

The Photo Foretelling Apple’s Doom - mikecane
http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/the-photo-foretelling-apples-doom/

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shib71
This is the same argument people have been making about the desktop Apple
products for years, and they were wrong then too. Apple is aiming at the
luxury market and seems content to ignore the rest of the market. What Apple
should worry about is that "good enough" is getting very, very close to
Apple's "premium".

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cheald
I think the real danger here to Apple is that due to devices like this,
Android could decisively unseat the iPhone as "the smartphone" in the public
consciousness. Right now, when you say "smartphone with apps", I suspect that
most people will mentally jump to the iPhone. If these sorts of low-end, low-
cost device/plan packages go big (and they will), it'll rapidly erode the
iPhone's carefully-curated image as "the smartphone platform". Android has
been chipping away at it for a while now, but if you capture the low-income-
but-tired-of-the-RAZR market (hi, high school and college market), then you
more or less have captured the entire direction of the market.

Apple will continue to sell iPhones, and will continue to be successful at it,
but it won't be the market-dominating behemoth it's been in the past couple of
years.

~~~
lsc
>but if you capture the low-income-but-tired-of-the-RAZR market (hi, high
school and college market), then you more or less have captured the entire
direction of the market.

See, apple tried that. when I was school in the 90s, apple owned the (primary
school) campus computer lab market... and really, nothing else. As far as I
can tell, it didn't help them much at all, other than to get a generation of
people thinking of apple as slow, obsolete crap (which is as much a result of
the school district keeping them around too long as anything else.)

edit: On the other hand, come to think of it, OS-x started getting real
popular around the time most people my age started earning enough money to pay
for a mac, so maybe I'm wrong and the policy was a resounding success? (I
mean, I was born in '80, and as I've had a 'real job' since '97 or so because
I skipped college to play in the .com boom, I sometimes forget that most
people don't start earning money until their mid 20s.)

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earl
Does anybody have any experience with sprint in SF / mission?

