Ashlee Vance, writing for Bloomberg:
The Sony Xperia M4 Aqua sounds amazing. Its rounded edges look sleek. It’s waterproof. It has a 13-megapixel camera with Superior Auto, which, according to the company, means the phone “recognizes 52 different scenarios and automatically configures the optimal settings—so you don’t have to.” Finally, an end to the era in which humans, like common animals, had to do all their own scenario recognition.
As with so many smartphones, though, very few people will ever see the Xperia M4 Aqua, let alone own it. Even after spending billions of dollars and overhauling its leadership to refocus on the devices, Sony has fallen out of the top 10 in smartphone sales. (The company declined to comment.) It’s a common story for dozens of flagging manufacturers, toiling at what has become one of the most brutally competitive businesses on the planet. Unless you’re Apple or Samsung, “you can’t make money in phones,” says Roger Kay, head of consultant Endpoint Technologies Associates. So why keep trying?
And:
Together, Apple and Samsung account for more than one in three smartphones sold, data compiled by Bloomberg show. More important, Apple vacuums up more than 90 percent of the profits in the business, and Samsung takes most of what’s left. That leaves crumbs for the half-dozen other big smartphone manufacturers, plus a sea of upstarts.
Go back four years to 2011, and HTC was the world’s biggest phone maker, the writing was on the wall for Apple. Doomed again.
[H/T the paradoxical not Jony Ive]
When a customer can see up front that they’re paying $650 for a phone, as they can see now with the switch to financing plans in the U.S., they’re going to want to get not just their $650 worth in hardware, but their $650 worth out of its operating system, too.
As can be seen with all the cheap bottom-of-the-barrel smartphones out there, Android is not worth $650.
All the fancy features that Sony, HTC, LG, Lenovo/Motorola, Samsung, etc. can cram on their high-end phones are just lipstick on a pig as long as those phones are still running Android.
It’s the same problem high-end PC makers faced when trying to sell premium PCs running Windows (or even worse, running Linux), but at least there was a PC gamer market they could try to target. There’s simply no such thing as a viable niche market for high-end Android phones.
“You guys, we’re losing money on phones, we just can’t compete with the high end of the market! What should we do?” “Go cheaper, with slimmer margins, and more gimmicks! Like waterproof phones that aren’t actually waterproof!”
“Go back four years to 2011, and HTC was the world’s biggest phone maker, the writing was on the wall for Apple.”
In 2011, Nokia was by far the biggest phone maker. And for smartphones, Samsung, Apple, Nokia, and RIM were all bigger than HTC.
https://mobiforge.com/research-analysis/2011-handset-and-smartphone-sales-statistics-worldwide-big-picture