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Old 07-26-2011, 10:10 AM   #10
Perfectlap
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Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: New Jersey
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oh they're worried alright. That's their nature. They don't want to become the next Blackberry: A company that got too comfortable with their stranglehold position. They know they were very very lucky to have had a very poorly organized competition at the critical time, an opposition that was fragmented into a dozen uncooperative companies wasting billions in resources coming up with their own bespoke systems. They mastered nothing either on the hardware or software side.
But those companies are getting their acts together now largely thanks to Google and their far more flexible sandbox rules, as we can already we see with Android phones and this latest Samsung tablet. Apple were able to capture all the early adopters for high end phones and tablets. Even though they equal tens of millions they are still the tip of the iceberg of the total market for phones and tablets. At some point economies of scale will kick in and anything that isn't proprietary to Apple, things that other's can't use in their devices, will be a tough sell at these current Apple profit margins. Apple sells a $650 Ipad that costs $250 to make. A $50 Iphone that costs $200 to make. What happens when the Apple product no longer does anything that an other product can't do for the half the price? Even if you sell to an upper middle class consumer who is willing to pay the premium at some point you'll need to maintain that huge tech advantage over the competition to justify those margins. That's the advantage that shrinking by the day. Then what? What new gadget will they invent? As you point out the current apple revolution was built on a single product, the ipod. I think they've pretty much exhausted all the iterations of that invention. Which isn't to say that there isn't plenty of gas left in that tank. This Ipod/tablet/Iphone thing could go on for years but making things that are light/thin/intuitive are no longer solely the territory of Apple.
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