, and operating margins jumped to 18.4 percent from 12 percent in the preceding quarter on strong sales of the Galaxy S and the Note phone/tablet, the surprise consumer hit of recent months.[1] Now 18.4% profit margin isn't as high as Apple's, but OTOH it includes a lot of low end (and less profitable) phones too. TL;DR? That thing about Apple making most of the profit in the mobile phone market is no longer true. [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/27/samsung-idUSL3E8FQABV20120427 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/27/samsung-idUSL3E8FQ...
btilly 14y ago
A rule that I learned a long time ago in tech is, "The commodity always wins." And it seems to work out that way most of the time. If there are two technologies, and one manages to become a commodity that is installed all over, that's the technology that you see innovation coming from and the future coming out of. It is often the worse technology. But it wins. I don't have a horse in the phone race. But when I see Apple folks talking about profit margins and Android folks talking about units sold, I'd lay my money on Android winning in the long run. It may be a worse market to be in now, it may make a lot less money. But where the users are is where the future tends to be. This happens for a lot of reasons. Let me give just one. When teenage kids (who don't have a lot of money of their own) get a smart phone, they are going to be given Android devices because it is cheaper. When they play around with those phones and master them, they will be learning Android. Many will stick with Android. Others will learn Android, and their first programming experiences will be with it because that is what they have. And once they grow up they will be worth a lot more than $0, both as customers or developers. But they won't be imprinted on iOS.
- rimantas 14y ago
  Please, everyone, when talking about "wins"—do specify, what is won. In this case—the race to the bottom?
  - btilly 14y ago
    What I mean by win is that they will wind up becoming the dominant technology with the lion's share of the market, revenue, and other companies building on top of. The also ran technology may survive, but it becomes relatively insignificant. For example compare the Mac vs Microsoft Windows. The Mac was better, had better product margins, etc. Microsoft was the commodity and completely owned the market. For other historical examples compare VMS vs Unix, Lisp vs C, OSI protocols vs TCP/IP, Smalltalk vs Java, traditional client-server vs web apps, CORBA vs SOAP (vs JSON rpcs), Perl vs PHP, and so on. In many cases the losing technology was technically much nicer to work with. But the winning technology won. For a famous essay reflecting on why, see http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html from the Lisp vs C war.

by fallous 14y ago

jarek 14y ago

Do you reckon the GS III is a low-margin product?

fallous 14y ago
No, but I doubt it has the margins of Apple hardware and it lacks the additional profit centers of the iPhone.

usaar333 14y ago

Unit talk numbers are very relevant, as it foretells how many people will be on each platform going forward. As a user or dev, I hardly care about Apple's profit per phone; I care about how large of an ecosystem I'm in.

nl 14y ago

And how much money did the Galaxy S III earn on those 10 million sales vs iPhone? I'm not sure if you are actually asking for an answer here - it seems you think you already know the answer. Samsung just had record profit last quarter, prior to the Galaxy 3 launch. They don't break down per phone profit & margin, but: Samsung's quarterly handset division profits nearly tripled to 4.27 trillion won ($3.8 billion), accounting for 73 percent of total profit, and operating margins jumped to 18.4 percent from 12 percent in the preceding quarter on strong sales of the Galaxy S and the Note phone/tablet, the surprise consumer hit of recent months.[1] Now 18.4% profit margin isn't as high as Apple's, but OTOH it includes a lot of low end (and less profitable) phones too. TL;DR? That thing about Apple making most of the profit in the mobile phone market is no longer true. [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/27/samsung-idUSL3E8FQABV20120427 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/27/samsung-idUSL3E8FQ...

btilly 14y ago

A rule that I learned a long time ago in tech is, "The commodity always wins." And it seems to work out that way most of the time. If there are two technologies, and one manages to become a commodity that is installed all over, that's the technology that you see innovation coming from and the future coming out of. It is often the worse technology. But it wins. I don't have a horse in the phone race. But when I see Apple folks talking about profit margins and Android folks talking about units sold, I'd lay my money on Android winning in the long run. It may be a worse market to be in now, it may make a lot less money. But where the users are is where the future tends to be. This happens for a lot of reasons. Let me give just one. When teenage kids (who don't have a lot of money of their own) get a smart phone, they are going to be given Android devices because it is cheaper. When they play around with those phones and master them, they will be learning Android. Many will stick with Android. Others will learn Android, and their first programming experiences will be with it because that is what they have. And once they grow up they will be worth a lot more than $0, both as customers or developers. But they won't be imprinted on iOS.

rimantas 14y ago
Please, everyone, when talking about "wins"—do specify, what is won. In this case—the race to the bottom?
- btilly 14y ago
  What I mean by win is that they will wind up becoming the dominant technology with the lion's share of the market, revenue, and other companies building on top of. The also ran technology may survive, but it becomes relatively insignificant. For example compare the Mac vs Microsoft Windows. The Mac was better, had better product margins, etc. Microsoft was the commodity and completely owned the market. For other historical examples compare VMS vs Unix, Lisp vs C, OSI protocols vs TCP/IP, Smalltalk vs Java, traditional client-server vs web apps, CORBA vs SOAP (vs JSON rpcs), Perl vs PHP, and so on. In many cases the losing technology was technically much nicer to work with. But the winning technology won. For a famous essay reflecting on why, see http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html from the Lisp vs C war.