Linked List: August 5, 2014

Tuesday, 5 August 2014

Jean-Louis Gassée:

In the first place, Apple’s drive to own “all layers of the stack” continues unabated years after Steve’s passing. As a recent example, Apple created its own Swift programming language that complements its Xcode IDE and Clang/LLVM compiler infrastructure. (For kremlinology’s sake I’ll point out that there is an official Apple Swift blog, a first in Apple 2.0 history if you exclude the Hot News section of the apple.com site. Imagine what would happen if there was an App Store blog… But I digress.)

Secondly, the Mac line is suspended, literally, by the late delivery of Intel’s Broadwell x86 processors. (The delay stems from an ambitious move to a bleeding edge fabrication technology that shrinks the basic building block of a chip to 14 nanometers, down from 22 nanometers in today’s Haswell chips.) Of course, Apple and its An semiconductor vendor could encounter similar problems – but the company would have more visibility, more control of its own destiny.

I’d say Gassée’s two points are different sides of the same coin. The delay in truly-new Mac hardware while waiting for Broadwell chips is exactly the sort of reason why Apple wants to own the whole stack. Anything they depend upon, they want under their control — and on the Mac, they depend upon Intel for CPUs. Maybe Apple will never pull it off and thus won’t ever make such a switch, but I’d be shocked if there isn’t a team inside Apple working on it already.

India, Too ★

Reuters, “Micromax Pips Samsung as India’s Leading Mobile Phone Brand”:

Indian budget smartphone maker Micromax has ousted Samsung Electronics Co Ltd as the leading brand in all types of mobile phones in the April-June quarter, grabbing a 16.6 percent market share, a recent research report showed.

Samsung had 14.4 percent market share, down from 16.3 percent in the first quarter, said the report by Counterpoint Research. In the smartphone segment, however, Samsung still came out tops.

It just occurred to me that I don’t see nearly as many analysts clamoring for Apple to release a “low-priced iPhone” this year as last. Market share is a fool’s game in price-sensitive countries like India and China.

(Via The Loop.)

‘Bad Call’ ★

Fritz Huber, writing for The Paris Review, on the sorry state of US televised sports commentary:

After a prolonged TV spectacle like college football’s Bowl Week (whose contests last year included the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl and the Taxslayer.com Bowl, the latter being only a slight improvement on the all-time most absurd Galleryfurniture.com Bowl), watching English Premiership matches or Six Nations rugby on BBC feels like a cultural upgrade. There’s less advertising. There’s less analysis of bullshit statistics (“Headed into this matchup, the Kentucky Wildcats are 11-3 in games played within four days of their coach’s annual colonoscopy”). And, on British television, the commentators’ linguistic repertoires don’t feel as inhibited; there’s more room for an occasional flourish. Why can’t we have a color analyst like Ray Hudson, who, in his exuberance, will announce that we’ve just witnessed “a Bernini sculpture of a goal,” or claim that watching Lionel Messi “softens the hard corners of our lives”?

Xiaomi Overtakes Samsung in Chinese Smartphone Market Share ★

Eva Dou, reporting for the WSJ:

Xiaomi led China’s second-quarter smartphone shipment rankings with 14% market share, following by Samsung, Lenovo and Yulong each with 12%. It’s quite a jump from the first quarter, when Xiaomi’s 10.7% market share trailed Samsung’s 18.3% and Lenovo’s 11%. And an even bigger leap from a year ago, when Xiaomi only held 5%. […]

Xiaomi’s devices typically sell for more than $100, while Samsung’s high-end Galaxy smartphones typically cost more than $500.

Market share as a first priority generally doesn’t end well. When you compete on quality, “almost the best” will often still do pretty well. When you compete on price, “almost the cheapest” always loses.