10 amazing facts on iPhone's 10th birthday

  Apple created  history  today 10 years ago, by launching a smartphone that defied imagination both in terms of design and features. In a world where no mobile OEM ever dreamed of taking away the  keyboards ( made famous by blackberry), Only Steve jobs managed to do the impossible by replacing the physical keypad with a display keypad. However not everyone knows that Before Apple ever released the iPhone, Cisco Systems had originally patented the name. In fact, they sued Apple for calling its smartphone an iPhone. The Cisco iPhone operated on VOIP phone that allowed users to call through Skype without having to use a computer. Both companies reached a settlement, and have now happily kept their rights to the name.  Even though the iPad was released by Apple after the Phone, Apple was actually exploring a tablet device before the idea for an iPhone even began to take shape.  Jobs  wanted Apple engineers to research various tablet designs with a virtual keyboard. Apple first approached Verizon as its carrier ,however it balked at Apple's offer and demands. Specifically, Verizon didn't want to cede any control to Apple. Cingular (now AT&T), meanwhile, needed a big smartphone exclusive to remain competitive, so it was more willing to agree to Apple's typically stringent demands and need to invest on infrastructure to support higher internet traffic . As a quick example of Apple's demands, Apple insisted that the iPhone would only house its own logo, not that of a carrier. 
Apple recently sold its billionth iPhone, during the second  quarter of 2016 according to its earning call As of September,2016 apple has sold over a billion phone out of  2.7 billion global smartphones existing across the world .Even if we conservatively estimate that current iPhone sales fall in the 750 million range, that means Apple has been averaging approximately 7.8 million iPhones a month for eight years running now.Time magazine featured iPhone was Invention of the Year in its cover of November 2007. The Apple iPhone was considered so revolutionary that Time Magazine named it  as the "Invention of the Year in its November 2007 edition. 
Some of us might have noticed that all iPhone advertisements show the device at a time set to 9:41. This is no coincidence. Former Apple executive Scott Forstall once explained, "We design the (product launch) keynotes so that the big reveal of the product happens around 40 minutes into the presentation. When the big image of the product appears on screen, we want the time shown to be close to the actual time on the audience's watches. But we know we won't hit 40 minutes exactly." As a point of interest, the default display times on iPhones used to be 9:42. 

Apple has over 400 apple stores around the world which employs more that 50,000 employees worldwide.Apple Stores drive so much traffic to shopping malls that Apple is able to negotiate cheaper rent. Apple Stores  generate more than 1 million visitors per day worldwide.Apple Stores have been shown to increase sales in mall 10%, according to the Wall Street Journal.The Nanjing East store in Shanghai is Apple's busiest. It gets 25,000 visitors per day.

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for the first time in a decade apple's iphone sales hits speedbreaker

Apple announced a sharp slowdown in sales growth for its iPhone

Apple's  honeymoon period with its most successful product, iPhone  seems to be finally over, with the company reporting " flat sales in a clear indication of  iPhone's  slowest growth since the product's 2007 launch  as Apple  warned investors that "sales will fall for the first time later this year.

The company sold 74.8m of its flagship devices in the final three months of 2015, compared to  74.46m iPhones  it told during the same period in 2014.. which points to the fact that : iPhone sales has now plateaued 

Apple's fundamentalas as a company is beyond comparison and its  one of the most cash rich company in the world with assets totalling $293bn, with $205bn of that in cash.
However the worrying point for apple, is that the company is dependent on the iPhone magic wand more than it should do as it created more volatility and risk for the company something that wall street will not like 

• Apple's ipads meanwhile have been shrinking for more than 18 months. Apple sold 16.1million iPads in the last three months of 2015, down from 21.4m tablets in the same quarter last year.
  
• Mac sales too, declined  with Apple selling 4% fewer  ending up with 5.3 million sales (YoY)
  
• Apple Watch, grew sharply to $4.4bn, up from $2.6bn in the third quarter of 2015 (when the company first reported Watch sales). 
• Other products in the category include Beats accessories, Apple Pay and Apple TV 

Most popular smartphones in Europe

The day apple stock declined by $100 billion

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the real reason why iphones and ipads cannot be manufactured in US

r those of you using apple products . specially iphone and ipad would have noticed the following t? "Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.". So why exactly does ipad and iphone cannot be made in US, is it the cost of production, the costs of labor in US that makes it  difficult to made iphones in US.. Why cant  apple 's  iPhones, iPads, and all the rest of Apple's magic gadgets be built in the States?

The real story of why this cant be done ... will be a revelation .. and its also a sad  comment how America  have been loosing its " manufacturing base"  and we are no longer producing the kind of people " with the required skills "

 The New York Times asked that question, and after an extremely well-researched report involving interviews with both former and current executives at Apple, the answer the Times found is both simple and chilling: iPhones aren't made in America because they just can't be, not because of  manufacturing costs and other hyperbole . The infrastructure and labor force that apple needs to manufacture iphones and ipads  doesn't  exist at any levels  in US , which is necessary to support Apple's operations -- in fact its not even close to China...

• The Chinese factory where most iPhones reach final assembly employs 230,000 workers. Compare this with US: how many cities in the US have a population higher than that, ( according to SIRI the answer was a mere 83 cities )-- and that's total population, not workforce. With an average labor force of around 65 percent of the population, only 50 US cities are large enough to provide that kind of labor pool... and even in the biggest US city of them all, New York, 230,000 people still amounts to almost three percent of the city's entire population. 

•  One of apple's biggest supplier Foxconn  has  over  60,000 people living and working at the factory. Many of the people at "Foxconn City" work six days a week, twelve hours a day.. In US you just cannot do that .Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States, less than a fifth the number of contractor employees assembling iPhones at one Chinese factory

• Even though the 200,000 assembly-line workers putting part A into slot B could potentially be classified as unskilled labor, the 8700 industrial engineers overseeing the process  are highly skilled -- and according to the nytimes Times, finding that many qualified engineers in the States would take 9 months . Chinese manufacturers found them all in 15 days..In US the demand and supply gap between engineers who  graduates every year is appalling .

 So the reason of iphone being manufactured  is not " a merely"  manufaturing cost issue,, Instead, it's about who can build manufacture  the greatest number of iPhones within the shortest period of time, all while remaining flexible and instantaneously adaptable to Apple's needs.

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List of 10 iphone component suppliers which gets over 70% revenue from Apple

Apple's driving enormous profits for its suppliers. Apple outsources almost all its internal components and devices used for the manufacturing of its iphone from RAM,screens and power amplifiers.The below chart shows the list of top 10 Suppliers who gets its highest business from Apple.
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These are the top device suppliers which helps apple makes its iphones The latest supplier to come on board include Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the chip foundry that Apple is using to make processors that have long been provided by Samsung Electronics With the notable exception of the A5 processor, most of the components used to make the iPhone are also manufactured overseas, For component suppliers Apple is a huge catch as they vie together in a fiercely competitive market to get business from Apple.With $171 billion in sales in its last fiscal year -- on par with the gross domestic product of Vietnam -Apple plays kingmaker by picking who provides semiconductors, graphics processors and other parts, helping to determine the fate of companies from California to China.

Apple's BlockBusters 3Ps : iPod vs iPhone vs iPad sales from 2007 to 2014

Apple Product Portfolio by  Sales  : iPhone vs iPod vs iPad

iPod Sales Since the introduction of the  new iPod touch along with iPhone in June 2007, sales of the iPod have seen  decline from 10 million units per quarter on average to less than 3 million in  3rd quarter of 2014. That was bound to happen as  the new features of iPod  is integrated across iphone  and iPad models

iPhone Sales :Meanwhile there has been no bigger product that has been sold more across the world than Apple's iPhone.Globally  Apple has sold 150 million  iPhone's in 2013 . As of  the FY2014 ending  March  500 million iPhone units  have been sold   worldwide 

 iPad Sales :There have been five versions of the iPad to date and as of June 2014, there have been over 200 million iPads sold worldwide since its release. I

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China set to Replace US as the Biggest Apple Market, continues to grow above 200%

source : outsider trading

China is Apple's Fastest Growing Market Today with Growth rates in China growing in astronomical proportions.Cut back to 2011 Microsoft’s CEO  Steve Ballmer bemoaned that revenue in China was about 5% of what it obtained in the US  .

Today in 2013 Apple  is  already the number 2 market in the world for  Apple after US. But that is very soon going to change with China overtaking the US  ( source: Techstorm ) )

Apple  notched up 250% growth in 2010 and 350% in 2011. In 2012 the growth slowed to 83% but that is still almost twice the US or the global average. 

China and the US have a roughly equal number of PCs but the mobile users in China exceed the US by a factor of three to one.

According to  Horace Dideu of Asymco 

The contrast is even more stark when one considers the time and effort each company has made in China. Microsoft has been investing and promoting itself in China for decades while Apple barely had any presence 3 years ago.

Apple’s China net sales in fiscal 2009 were only 769 million. In 2012 they were $22.8 billion. That is a figure greater than US sales three years earlier. Put another way, China sales grew in three years as much as they did in the US in 33.

According to Powerstream , Chinese  brands spent merely a total of 500mn Yuan (about $81mn) on mobile advertising in 2012, 0.2%of the total ad spending in China, or 1.3% of online ad advertising. ( source : http://technode.com/2012/11/24/how-smallbig-is-chinese-mobile-advertising-market/)

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