The old saying about a rising tide lifts all boats seems pertinent even to smartphones. A dramatic rise in demand for smartphones has allowed Android to enter the market yet hasn’t caused Apple to cut its price for the iPhone, writes one analyst Monday.
With demand for smartphones growing at 90 percent per year, the question isn’t how Android will hurt Apple. “The more smartphones you build, the more price you can charge. This is regardless of platform,” according to Asymco’s Horace Dediu.
“The only correlation with pricing power is whether you build smartphones or dumb phones,” he adds. Expanding the number of smartphones is good for Apple. “A world full of smartphone users is a better addressable market for iPhones that one filled with voice products,” Dediu writes. He notes the iPhone’s success has always come in markets preceded by other smartphone makers, such as RIM’s BlackBerry in the U.S. and Nokia’s Symbian platform in Europe.
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.
4 responses to “Analyst: Android Helping Boost Apple iPhone Prices”
WEll, this is definitely going to be inevitable since Apple products are cheaper than any device in the market. Now, since the rival prices are higher, I think Apple can put up some additional price on their products.