Author: The Macalope

Losing the valuable child-of-an-Android-OEM exec demographic

iPhones uncool according to the friends of the daughter of an HTC exec. So, you know, rock-solid.

With all the news about Windows 8 this week, you may have missed the news about iPhones. Turns out they just aren’t cool anymore.

(According to HTC US president Martin Fichter. Void where prohibited by common sense.)

“I brought my daughter back to college — she’s down in Portland at Reed — and I talked to a few of the kids on her floor. And none of them has an iPhone because they told me: ‘My dad has an iPhone.’ There’s an interesting thing that’s going on in the market. The iPhone becomes a little less cool than it was. They were carrying HTCs. They were carrying Samsungs. They were even carrying some Chinese manufacture’s devices. If you look at a college campus, Mac Book Airs are cool. iPhones are not that cool anymore. We here are using iPhones, but our kids don’t find them that cool anymore.”

There certainly couldn’t be any selection bias in that survey.

“Stacy, say something nice to my dad. He’s got Steve Jobs envy bad. It’s a whole big thing.”

Well, assuming these kids were being truthful instead of just nice, someone should tell them to get “hep” to the fact that customer satisfaction is hella cool, yo! Apparently the youngsters on floor four of Reed’s Che Guevara Hall were not part of this survey. Nor were they part of any of the numerous surveys showing iPhone loyalty beating Android.

It’s true that Android users tend to skew younger but there’s a more likely reason than “The iPhone’s for dads! LOL! TTFN! TMI! BRB! FML!” And that is that they’re just cheaper.

You can’t fault Fichter, really. What’s he supposed to say? “Kids buy our phones because they’re cheap but the minute they get enough money they’re going to buy an iPhone.” That doesn’t look good in an annual report.

In a follow-up interview, Fichter sounded a little more realistic.

“I’ve heard the term iPhone killer a lot of times, outside of my company and inside my company. Whenever I hear it in meeting rooms inside HTC, I caution people and say: ‘Hey, look, there is a market there for the iPhone.’ I don’t think we want to kill the iPhone because it is geared to a certain amount of people who like things in a certain way, and we do something different.”

Right. Their competition is less Apple and more Samsung, LG, Motorola and Slappy Joe’s Android Handset Shack off I-75 in Sarasota.

The Macalope really needs to get down to that stretch of I-75. There’s a lot going on there.

Orders of magnitude

Who makes more, Apple or Google?

Here’s a little something to think about.

John Gruber posted something today noting that iTunes brought Apple $1.4 billion in revenue last quarter, noting how “it’s insignificant in the grand scheme of Apple’s income”. Indeed, Apple brought in $13.3 billion in revenue on the iPhone alone last quarter.

Which brings us to Google. Estimates are that Google could make up to $2 billion in revenue on Android… for all of next year.

Google’s development costs are probably lower because they only have to develop the operating system and not the hardware and their marketing costs are probably lower but, still, they’re just not pulling in anything near what Apple is.

Your takeaway from this should be, of course, that Google is winning and Apple is losing.