What is actually kind of telling is that this matters so much to Gruber that he wrote a blog post about it. It is extremely important to him that there not be any undue perception that Samsung is making more profit than Apple. Why?
Because, I think, a tremendous amount of his world view and many Apple oriented folk like him, is bound up in the idea that Apple's business model is infallibly better than that of the OEM model. It just can't be true that there is more profit from making "crap" things than making "good" things can it? That selling lower quality stuff can actually be better business than premium quality? (I am of course, taking liberties with the these words). This possibility is deeply threatening to many people who have bound themselves up in the Apple ecosystem. If making better things is, in fact, worse business, what does it mean for people who care deeply about quality? There's a whole mindset, even way of life here that is dependent on this beautiful self-consistent, self-reinforcing ecosystem. Closed, centralized, controlled, designed, simplified, quality AND higher profits all go together. The fact that Apple keeps making more profits than other phone makers has been the last metric that held together this belief system. If it goes, so too while the whole notion that Apple has done something new, different and better. Their rise will once again be seen as an abberration (as he himself refers to in the post).
Of course, the fact that I felt the need to post this rant itself is also telling about me :-)
"that Apple’s market domination has been an aberration"
"that the company in the midst of an inevitable decline"
Let me know when he gets to 2010... [I wrote an email to iOS/Android friend-partisans in April of 2010 predicting the effects of Apple's TOS changes. From my perspective, the TOS itself was not the issue; the orientation to developers was the issue. Pretty much all of the predictions in that email has been realized.]
I do agree with the point that it doesn't matter whether or not Samsung sells more phones or makes more profit than does Apple. But that doesn't mean that ecosystem shifts do not matter. They do and Android seems to be on the winning side of that shift.
This is also not to discount the value of advocating for the "right" side. Dating myself, I advocated for OS/2 in 1992 but my advocacy was drowned out by the dominance of Windows. That said, OS/2 had technical underpinnings to recommend it. At this point, iOS advocacy seems to be focused more on random factors (e.g. color scheme or parallax backgrounds) and less on significant
Another factor is the strange affliction that causes
many to believe whatever is attributed to an “analyst”
I assume by "many" he means "no one" since one is either unaware of analysts or, if aware, discounting of analysts.
I'm trying to read DF's article as something besides a partisan apology/explanation, but [as usual] I'm having a hard time. Hints?
And yet weirdly, Appleinsider, the source of the alleged debunking, regularly publishes very similar estimates.
Obviously they started doing so when Apple was far in the lead, they'll probably stop after the latest one, which shows that Samsung has now caught up and is only three percentage points behind after closing a gap of 40 percentage points in the last 3 quarters:
"Apple takes 53% of smartphone profits, Samsung at 50%, remainder lose money"
Amusingly, they refer to this as "the latest data to refute a recent claim that Samsung Electronics had dethroned Apple, Inc., in mobile profits." because Samsing being 3, 2 or 1 percentage points behind is so completely different from them being 1, 2 or 3 ahead (and remembering we're talking about estimates here) that it warrants not one but two rants from Appleinsider and John Gruber questioning people's morals and professionalism.
I think he's creating his own narrative: that news firms are out to "get" Apple. To punish Apple's wicked ways, or something, I dunno.
The "fact" here is that news organisations don't care what the narrative is. Journalism has two basic features:
1. Write something people will read.
2. By deadline.
If something is unusual, it gets published. If it is normal, it doesn't. If there's a deadline looming, interesting or unusual stories will not be scrutinised with any great care.
Remember: it's called "News", not "Same As Yesterdays".
it was amazing, even here on HN, how this analyst report spread like wildfire - while the counter analysis was ignored, both in comments as well as a separate posting.
the global reach of these things is amazing, all tech "reporters" worldwide seem to copypaste in realtime, this piece popped up in germany, etc. right after it hit the US. all the webfrontends for traditional newspapers have separate, lower payed staff that often is nerd-heavy, so more web/tech news make it on their frontpages. and none of them, ever, seem to check facts.
it is an amazing time to manipulate the stock market.
Because, I think, a tremendous amount of his world view and many Apple oriented folk like him, is bound up in the idea that Apple's business model is infallibly better than that of the OEM model. It just can't be true that there is more profit from making "crap" things than making "good" things can it? That selling lower quality stuff can actually be better business than premium quality? (I am of course, taking liberties with the these words). This possibility is deeply threatening to many people who have bound themselves up in the Apple ecosystem. If making better things is, in fact, worse business, what does it mean for people who care deeply about quality? There's a whole mindset, even way of life here that is dependent on this beautiful self-consistent, self-reinforcing ecosystem. Closed, centralized, controlled, designed, simplified, quality AND higher profits all go together. The fact that Apple keeps making more profits than other phone makers has been the last metric that held together this belief system. If it goes, so too while the whole notion that Apple has done something new, different and better. Their rise will once again be seen as an abberration (as he himself refers to in the post).
Of course, the fact that I felt the need to post this rant itself is also telling about me :-)