People have been saying that Apple products are a “status symbol” since the iPod. How is a product owned by 45% of smart phone owners - at least in the US - a status symbol?

By product differentiation. People who do not want or cannot spend a lot of money buy an older generation (currently iPhone 7 and iPhone 8), people who can spend more buy the latest iteration. With the watch there is also a lot of differentiation, from basic bands, sports bands, to expensive metal or leather bands.

Though, I do not agree that people are only buying Apple for status. A lot of non-tech friends just find iPhones simpler to use, does not have preinstalled crap, and gets updated longer.

I bought a 6s in 2015. I kept it until earlier this year, replaces the battery for $29, bought an Apple battery case and gave it to my son. It runs the latest OS and is still faster than most midrange Android phones coming out this year.

iPhone 6s is faster than any android phone in single core tests. Mozilla Kraken score for 6s is 1315ms.

>at least in the US

Key. Outside of the US and a few high income countries it was always a status symbol everywhere.

Do people outside the high income countries really drive discourse on HN and other English-speaking technology sites?

Well, this specific comment thread was started by me and I'm not from an English-speaking, high income country, so there's that ^.^

Because of the meme that iPhones and iPods are overpriced, even though any directly comparable alternative is priced exactly the same.

If you call something you don't like a "status symbol", immediately you become smarter for not using it because you're making the "better" choice.

Children

I think they could carve out a niche as the phone manufacturer that respects people's privacy, but I'd be a lot happier to join their cheerleading squad over that if they weren't also constantly ratcheting up their prices. It doesn't sit well with Tim Cook's statements to the effect of privacy being a right and not a luxury.

"phone manufacturer that respects people's privacy"

Small market (outside of HN) :)

right now apple is

- privacy focused - arm processor design leader - swift native apps

thats about all that differentiates it. the question is how long that will matter, and if or when the third becomes more of a hinderance. If Microsoft and Google continue to grow towards each other (teams being built on chrome, Microsoft treating android as its mobile operating system.)

I thought Apple was going for that market already. Microsoft going there would be hilarious.

Microsoft? They are neither privacy oriented (hello, telemetry) nor do they have a functioning phone business.

I've been to Los Angeles last weekend and have seen homeless people at the subway stations entertaining themselves with their iPhones. Now tell me: how is owning an iPhone a "status symbol"?

If you don't have one your status is lower than even that of a homeless person.

Android is already used in the majority of the market. It's just that android phones aren't under a single corporate umbrella like Apple phones are.

> Android is creeping higher and higher in the ecosystem

It crept there about 7 years ago and is about 90% of the market now, why present tense? And it was good enough from like day 1, although the hardware was behind sometimes.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/266136/global-market-sha...

Here are the Android Q2 figures from that link:

2018: 88%

2017: 87.8%

2016: 86.2%

2015: 82.2%

2014: 83.8%

2013: 79%

2012: 64.2%

2011: 43.4%

So I think it's fair to use the present tense, especially now that Apple will stop disclosing iPhone unit sales which indicates they are no longer growing.

I wonder whether we'll see a tipping point - especially in poor countries where the Android share is close to 100% - where developers start producing Android apps but not iPhone apps, and this affects the desirability of iPhone.

As a side note: I hate statista and hope it is removed from Google search because (a) 90% of the time when I try to access that page I see a "Exclusive Premium statistic" label that blocks 80% of the graph; (b) 100% of the time when I try to view the source figures of the graph I get the "Exclusive Premium Functionality" blocker.

Global Sales. Not Global Usage Shares. Android has a pattern of faster replacement cycle.

There are Currently 5B Mobile User World Wide, 3.3B Smartphone, 2.5B Android, 800M iPhone users. Both the Smartphone and iPhone user base are still growing. So Apple has roughly 25% of the world market share. This is not bad consider there are 500M+ Smartphone users in India which Apple has less than 2% market shares.

Looking at the trend line and from line of speech, I think most analyst ( Well, only a few really. Most of them don't care about its actual market usage. ) were predicting the 1B iPhone user base by 2020. Fueled party by iPhone XR, or the supposedly affordable iPhone. Now it doesn't look like it.

The thing is, I don't have hard numbers for this, but from what I know (and it makes sense, given my personal experience with people and desktop OSs, car brands, clothing brands, etc.), regular people don't switch that much between mobile platforms.

I'm pretty sure Android is growing faster than iOS, worldwide. And most of the users that get entry level or mid range level Android phones won't "upgrade" to iOS, they will just get better Android phones, since they already know the system.

Barring some super successful entry level iOS device [1] being introduced by Apple, which is unlikely, Android's market share will only go up. Apple will still be super profitable, though.

[1] And that won't happen, as Linus from Linus Tech Tips put it: Apple is jewelry and people don't buy cheap jewelry :)

>I'm pretty sure Android is growing faster than iOS, worldwide. And most of the users that get entry level or mid range level Android phones won't "upgrade" to iOS, they will just get better Android phones, since they already know the system.

First one is true. Mostly because Smartphone Saturation. The growth are in Low Pricing phones, 80% of the Smartphone in India are below $250. And Apple doesn't have phone below $400.

The Not Switching to iOS is false. While everyone has expected that, in reality Apple is still growing its user base, at a rate of roughly 100M in 18 months. That means roughly 25% to 30% of all iPhone purchase were coming from Android.

If iPhone got 30m users from Android and Android itself got 500m in total in the same interval, my numbers were pretty close.

Global market share. In most western countries it's around 50/50 or 60/40 one way or the other. End of the day, that's still where most of the purchasing power is.

> In most western countries it's around 50/50 or 60/40 one way or the other.

Not really, it's 70/30 Android/iOS for the whole of Europe on average.

Yeah, but in the wealthier countries, apart from Germany and France, it seems iOS is either almost tied or in the majority (I just looked at US, UK, Canada, Netherlands, Sweden)

Indeed, and Apple's services revenue is also growing quite a bit. So, they'll want chunks of the market where it is also likely that people will be purchasing paid apps, iCloud storage, Apple Music, movies, etc.