iOS unit sales crossed over 700 million units last month. That is a significant milestone but the total number of units in use is likely to be lower. My estimate based on device replacement assumptions is that about 500 million are still in use.
The estimated break-down of units sold and in use by device type is shown below:
Continue reading “When will there be one billion iOS devices in use?”
I joined Benedict Evans and Ben Bajarin on their Cubed podcast to discuss innovation and cultures that breed innovation. We also discuss some updates on our thinking of the curious case of the android tablet ghosts toward the end.
Show Notes
The Meaning of Really Cheap Android
Android as the Platform For Commodity Electronics
Harvard Business Review – How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity (subscription required)
via Cubed Episode 010: The Process of Innovation | Cubed Podcast.
Benedict Evans explains well the problem with measuring Android tablets. There are no reliable data collected because many of the devices are invisible through the regular, measurable channels:
The only measured statistic happens to be component shipments. Items such as screens, CPUs or perhaps memory might be visible to market analysts. It’s therefore tempting to add up tires manufactured to determine what’s getting sold in auto dealerships.
But it’s also hugely problematic.
The adoption of smartphones in the US is on track for reaching 90% of the available audience by August 2016. This is a mere eight years after smartphones reached 10% penetration. As far as technologies go, that’s pretty fast. To get an idea of how rapid, I plotted a few other technologies and the time they took to grow within the US market.
A few things to note: Continue reading “Seeing What’s Next”
The fascination with highly visible but largely unknown business models continues. How do infomercials work? What is the value of fashion? How can you make money when no creative idea can be protected? Why is Apple building a sapphire manufacturing facility? It’s all part of a pattern.
The Transportationist, David Levinson @trnsprttnst joins us to discuss the technical, human, environmental and economic factors driving change to the auto-ecosystem.David helps us smartly survey the landscape via:
Photo credit: Wikipedia, CVN-78
I’ve been writing about Apple’s capital intensive operations for some time. The difficulty has always been in explaining the scale involved. I’ve compared the spending to that of Samsung, Microsoft, Google, Intel and Amazon. But these numbers still can’t be easily grasped. You can’t point to any comparable objects when you try to explain the figure. I struggle to create a less abstract notion than that of a “sea of tooling and servers.”
Instead, I’ve used the analogy of US aircraft carriers. Historically, Nimitz class aircraft carriers have cost a less than $5 billion. The USS Ronald Reagan, christened in 2001, cost $4.5 billion. Therefore I was comfortable saying that Apple spends the equivalent of about one Nimitz class aircraft carrier every six months (and that the Navy takes about six years to put it together.)
Unfortunately, costs for aircraft carriers have gone up. The USS Gerald Ford will take about $13 billion to complete. That places Apple and Samsung capital spending in the following context: Continue reading “A yardstick for capex”
Apple has sold 700 million iOS devices. Google claims one billion Android device activations. Microsoft has about 1.5 billion Windows users and Facebook about 1.19 billion. LinkedIn has 259 million users and Twitter has 232 million. Amazon has 215 active account holders and PayPal 137 million.
Markets place a value on these users implicitly when company shares are priced. For example, Twitter whose users are worth about $110 or FaceBook’s $98 and LinkedIn at $93.
This consistency suggests a universally accepted value per social media user but what is the value of an ecosystem user? Apple, Google, Microsoft and even Amazon aspire to enable ecosystems which should be seen are more valuable than mere communities. Ecosystems enable a higher level of economic activity because they are unbounded by the medium itself. Any number of media can be created. Or so the theory goes.
If we could determine a value for an ecosystem user we could test it against the going value of a social media user. Fortunately we have enough data to do so.
The total number of iOS devices sold per quarter allows us to measure the install base of device users. With some assumptions regarding the retirement and attrition rate we can get the following history:
Since the total number of iTunes accounts is updated with some regularity I’ve added it to the graph. I’ve also shown on the same graph the total number of iCloud accounts. For calibration, I included survey data showing the number of iPhone users in two regions (US and EU5). Continue reading “What’s an Active User worth?”
The closing of one and the onset of another era. In this hundredth episode of The Critical Path we look back to some of the big questions we asked and ask them again with hindsight and foresight. They are:
Episode #62 – Rocket Science | 350 Third.
Horace Dediu joins us for a discussion about the history of the space industry and its more recent commercial direction. We touch on the history of governmental and private investments in space as well as possible asymmetric strategies for the future including a railgun and the ever elusive space elevator. Does the commercial exploitation of space fit within a timescale business is able to accept?
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