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Apple Posts 13 billion in holiday season … but something doesn’t add up
You believe everything you hear when it's packaged like this.
You’ve heard, by now, the news on Apple bringing in 46 billion in revenue, doubling their profit from the year before. Much of the earnings have come from 37 million iPhones sold (128% increase), roughly 15.5 million iPads (111% increase), 5.2 million Macs (26% increase), and some iPods. But take a minute and let’s look under the hood …
To preface the following … this article is to raise some concern and is by no measure an anti-apple article or stating even an opinion on the situation.
Many articles have professed the profits and thrown around words like market share and revenue and Q1 etc. Many of these articles seem to have generated facts from a Marketing company that is hired by Apple by the name of Kantar. Kantar has worked with Apple in the past to help with press releases and possibly Market Analysis and research.
Why is this important?
Take Reuter’s for instance. Reuter’s is a heavily read source of what should be legitimate information about companies that investors are interested in investing in. Here is an article on reuters.com that talks about the Apple 13 billion news which appears to have been fed to them, not by Apple, but Kantar. Click here to see the article. This article states that Apple has doubled it’s U.S. market share. With the numbers that are being thrown around in sales by article’s
TLDR ... this girl with an iPhone is hot
like this from GoldPriceNetwork it seems plausible and even leads you to believe not only is Apple back on top but other companies are losing their edge.
This news, of course, comes after what appeared to be a tough season with the Amazon Kindle Fire breaking iPad weekly sales records and the iPhone slipping in the mainstream reviews from being the top smartphone to buy. Reuters, earlier in 2011, had even released a market share report explaining Apple bowing to Samsung in market share. Now in spite of the news from Kantar stating iPad is up 111%, here is an article just released explaining a report by Strategy Analytics showing iPad down 11% in 2011 with Android taking the market share. Is this he-said-she-said? Is this one side or both sides spinning information to make them respectively look better?
Here is where you may find your answer. All the news articles can state their fluff but you can’t argue with the stats that web developers have come to use for determining industry standard and how to build for the web. My company uses a mixture of statistics from w3schools.com and statcounter.com to determine what OS people are mostly running, browser stats and trends, flavor of browser, mobile OS, screen resolutions and more. Now these stats are not thought of by us to be absolutely accurate, but a solid general marker for what is going on.
The thing that make’s you go hmmm.
- W3 browser stats show no increase: Oct 2011 – Dec 2011 a flat 4.2% of the Safari browser being used. Safari started the year with 4.0% of the Browser share
- W3 OS stats show a decline: Oct 2011 – 8.9%, Nov 2011 – 8.6%, Dec 2011 8.5% of the OS share starting the year at 7.8%
Someone sold her a knockoff iPhone but she's still happy
- MobileOS iPhone stats slight increase: Oct 2011 – .19%, Nov 2011 – .19%, Dec 2011 – .20% starting the year with .18% – this percentage is based on smart devices now being considered PCs – note Android OS was registered .28%, .30%, .35 respectively.
- Statcounter OSx worldwide stats show MacOS decline: Oct 2011 – 7.18%, Nov 2011 – 7.05%, Dec 2011 – 7.01%
- Statcounter OSx North America stats show MacOS decline: Oct 2011 – 14.92%, Nov 2011 – 13.64%, Dec 2011 – 14.12%
- Statcounter iOS North America stats show MacOS .42% increase: Oct 2011 – 1.96%, Nov 2011 – 2.02%, Dec 2011 – 2.38%
Strictly Mobile OS stats
- Statcounter iOS worldwide stats show iOS decline: Oct 2011 – 23.48%, Nov 2011 – 24.21%, Dec 2011 – 22.71% – note Android 22.71%
- Statcounter iOS North Am stats show iOS 2.48% increase: Oct 2011 – 40.04%, Nov 2011 – 42.79%, Dec 2011 – 42.52% – note Android holds 40.92%
One big thing to note from StatCounter is that the true MobileOS champ is neither iOS or Android but Symbian holding 33.46% of the worldwide MobileOS market which is 10% more than iOS or Android have.
Now dem are some Apples!
Explaining the question
In a few cases you can see Apple has grown slightly, but that is the problem. Even if these stats are not absolutely accurate, they are also not completely way off on their stats. Neither W3 nor Statcounter have registered a spike or notable growth for Macs nor iOS or even the browsers that might be used respectively. Looking at the stats, it is very hard to explain the news in relation to the real statistics out on the web. Either all the new Apple purchasers are not using their devices and laptops to surf the web, Statcounter and W3 have broken reports, or someone is not reporting the real facts and numbers. Either way, this is for the powers that be to wonder about before they go writing articles parroting hired marketing agencies.
