Tag Archives | iSuppli

The Future of Phones: Forever Unknowable

Posted by Harry McCracken on January 23, 2012 at 3:08 am

In a release exuberantly titled “Lumia 900 Introduction to Trigger Smartphone Renaissance for Nokia and Microsoft,” IHS iSuppli analyst Wayne Lam has some predictions about where the phone market is going between now and 2015:

Largely based on Nokia’s strong support, Windows Phone is set to regain the No. 2 rank in the smartphone operating system in 2015. Finnish-based Nokia in 2009 lost its second-place worldwide ranking because of rising competition from Google Inc.’s Android and Apple Inc.’s iOS.

In 2015, however, Windows Phone will account for 16.7 percent of the smartphones shipped, up from less than 2 percent in 2011, according to the IHS iSuppli Mobile & Wireless Communications Service at information and analysis provider IHS (NYSE: IHS). This will allow Windows Phone to slightly surpass Apple’s iOS to retake the market’s second rank behind Android, as presented in the table below.

That’s awfully confident-sounding. Windows Phone is “set” to become #2 by 2015 and “will” have market share of 16.7 percent and “will” overtake iOS. And hey, it’s an analyst who knows his stuff doing the talking, so the rest of us should pay attention.

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iSuppli Says iPhone 4 Cost Apple $187.51

Posted by Ed Oswald on June 28, 2010 at 9:57 am

Apple is making a decent profit on the iPhone 4 after the fees AT&T likely pays for each sale of the iPhone 4 ar added on, the most recent teardown by research firm iSuppli indicates. Each device costs about $187.51 to produce, with the new “retina display” being the most expensive component. iSuppli believes it to be manufactured by LG at a cost about $28.50 per unit.

Researcher Kevin Keller told BusinessWeek that Apple has seemed to generally spend about $170 to $180 to produce iPhones, from the original model in 2007 to today’s iPhone 4.

The iPhone 3Gs initially cost about $179 to produce, although that price has since dropped to about $134. That means Apple likely now only breaks even or makes a very small profit as it sells for $99 from AT&T.

Inside, iSuppli found that the device uses a similar A4 chip that is also seen in the iPad, and confirmed the antenna is in the metal strip around the phone. As you’ve seen here on Technologizer, that’s been a potential problem for Apple, although iSuppli makes no reference of it in its report.

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Laptops Overtake Desktops–This Time For Real

Posted by Harry McCracken on December 24, 2008 at 8:57 am

kinglaptopsIn the news world, there are things that I think of as Groundhog Day stories–ones that announce a noteworthy event that you could have sworn earlier stories had already made a big deal about having happened. One of those would be the notion that laptops have finally outsold desktop PCs. Every time notebook sales outpace desktops in some specific respect–in U.S. retail stores, for instance–there’s a rash of laptops-overtake-desktops articles. Here’s one from 2003.

There’s another outbreak of such stories today. But this one was prompted by a new report from iSuppli that’s pretty darn definitive: It says that global unit sales of notebooks surpassed desktops for the first time in Q3 2008. Unless you want to wait for the day when there are more laptops on the planet than desktops, this is it–laptops have overtaken desktops. Period. Finally. End of need for future Groundhog Day stories on the matter.

So can I make a modest proposal? If the majority of personal computers being sold everywhere on earth are laptops, they’re not the variant of the PC they were when they first popped up in the 1980s–they are the PC. It’s desktop computers that require qualification, and the time will come when desktops become an endangered species, just like minicomputers were by the 1990s. Which means that it would be perfectly reasonable to redefine the unmodified term PC as meaning a computer that’s portable.

I’m not promising I’ll stick to such a policy here–if I’m the only person who does, I’ll just confuse people–but I kind of like the idea.

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