Daring Fireball: Ceding the Crown
So Phil Schiller gave a second eve-of-Galaxy-S4-launch interview, this one to Reuters reporter Poornima Gupta. The headline (“Apple’s Schiller Blasts Android, Samsung on Galaxy’s Eve”) is spot-on, but here’s the second paragraph:
The marketing chief’s rare attack on a rival, on the eve of the Galaxy S4’s global premier in New York, underscores the extent of the pressure piled upon a company that once stood the undisputed leader of the smartphone arena, but ceded its crown to Samsung in 2012.
Before I got to that final clause, I thought Gupta was on the cusp of making a salient point with regard to what’s going on with Apple and the news media today. Like most first-generation Apple products, the original iPhone was greeted by much skepticism. Needs a keyboard. Needs a removable battery. Costs too much. Only on AT&T. Then, after a few years, it became obvious that the iPhone was in fact the way all modern smartphones should work — a touchscreen with very few hardware buttons and an app-based system, more computer-with-phone-features than phone-with-computer-features. And Apple had no serious competition. None. This is the period, from 2009-2011 or so, where Apple’s stock rose coincident with its profits, at a steady consistent pace. But as time goes on, I’m ever more convinced that many observers — including investors and reporters (especially those in the business press) — developed three bad assumptions: