Comments on: Apple Q3 – Middle Age Spread.

By: HPQ Q3 – Home to roost | Radio Free Mobile

HPQ Q3 – Home to roost | Radio Free Mobile — Thu, 22 Aug 2013 06:21:41 +0000

[…] I would look at Samsung, Asustek or Microsoft as ways to have exposure to a bottoming of the PC market (see here). […]

By: windsorr

windsorr — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 09:13:56 +0000

A key aspect of the replacement cycle at the high end is subsidisation. If your operator offers you a shiny new phone free every 24 months you will replace every 24 months. Until that changes I think replacement at he high end will remain dependent on contract length.

By: tatilsever

tatilsever — Wed, 24 Jul 2013 15:45:11 +0000

I understand your point. Still, when a company has only one launch after one whole year, it is easy to see why there is a need to produce more than actual sales early on. When the refresh cycle is broken, yoy comparisons becomes less meaningful.

In any case, it does not seem like iPad Mini is bringing a large number of new tablet customers rather than eating into the sales of full size version. It is quite interesting that consumers gravitate towards laptops with larger screens, but tablets with smaller ones. That cannot be good news for Win8 tablets. If consumers prefer smaller screens beyond the price advantage, they are unlikely to be clamoring for simultaneously open multiple app windows.

By: tatilsever

tatilsever — Wed, 24 Jul 2013 08:25:15 +0000

For browsing, photo editing, sketching, note taking, emailing etc, 4S has been fast enough, regardless of its shape. I doubt it feels any different between Galaxy S3 and 4. For the majority of customers who are not into games that make use of the latest GPUs, the urge to upgrade must be less nowadays. It will be interesting to see if upgrade cycles will expand beyond 24 months. ARM hardware has been nowhere near the speed of desktops, but apparently most people do not need such power once bloated old OSes and apps get cleaned up and optimized for the mobile era. Traditional PC era lasted more than 2 decades, I wonder if it’ll take as long before another computing paradigm displaces mobile computing.

Fortunately for hardware people, phones tend to fall on pavement or dunked in water more often than laptops. 🙂 It will not be all that bad if mobile sales stabilizes around 3 to 5 times PC sales.

By: windsorr

windsorr — Wed, 24 Jul 2013 08:24:13 +0000

That’s true. You have, however, fallen for the oldest trick in the book. Whenever a company is seeing a slow down or saturation they always start talking about how inventory adjustments are masking the picture. If there was not a slowdown or maturation going on there would have been no need to justify the numbers. Even when you take the inventory out, the company missed expectations giving the signal that maturation is here.

By: tatilsever

tatilsever — Wed, 24 Jul 2013 08:01:22 +0000

Shipments =/= sales. Actual iPad sales (sell-through) was only down by 3%, compared to a year ago when the first retina iPad was launched and apparently channels were being stuffed, so -19% shipment comparison is a bit misleading. Still, there is now one more iPad model, the mini, so it’d be reasonable to expect unit volumes to go up despite lack of a new launch. In any case, holiday quarter will be a more reliable gauge in maturation or saturation.