How many iPhone 5's will sell in the opening weekend?

The iPhone 4S sold about 4 million units in the first three days of availability last year. The iPhone 4 sold about 1.7 million and iPhone 3GS about 1 million.

The main driver to growth for the initial weekend is usually upgrades for existing customers. There might be first time buyers, but the dedication required to ensure being first to have it usually means buyers are keen on the brand and are repeat customers.

The other factor is the number of countries where the phone is available. The 4 was initially available in 5 countries. The 4S in seven and now the 5 will be in nine countries. I made a list of the differences in launch countries for the 4S and the 5 below:

I’ve also listed the second week launch countries for completeness and shown which countries have changed.[1] Continue reading “How many iPhone 5's will sell in the opening weekend?”

5by5 | The Critical Path #53: To Be First and Loudest

Horace is still out crossing the globe on secret missions, so Moisés Chiullan, host of Screen Time, fills in for Dan. This week, Horace covers his Swipe Conference presentation on the history of personal computing and the shift to new platforms that foreshadows the dawn of a new era, the state of the US mobile market and where Lumia fits into the fold, and how Samsung moves forward in the wake of the litigation.

via 5by5 | The Critical Path #53: To Be First and Loudest.

How many new Kindles will Amazon sell?

Amazon will sell as many Kindles as they make, but the number they will make will not be the most they could make.

The logic of selling a product which has a profit model unrelated to the cost of goods sold is tricky. The incentives are different. The risk is not selling too few but selling too many.

For this reason I think the total number of new Fire units to be sold has already been determined by a production order. You cannot think about the business from a demand point of view. If the product would be free then the demand would be infinite. The decision about how many will be “sold” will depend on the goodwill of the producer.

What Amazon tries to do with the brand is ensure that the Fire is in the hands of its most ravenous consumers. That is why it’s not sold in all markets or through all channels. They are sold through Amazon.com in the US (limited sales in UK as well). This is because a large number of the product in the hands of users who only use it for browsing or in areas where Amazon does not have content deals or where its ads are poorly targeted (e.g. India, Indonesia or Madagascar) would be a disaster. It may not be all that helpful to Google to have Android in those markets but as you would expect it’s still a profitable business for Apple.

So one way to think of the Fire is as a promotional item (aka swag) for another business (Amazon.com). Using this frame of mind, assessing its “threat” to another business which charges for the product itself is like assessing whether free t-shirts from trade shows affect the sales of clothing or apparel in general. They do, but mostly the sale of cheap t-shirts. I doubt that people stop buying more functional clothing because they have hundreds of free t-shirts. And then there’s the problem of looking like an advertisement.

MacTalk Podcast Special | Horace Dediu

A recorded interview Peter Wells at Swipe Conference. We discuss the rise and fall of the PC, and some of the parallels that can be drawn from the rise of mobile platforms today. Which mobile platforms are destined to succeed, and who will fade away? And why can’t some analysts count the iPad as a PC replacement? Horace also discusses the amazing iPad app he used today in his presentation.

via MacTalk – MacTalk Podcast Special | Horace Dediu.

Positioning Lumia

The US has reached 50% smartphone penetration.

comScore data shows July penetration at 48.8% and a monthly growth in penetration of nearly 2 percentage points. Given the rate of growth, it’s nearly certain that we’ve crossed 50% in August.

The historic growth is shown below:

The platforms making up the smartphone market in the US have seen unequal shares of this new population of users. The following diagrams show how the install bases have changed in absolute and share terms.

 

To round out the analysis, here is the net user gains for the platforms showing the net addition or loss of users since early 2010. Continue reading “Positioning Lumia”

5

It looks like the next iPhone will be called the iPhone 5. What’s in a name? As it turns out, quite a lot.

Every hardware product that Apple has released has had a brand and a sub-brand. Macs for example use the Mac brand and a sub-brand as follows:

  • iMac
  • Mac Pro
  • Mac mini
  • MacBook

Thus each sub-brand imparts certain meaning to the buyer. i, Pro, mini, book are all evocative. MacBook even has its own sub-brands:

  • MacBook Pro
  • MacBook Air

These Mac sub-sub-brands of Pro and Air are specifically designed to also distinguish and convey meaning.

iPods as well use the iPod brand followed by a sub-brand.

