DaringFireball kicks the crap out of FastCompany Apple review

I John Gruber. Best bullshit detector on the internet.

http://daringfireball.net/2007/12/fastcompany

From Adam L. Penenberg’s December cover story for Fast Company, “All Eyes on Apple: Will the gray light of January cool the world’s hottest company?”:
As Apple moves into new markets, it has made powerful new enemies, some working in concert. Nokia, for example, is banding with telecom companies to offer its own touch-screen hardware in an effort to sway subscribers from the iPhone and Apple’s exclusive partner, AT&T.

MP3 players from the likes of iRiver, Microsoft, SanDisk, and Toshiba are getting slicker all the time, targeting the iPod at a fraction of the cost.

(a) AT&T is only Apple’s iPhone partner in the U.S.; and (b) Nokia has been “banding with telecom companies” forever, because, uh, Nokia’s core business is “banding with telecom companies to sell new phones”, right?

iRiver?; Microsoft’s Zune players costs exactly the same as corresponding iPods; SanDisk’s second-place success is not new and doesn’t seem to be hurting the iPod at all, but rather seems to be coming at the expense of all the various “other” player manufacturers; and, as for Toshiba, their top-selling MP3 player clocks in at #97 — ninety-fucking-seven — on Amazon’s current bestseller list. (Even Sony has better-selling players than Toshiba.)

Empirical evidence indicates that Apple’s iPod franchise is doing better than ever. iPod sales growth can’t continue unabated — eventually, at this rate, they’ll run out of people who don’t already have one. That seems to me the biggest threat to the iPod — or at least to the iPod’s effect on Apple’s stock value — on the horizon: that Apple will saturate the entire potential market for handheld media players and growth will slow, even if profits remain strong. That’s a problem Apple is willing to accept, I’d say.

Post Data

Related Posts

blog comments powered by Disqus