Apple Doesn’t Need a Cheap iPhone ⇥ asymco.com

Horace Dediu of Asymco, in an interview with Anouch Seydtaghia of Le Temps:

Apple had leadership in the phone market for two quarters. […]

It’s a myth to think that Apple was dominant for any extended period of time. The top spot is very difficult to obtain unless a company has a large portfolio of products which are sold in all markets. Apple has less than half the operator distribution of Samsung and keeps only one new product in the market each year.

John Gruber’s “Ceding the Crown” has a similar take:

But for some, the fact that Apple and the iPhone now face at least one serious (and successful) competitor somehow means that the iPhone is already losing. This is insane.

By market share alone, one can argue that Samsung is winning, but as I’ve stated above (and repeatedly recently), the iPhone has never been close to a market share leader.

Which brings me to “Apple Needs a Cheap iPhone”, which I linked to yesterday. John Paczkowski, AllThingsD:

Why build it? Because at this point it’s stupid not to. The emerging market opportunity in China, India and elsewhere is simply too great. And while peddling legacy iPhones to price-sensitive customers has allowed Apple to tap into this market, it would likely be a lot more successful with a device designed specifically for it. What’s more appealing, paying bargain-basement prices for a two-year old iPhone? Or purchasing an inexpensive version of the latest model? Think of the low-end iPhone like the iPad mini, and the logic of that argument becomes quite clear. The iPad mini has become very popular, very quickly.

This logic is based on the notion that Apple must sell a cheaper iPhone or it cannot increase its earnings-per-share. But that’s assuming that the only products Apple will ever introduce are variations of what they currently sell.