On Dec 9, 12:41 pm, Miroslav Pokorny <[email protected]> wrote: > I wonder if in a few years time, we > will say yes Apple screwed up they repeated the mistakes of the MAC on iOS.
Apple is in the business of making money. By licensing out iOS to third parties, Apple would get just iOS license revenue and see inferior products because you generally build better products if you build the entire thing yourself. Let's say the about 25 million iOS devices Apple sold sold last quarter were built by somebody else, but Apple got 30 dollars license fee a pop (that's pretty expensive - Window Phone 7 is rumored to be around $25 a phone). Makes $750 million revenue and about $640 million profit (at 85% gross margin, which is Microsoft / IBM territory). Now last quarter, Apple's profit was around $4.3 billion. iOS accounts for about 70% of Apple's revenue, so lets be generous and say iOS only got 60% of the profits - that's $2.6 billion. Hmm.... And that doesn't even account for supply chain efficiencies like Flash storage that is used across Macs and iOS (Apple is estimated to buy about 40% of the worldwide Flash storage) and - to a lesser degrees - shared code between iOS and OS X. Two more things are different this time around: - People buy content beyond software (music, video, books), and Apple has the most complete one-stop shop for this (well, two, since iBooks has its own store). - Macs have always been more expensive than Windows machines. The iPhone, compared against high-end Android phones, is as expensive or just a bit more expensive. Nevertheless, Apple certainly has their work cut out for them, facing all phone companies and game console companies at once. However, I don't think that at the end of the day, they'll end up with 5% of the smartphone / tablet / TV thing market - I'd say 33% at least. And unless something really big happens, they will continue to make more money than most of their competitors combined in these fields. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