  • iPod Classic
  • iPod touch
  • iPod mini
  • iPod shuffle
  • iPod nano

Note how the mini  sub-brand was retired from the iPod line to be used exclusively in the Mac product line. That may not be specifically necessary or desirable but it is an interesting coincidence. (The Pro sub-brand is shared between different Mac lines)

However, when we look at the iPhone and the iPad, the nomenclature has been distinctly different. Both products have been using generational naming conventions. This implies no sub-branding as the iPhone and iPad are the only identifiers of brand and hence the only meaning being imparted to the buyer. You either get an iPhone or and old iPhone.

That changed with the iPad however. The third generation iPad became just iPad. This was deliberate (why would they want to confuse buyers?) I think there is some logic to this.

Note the parallel to the convention of the original iPod. When the iPod launched it was just the iPod. Subsequent versions were identified by a generation, but not a specific sub-brand. After the third generation iPod (still called iPod), the mini version was launched, creating the sub-brand convention that remains in use to this day. The iPod therefore was born generational but switched to sub-branding in adolescence.

The possibility exists, therefore, that there will be a sub-brand for the iPad. Perhaps “mini” is being reserved for a new iPad, to distinguish it from the regular iPad (no sub-brand) that is likely to remain in production. The logic is to make room for sub-brands when the core brand begins to cover a wider array of form factors, themselves proxies for separate use cases or jobs to be done.

So what about the iPhone?

Continue reading “5”

An interview about Microsoft's Surface

This interview was conducted with Bruno Ferrari Editor of Exame magazine in Brazil.

First, do you have forecasts for tablet market share including Microsoft for next years? (Apple, Android, Amazon etc)?

I have some guesses but I don’t think it’s something that is defensible. Too many things can change. Fundamentally I believe Microsoft sees the tablet as a PC and intends to migrate a substantial portion of would-be PC customers to tablet forms. If they are successful then they preserve the existing PC user base and allow it to grow a bit.

In contrast Apple sees the iPad as a new type of device that is used for things not directly related to PC style computing. In that sense the iPad competes with PC non-consumption. It means people may own both a PC and an iPad and some will own only an iPad. The iPad will expand the market while taking share from the PC. Windows tablets will try to hold the Windows share steady.

 How do you analyze Microsoft’s strategy with Microsoft Surface? Don’t you think they’re admitting themselves that Apple was right since the beginning?

We don’t know the strategy yet. Without pricing and an idea of how the other OEMs will respond, I have more questions than answers. The fact that they are doing their own PC hardware does indicate that they see the industry architecture changing and that a large number of vendors offering hardware “choice” is not really the basis of competition in PCs. In other words, buyers are not willing to pay a premium for Windows because the hardware it’s available on is offered in a wide range of options.

Do you think MS growth at tablet market will surpass the lost at PC (desktop and notebook) market in the next years?

Continue reading “An interview about Microsoft's Surface”

5by5 | The Critical Path #52: The Art of Making Money

With Horace criss-crossing the globe on various secret missions, Moisés Chiullan, host of Screen Time, fills in for Dan this week. In this episode, Horace follows up on last week’s predictions now that the Apple v. Samsung verdict has been finalized … or has it? Horace and Moisés also dig into the algebra needed to decode how many tablet units which manufacturers have sold, and what that means for Amazon’s Kindle Fire in particular.

via 5by5 | The Critical Path #52: The Art of Making Money.

How many Kindle Fires were sold?

Last September I argued against the potential of the Kindle Fire acting as a low end disruption in the tablet market.

Now that the first version of the product has reached is end of life, it’s time to review the discussion.

The first problem is finding out how well the product did. Amazon just released a statement that the Fire accounted for 22% of tablet sales in the US in the nine months it was available. The challenge becomes knowing how many total tablets were sold in the US during this time frame.

Fortunately we know the vast bulk of that total based on the Samsung v. Apple trial. Both Apple and Samsung submitted as evidence sales of the iPad and the Tab product lines in the US. The iPad added up to 16.14 million units (Q4’11 through Q2’12) and the Tab was 540k units. That makes the iPad and the Tab add up to about 16.7 million units. Assuming an additional 1 million units for the other (non-Kindle) total yields an estimate of 22.7 million tablet devices sold in the nine months ending June.

Applying the 22% claim to that total gives a Kindle sales total of 4.987 million. That’s awfully close to a round number of 5 million.

Since Amazon admitted that they ended production prior to launching a replacement (and presumably did so quite early in order to drain inventory,) then we can safely assume that the original production order was 5 million units.

Five million Kindle Fire units becomes the first reliable estimate of Kindle sales (based on Apple, Samsung and Amazon supplied information rather than guesses from analysts.) Continue reading “How many Kindle Fires were sold?”

Asymco

Asymmetric Competition

Skip to content ↓