Apple’s Biggest Problem? The iPhone Isn’t Better Than Android (Premium)

I’m confused that anyone was surprised by Apple’s admission this past week that its latest iPhones aren’t selling as well as expected. After all, we had seen months of evidence---what I think of as “intelligence chatter”---showing that these iPhones were not selling well. But I’m more alarmed by a narrative I’ve seen repeated again and again in mainstream publications that part of the problem is that Android handsets are “almost as good” as the iPhone and cost much less.

This is nonsense, since Android handsets are superior to the iPhone in very important ways. And they can cost just as much as the iPhone.

The problem for Apple is that it doesn’t offer a superior product. And the reason we know this is true is that iPhone’s marketshare has fallen steadily over the past few years. Android, meanwhile, dominates the smartphone market, and it has for years. Over 80 percent of smartphones sold each year run Android, not iOS.

And this problem is entirely of Apple’s making.

I’m almost certainly going to write separately about Tim Cook’s deceptive and overly-wordy open letter in which he tries to foist blame for the company’s troubles off on events beyond his control. Here, I’m going to focus on something that I feel is even important: That Apple hasn’t done enough to differentiate its own offerings beyond making them too expensive to buy and locking in its best customers with related services that only work on Apple’s devices. That is Tim Cook’s real legacy. He’s Apple’s Steve Balmer, a guy who was able to grow a company well beyond that of his co-founder predecessor. And yet doesn’t contain even an iota of that special something made that predecessor so great. He’s a manager, not a creator.

This might have worked out fine. But Android doesn’t suck either. And now Apple has a problem.

Android isn’t perfect, for sure. And some Android hardware makers are absolutely running right into the same sales wall as Apple thanks to nearly ubiquitous market saturation. Everyone who wants a smartphone pretty much has one. And in that condition, sales go mostly to a previously-created, mostly-stable installed base. Customers may move between brands a bit. But no one is leaving. And very few new users are being added.

If this situation sounds familiar, that’s because it mirrored what happened in the PC market, albeit more slowly and over a much longer period of time. What’s interesting is that Apple is making the same mistakes now with iPhone that it did with the Mac. And just as Windows long ago surpassed the Mac, functionally, technically, and in usage, Android has also surpassed the iPhone.

(Contrast Apple’s insular kill-the-partners approach to Microsoft’s long-time partnering philosophy and its more recent openness, literally, to open source and to former competitors.)

The list of technologies that appeared on Android before iPhone is long and hardly worth recounting, and...

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