And bizarrely, I find myself wondering why they need more than the home button - why isn't things like app settings simply accessible in the app?
The concept of 'back one screen' is weird. If I'm in an app, it should offer me an option for 'back one screen' if that's what I want, otherwise the home button is fine. Double tap it to fast switch between apps? I'm ok with that.

http://www.cultofandroid.com/71615/iphone-regains-lead-android-first-time-three-years/ - was interesting reading.

Small print, in the USA.

Still an achievement, but I doubt they will regain worldwide no. 1 status, just because there are too many markets where people buy phones, as opposed to least-purchase them from the operator and they will struggle to give out $100, let alone nearly $1000 for a smartphone.

Most of my family is on 4" smartphones with Android or WP8, because they could pick them up for around 100€. Even the "budget" 5C, which might have been cheap by Apple standards, doesn't fall into the price range for the average consumer in the "next billion".

Yet they still manage to make more money each year, selling phones that are apparently way too expensive and that people don't want, than any other company on earth ever has selling anything and make the best selling phone in China, where there are manufacturers using vast economies of scale to sell very serviceable smartphones for frankly buttons and where you'd think iPhones would be beyond the means of the vast majority of the population.

Basically, I've been hearing the 'cheap Android phones will be Apple's doom!' argument for years yet throughout that period Apple has continued to sell more and more phones and make more and more profit. Reality simply hasn't backed up the argument.

Who is talking about doom for Apple? People will always want luxury goods.

Swatch didn't kill Breitling, Tag Heuer and other luxury watch makers. The Beetle, Fiesta, Picanto etc. didn't kill Mercedes, Lexus and other luxury car makers. Cheap Android and Windows Phone devices won't kill the iPhone.

The point I was making is, for those where a 100€ smartphone is a big investment, they are not even going to look at an iPhone. The "next Billion" probably earn less than $100 a month, probably much less. Saving up for a smartphone is going to be a luxury. Owning any smartphone will be a status symbol. If you can save a few cents or, if you are lucky, a couple of dollars a month, you won't want to buy any smartphone, if you don't have to. And if you do buy one, then it is going to have to be rugged and it will have to last a good many years. This is not a market that Apple can realistically sell to, with their current prices. If you are looking at having to wait 2 years to be able to afford any smartphone, you aren't going to save another 10 years, just to get an iPhone.

In fact, you will probably give that money out for other things first, like extra food, medicine, etc.

That doesn't mean that they won't sell any more phones, in fact in the "first" world, it probably won't make any difference.

And yet in pretty much all of the places where you CAN get a smartphone for the local equivalent of 100€, Apple iPhones sell in huge numbers.


If you're earning less than $100 a month, unless you're somewhere the cost of living is effectively zero, 'saving for anything' is a luxury and a smartphone is probably way down the list of the things you'll be saving for.

I'm sorry, but I believe this argument is a fallacy. The developed world is awash with people who can afford smartphones pretty much if they want one, be they apple ones or samsung ones or Nokia ones. The undeveloped world is full of people who will never be able to afford pretty much any form of smartphone and wouldn't know what to do with one if they could - remember the majority of the world is still functionally illiterate and something like 1/3 of the world's population doesn't even have mains electricity, let alone a mobile phone signal or any idea what the internet is.

In between there's a lump of people for whom you could consider a smartphone an aspirational item - they know what they are, they can't afford one as an 'impulse purchase' but they might be able to save up for one over say a couple of years. But there are simply not billions of people in that group. 'A billion' is one seventh of the population of the entire planet.

Oh, and this is what an $100 smartphone looks like.

if it took you two years to save up $100, why would you spend it on that...

There are plenty of Android phones (Xiaomi, Huawei etc.) as well as the entry level Lumias. They aren't bad phones, to be honest. I bought my wife a $100 Lumia last year to replace her dead iPhone 3GS, it is a very nice phone and she is more than happy with it - in fact she specifically said she didn't want another iPhone, but that my Android work phone was too complicated.

According to the "experts", the next billion are those in rural Africa and India. Here the iPhone AFAIK isn't selling that well, compared to $100 smartphones from Karbonnn (the 26UKP smartphone), Xaiomi and Huawei.

In India in 2015, they are reckoning with over 80 million new smartphones being sold, with an average price of around $150.

I (and I imagine you, given your quotation marks) am always somewhat reluctant to take what experts/analysts claim will happen in the future as gospel. I remain entirely unsure there are millions of African peasant farmers who will be convinced they need a smartphone.


here my opinion : if they can actually make a decent, usable smartphone for an amount of money that puts them in the affordable range of the lowest third of the world's population and then find a way to convince those people to buy them rather than spend the money on something else, then they deserve to make the profit. I remain sceptical to be honest.



Guess we'll find out at the end of the year. But 80 million is still way, way short of a billion.

I found an interesting article about why ApplePay might not be so popular in Europe, and especially Germany, this morning.

According to Handelsblatt, the iPhone has only 12% market share in Germany - the last I heard it was level pegging with Windows Phone at 14%, but that was last summer.

http://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen ... 93796.html (German)

Summary: banks won't be interested, because Apple take 0,15% of the transaction and the maximum the banks / processing agencies can legally take is 0.2% for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards, which means Apple will take between 50% and 75% of their income.

Credit card penetration is also very low - less than 33% of Germans have a credit card - and apart from hotels, restaurants and fuel stations, they aren't really accepted anywhere. Certainly not in normal shops (designer label probably though, although I've never shopped at a Gucci shop etc.), no supermarkets or electronics retailers accept credit cards, for example.

The recommendation is for banks to come up with their own mobile payments solution, as this is the way forward.

Don't give us that we Formites all know you are a dedicated follower of fashion

C&A is about my level. :p

I think the.. natural inclination against credit cards in Germany may well be an inhibitor to the use of ApplePay and similar systems there. Even though in fact it's not actually 'credit' as such necessarily - if you add a debit card to it you can user that instead. Although I'm not entirely sure if the system allows you to 'go overdrawn' by a small amount using bonk-to-pay mechanisms.

The transactional costs & etc are a more interesting issue - if enough people decide they want to use it, then the banks are suddenly in The Prisoner's Dilemma - if they all stand firm and say no, then eventually probably demand will fall away and they'll all be fine. But the first one to break ranks and go in with Apple Pay will, one assumes, see an influx as those who want to use Apple Pay transfer their banking services. So if they all stay, they all win, but if someone jumps they win and everyone else loses.

Of course it's hard to judge the demand for something when there's no current supplier for it, or in fact even the prospect of there being a supplier for it.

Would Apple pay be a success in Germany? Would it be an definite failure in Germany? I'm inclined to go with a variant of Feynman's maxim about quantum mechanics - 'Anyone who says they know the answer to those questions doesn't actually understand those questions'.

I don't know if it will be a success, long term, but with a current market of only around 20% of 12% of smartphone users in Germany, that is a very limited market. I can't see shops and banks queueing up to use it, at least not now. Many shops currently have a 25€ minimum for using a debit card, for example. This is slowly going away, but Germans like cold, hard cash as lot more than they do plastic.

We've had contactless payment systems (debit cards) for a few years, but only a very small percentage of stores have bothered to upgrade to accept them, for example.

I think it will certainly be a struggle for Apple to break into the market. As I said earlier, it will be interesting to see if they succeed.

Given that. I'd probably expect Germany to be way down their list of places to attempt to launch, if it's on it at all. I'd definitely expect to see it in the Uk before they even try Germany.