Benedict Evans reports on how Apple sold more computers than Windows PC sold globablly in Q4 2013.
This is a pretty good illustration of the scale of mobile: Apple limits itself only to the high end of the mobile market but still sells more units than the whole PC industry.
It is also significant to note the shift towards mobile computing.
Investors.com reported on the mobile market in Q4 of 2013.
Apple and Samsung continue to soak up all the industry’s profits, McCourt says. Apple claimed 87.4% of phone earnings before interest and taxes in the fourth quarter, he said. Samsung took in 32.2% of industry profits. Because their combined earnings were higher than the industry’s total earnings as a result of many vendors losing money in Q4, Apple and Samsung mathematically accounted for more than 100% of the industry’s earnings.
Based on the reported figures, Apple and Samsung took in about 120% of the profits. The competitors are making huge losses.
The Next Web reports on Windows 8 selling 100 million copies less than Windows 7 after 15 months from launch.
Windows 7 launched on October 22, 2009. In October 2010, Microsoft revealed that it had sold over 240 million Windows 7 licenses in the operating system’s first year, and in January 2011 that number grew to 300 million at the 15-month mark.
Windows 8 launched on October 26, 2012. In February 2014, Microsoft revealed that it had sold over 200 million Windows 8 licenses in the operating system’s 15 months. No matter how you slice it, that’s not good news for the company.
John Gruber nailed it with this comment:
Almost bad enough for the CEO to lose his job. Oh, wait.
He also astutely picked up on how both versions sold in similar quantities in the first six months
Horace Dediu writes on how big iTunes is.
On a yearly basis iTunes/Software/Services is nearly half of Google’s core business and growing slightly faster.
The iTunes “empire” of content and services would be ranked as number 130 in the Fortune 500 ranking of companies (slightly below Alcoa and above Eli Lilly).
The Guardian discusses the impact of the value trap on Windows PC makers.
The problem for Windows PC makers is that they are caught in the “value trap”. Even as prices are being forced down by commoditisation and slumping demand, they have no obvious way to capture any of the money that a consumer who buys one of their products subsequently spends with it.
A comparison reveals the stark difference in profitability between Mac and Windows machines.
And how profitable are Macs on their own, even without that revenue stream? Apple doesn’t break out the figure for Mac profitability. But Horace Dediu of the Asymco consultancy reckons there’s a good-enough rule of thumb: assume that Macs have an 18.9% profit margin, which fits well enough with its historical operating margins.
That metric gives a hardware per-PC profit which has dropped from 232 – an erosion, certainly, but a margin that Windows PC makers would kill for: it’s more than 10 times greater than their per-PC profit.
LG and Sony are leaving the PC market. Acer might be the next in line if it does not turn its fortunes around.
WSJ.com reports on [Sony’s forecast of 300 million profit.
In an unexpected move, Sony also said it would split off its TV business and operate it as a subsidiary, similar to what it did with its mobile-phone and PlayStation videogame businesses. Sony said the move is aimed at accelerating decision making, while analysts speculated that it could leave open the option of selling the business in the future. For the full year, Sony now expects to record losses from the TV business totaling ¥25 billion—its 10th straight year in the red.
I think Sony plans to sell off its Vaio PC business to get out of having to compete in a shrinking market. It is a wise move ditch PC and focus on mobile devices in the post-PC era instead.