The Critical Path #81: Continuous Flow

We cover misleading headlines with respect to the iPhone at Verizon while questioning the ebb and flow of media tone on Apple news. We also dive deeper into Asymcar and how to think about car manufacturing. Finally, how to approach industry analysis regardless of your industry.

via 5by5 | The Critical Path #81: Continuous Flow.

The job the iPhone is hired to do, part II

I repeat what I’ve mentioned before: The iPhone is primarily hired as a premium network service salesman. It receives a “commission” for selling a premium service in the form of a premium price. Because it’s so good at it, the premium is quite high.

The job the iPhone is hired to do 

The original post on the hiring of the iPhone by operators was anchored in data about the revenue per unit (or price) that the product was able to obtain. The remarkable resilience in the exceptionally high average price showed that the iPhone was still getting a premium for moving users to higher levels of spending on network services.

The evidence was circumstantial however: By knowing the price and knowing it was far higher than competing products and knowing that much of it was paid by the operator and not the consumer (at least not up-front) implied that it was the iPhone, and only the iPhone, that was hired as a network service sales tool.

Now we have more evidence thanks to Ben Thompson (@monkbent). I illustrate the data here as an x-y scatterplot.

Screen Shot 2013-04-23 at 4-23-11.21.37 AM

Continue reading “The job the iPhone is hired to do, part II”