Although iCloud has yet to be released, analysts are already saying that it could put the final nail in Blackberry’s coffin, eliminating the last advantage RIM has over Apple in the smartphone market: the BlackBerry Push Service.
RIM could see its “>BlackBerry push network hurt by iCloud, which can deliver everything from music to video and software, analysts at Sterne Agee told investors Friday. The company cut its price target on RIM shares to $44, down from $52. Only a day earlier, Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu described iCloud as a “very big deal” allowing Apple to put rivals far in the background.
“We believe reaching cloud music deals would be a great start and further enhance AAPL from GOOG, AMZN, MSFT, and others,” he said. For the past decade, Apple’s competitors “so far have failed to put even a minor dent to iTunes,” Wu adds.
In a related note, UBS analyst Maynard Um forecasts iCloud initially attracting 200 million iTunes customers, or 10 percent of those signed-up for the Apple service. He believes the Cupertino, Calif. company could recoup some of its investment in free apps through a $15 per month subscription fee for a hosting service.
But iCloud’s benefits could also assist boosting iPhone sales, giving a cloud-based alternative to requiring a PC to sync handsets. The result: Apple’s potential market could skyrocket to 5.1 billion customers, up from 1.3 billion, he advises. Also, iCloud could spawn many other services, such as content streaming, voice recognition, photo sharing, and more. Um foresees this “leading to new iOS devices built around iCloud services.”
That huge data center in North Carolina and the wild memory storage buying spree Apple has been on means another advantage for the tech giant, according to another Wall Street observer. Apple “will likely offer much more available memory than competitors since its users have much larger libraries of music, movies and photos,” says Barclay Capital’s Ben Reitzes. The iCloud service will help sell more Macs, iPhones, iPods and iPads, according to Reitzes.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
35 responses to “iCloud Could Help Apple Kill Blackberries Once and for All”
Maybe in the States. Not in Canada where the Berry leads by more than 10 percentage points over Apple in sheer numbers.
iCloud would definitely Surpass the others, it was like when the iPhone was given Mulitasking with the iOS 4 Update, they maybe be the last at Mulitasking, but were the best. It dosen’t matter if Google already started or if RIM is thinking of it, Apple is Simply the Best
-Apple Fanboy
I sure wish those over-exuberant analysts would stop teasing investors with all those big numbers and Apple would actually do something to grow smartphone market share. I’m getting sick and tired of hearing about Android and it’s invulnerability to growth slowdown. I just hope all the hype for this cloud service doesn’t turn into a debacle for Apple when the media discovers that iCloud can’t cure the common cold.
a lead of 10% in Canada means nothing if America and yes the rest of the world is adopting iPhone and Android devices…
So it’s Apple’s iCloud and not Google’s Chrome that creates Skybot!
The author’s portrait also hints of Orwell’s “1984”!
What on earth has happened to this once quality site?
CoM used to offer great comment, now almost every post is about iOS ‘killing’ other operating systems, be that Android, Blackberry, Windows 8, Google Chrome.
Why not celebrate what is great about Apple, rather than spouting so much bitterness?
I believe its too early until we see the implementation of iCloud on wild. The much hyped iPhone 4 had its short-comings and since the beginning Mac had a bad experience with Cloud services. Hope the time is ripe now for Apple to Shine over Cloud
I would of course expect this sort of “reporting”. That said, can you take a step back and look at the numbers in North America – Apple has 26% and RIM 22% of US market. It held pretty much steady over the last three months.
RIM hardly has a nail in the coffin – and Apple has stagnated.
The day the iPhone was introduced I said RIM is dead, they just don’t know it yet. It’s true, I did say it. Ask my neighbor’s cat.
its about time bbs were wiped from the face of this earth
I think RIM is doing remarkably well outside the US. This is due to data compression and BBM which keep costs down for users
Intelligent comments are rare here. Nice work Respighifan for being one of the few.
Why cant we all just live in peace, and love apple products, talk through rim products and surf through google? i do that, execpt the RIM part, i will though
I REALLY REALLY DON’T LIKE YOU AT ALL!
Why would i pay another $15 just to stream musics i already owned???
I need over 100GB for all my stuff!!!
When the iPhone was first announced, a lot of people who owned smartphones like Blackberries kept saying “The iPhone is a smartphone wannabe.” A lot of people at the time didn’t see how Apple was going to change the smartphone arena back in 2007. Apple changed the smartphone arena forever with the release of the iPhone.
At the time before the iPhone, smartphones were okay at best. Sure, you could do e-mail, do some light web browsing, and all of that good stuff. But, what killed me was that you had small plastic buttons that were a pain to type an e-mail on, or even make a phone call on (I’m a former Blackberry Curve/Storm2 owner). So, when Steve announced the iPhone, I knew that it was going to change the world forever; it was an iPod, a phone, and you had the internet in your hand! It was mind-blowing at the time; the iPhone is now almost 5 years old, and it is still changing the smartphone landscape; Apple has been leading the way to show phone companies “This is what people want, and Apple is going to give it to them.”
As for Blackberry, it’s not going to be the world leader like it was before the iPhone release. Those days are LONG gone; RIM has made some blunders with the Blackberry brand; the Blackberry Storm was SLOW, and just doing normal stuff like making a phone call, you had to press down on the keypad HARD just to punch in the numbers and for the phone to recognize what you were trying to do.
I will admit that there are still some hardcore Blackberry users out there, but the smartphone world has been forever changed by the iPhone. Sorry RIM, but there is no going back.
Umm yes, but at what cost is maintaining Market share being bought? Too many Bogof offers and corporate giveaways means profit share is reduced.
See this post: http://www.asymco.com/2011/05/…
The nail is half buried