Re: "For an Android"
Wow. Looking at the downvotes, there's a lot of butthurt fruity-company lovers out there :)
To take the somewhat confused responses from the (sadly anonymous) person who did respond:
> Your logic makes no sense - the Samsung is not that much cheaper.
Eh? The entire point is that Samsung makes a much wider range of phones, all of which are targeted at different price points and market segments - many of which Apple does not cater for.
E.g. looking at Carphone Warehouse, the cheapest Samsung phone is the A02s at £139.99, closely followed by the A20e at £149.99.
Conversely, the cheapest Apple phone is the iPhone 7 at £299.
Personally, I'd say that a 50% difference in price definitely counts as "much cheaper"!
And honestly, when buying something which is 50% cheaper, do you really expect to get the same level of after-support service? The money for that support has to come from somewhere...
> So a samsung galaxy s8 buyer subsidised their other product launches?
No - and nor did I say anything which suggested that.
What I did say is that Samsung's profit margins per handset are lower than Apple's per-handset profit margins.
To take the iPhone 7: at launch in 2016, that cost $769 and had an estimated BOM of about $220.
https://evertiq.com/news/40311
Conversely, the Samsung S7 (released the same year) cost $669 at launch and had a BOM of around $255
https://www.ubergizmo.com/2016/03/samsung-galaxy-s7-bom-allegedly-costs-255/
Which means that (to vastly oversimplify and ignore things like R&D costs, labour costs, etc), Apple was getting $550 per handset, versus the $415 which Samsung was receiving.
And these were both flagship models at the time; the budget phones Samsung releases are likely to have much thinner profit margins - e.g. with the A20s at $250, I'd be surprised if Samsung was getting more than $100 back in profit.
> I dont care to subsidise a multibillion dollar corporation's product strategy nor bottom line.
As per above, that's definitely not what I said. And beyond that, it's a really stupid thing to say, since you "subsidise" a company's product strategy and bottom line every time you buy a product. After all, where else would the money for R&D (and/or lining exec paypackets) come from?
> Samsung store happens to be dumb. That's their failure, it should not be their customer's.
I'll agree that Samsung's store is crap. But that's not the point here.
The point is that Apple offers a fully integrated eco-system - you're not buying a phone, but you're instead buying a turnkey appliance which hooks seamlessly into a wealth of other Apple technologies. E.g. the iPad, the Macbook, the Apple Watch, the App Store, Siri, etc, etc.
And Apple makes money out of every bit of this eco-system which you make use of.
Conversely, Samsung is selling phones which hook into a shared eco-system primarily owned/controlled by Google. So they don't have the same ability to earn money. And with the need to pass all the certification/licencing hoops that Google throws up, they have much higher overheads.
So yeah. Higher costs and lower profit margins = less money and resources for long term support.
Is that all clear enough, or would you like me to get the crayons out?
;)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
