

Apple becomes top phone maker by profits (beating Nokia, etc) - swombat
http://www.reuters.com/article/COMSRV/idUSN1051937420091110

======
swombat
Amazing considering they're less than 3 years into the iPhone's life. Just
staggering.

If anyone had predicted, when the iPhone was announced, that within 3 years
Apple would be making the largest profits of any phone-maker, they would have
been laughed out of the room.

~~~
gaius
Same as if you'd said Apple was getting into the music retail business.

~~~
raganwald
Same as if you said that Apple would have the largest profit share of any PC
manufacturer. It's all about the margins, and now when someone says Apple's
market share is _marginal_ , we know what that word means.

------
nimbix
I just went to Nokia's regional site for my country and the products page
there lists - get this - 135 different phone models!! How does something like
this happen? And I have absolutely no idea what the features on any of them
are. How am I supposed to pick one?

~~~
jagjit
Are you complaining about choice? I just checked out their US site and it is
pretty straight forward to search based on features etc.

I can understand finding faults with Nokia for not being able to compete
effectively against iPhone. But then which other mobile maker is right now
able to do that. iPhone is pretty much a new product category. And Apple gets
consumers and software like few others.

But I cannot understand finding faults with the choice of phones Nokia
provides.

~~~
nimbix
Yes, I'm complaining about choice. I used the filters on the left and was
still left with 28 phones to choose from. I'm sorry, but I'm just not willing
to put any serious effort into comparing 28 different models that I know
nothing about when their competition makes it so much easier not to screw up.

~~~
jagjit
I agree choice can be confusing. And that is why Apple products standout.

Maybe I should have clarified what I like about choice in phones that Nokia or
others provide. One aspect of choice which I like is the different pricing
options. The mobile phones are needed by people all over the world with
varying purchasing powers. Everybody cannot or does not want to afford the
total cost of ownership of iPhone or even Nokia N97 or Droid. But there are
billions who want to make phone calls.

------
dschobel
This is all the more amazing since they have one super-high end product vs the
balanced product portfolio of Nokia.

You'd have to imagine this makes Apple's position a bit tenuous.

~~~
danek
Nokia has a balanced portfolio of crap. I used nokia phones for 4 years before
getting an iPhone. Their menu systems look like they are designed by
programmers. They are so hard to use. I mean, you learn to live with it, but
it got to the point where I was checking days off my calendar until the 3gs
was released (figuratively speaking, I don't own a calendar).

I had one phone that would always call people from my pocket because it had
these 2 buttons on the side that if pressed at the same time, would activate
voice dialing, and it would pick up random words from conversation and call
whoever it thought you said. That made for some awkward moments. Oh, and there
was no way to disable that "feature".

When you are choosing between $79 anything phone + 2yr contract, or a $199
iPhone + 2yr contract, it's kind of a no-brainer, unless you _want_ a cheap
phone for some reason, like you happen to be really accident prone.

~~~
blub
What happens if you lose the cheap 200$ phone, do you still have to pay for
the 2yr contract? Do you get another phone for the same contract or do you
have to make another contract?

Anyway, that is not my experience at all with Nokia. They are very popular
here in Europe because there is no carrier lock-in and anyone can get any
phone that they want. This means that the best phones tend to win, not the
ones that are the most subsidized. The high-end Nokia series are N
(multimedia) and E (business).

Your two-button key combination is either a bug, or you didn't lock your
keypad.

~~~
danek
It was a flip phone and the buttons were on the side. no way to lock them. I
checked the manual and that combination was the way to activate voice mode...

Before I got my iPhone, I considered Nokias to be the best. In Europe the
situation is different. You guys get way better phones than we do. I lived in
France for a while and when I came back to the US, all the phones I could buy
here looked 5 years old.

Our contracts aren't tied to a specific phone (except for the iPhone), so if
you lose your phone you can replace it with just about anything that would
work with that carrier. I have a friend who loses his phone every few months
and he usually buys a cheap replacement on eBay.

~~~
whatusername
Pretty sure the iPhone contracts aren't tied to a specific phone. I'm not in
the US, but I'm pretty sure that you can't tie a GSM SIM Card to a phone. Take
the Sim out and put it in a n97 and it should work.

~~~
danek
Oops I didn't mean to say that an iPhone contract is tied to a specific phone.
You could always swap the sim to a different phone.

what I was trying to say was that AT&T has a special iPhone contract that is
separate from their regular contracts, in that it comes with a $30/month data
plan.

