BankMyCell

The Apple watch started at $350, not $1k [0]. Also no one with an Android phone has an Apple Watch, which means Apple at best has ~27% of the market [1]. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2015/3/9/8162455/apple-watch-price-release-da… [1] https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/android-vs-apple-market-share/

I think a lot of people would have stopped answering their phones regardless. Letting random people interrupt you with a conversation may have been the best UX available 100 years ago, but I don't think that's the case now. I note that 81% of millennials "sometimes have to summon up the courage to make a phone call", and 75% will avoid calls that are "time consuming". https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/why-millennials-ignore-calls#data

As you can see, in Europe Apple only has around 46%, 49% if worldwide, with the remaining being shared across all Android vendors. https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/tablet/europe If you go world wide in another data set, it is around 54% https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/global-tablet-market-share/ Even considering the more generous number, that makes half of the tablets being sold across the planet are not iPads.

iPhones are not a luxury good by any means. You can waltz right into an Apple Store TODAY and buy yourself a $429 iPhone SE or a $599 iPhone 14. Boost mobile was giving iPhone 12s away for $99. Virtually every carrier has a free-with 2-3 year commitment deal for the iPhone 16. I live in the US where iPhones were 61.26% of smartphones sold in the US in the most recent quarter https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/us-smartphone-market-share If you want to be fancy, get a folding phone like a Galaxy Fold or a Pixel Fold. Those do have steep discounts at times, but you're still going to have to fork up $800-1200 or so for them. Or get one of those niche phones like an Xperia 1 or an Asus ROG phone or whatever that costs >$1000 and isn't subsidized by ANY carrier.

Google is like 3%ish of the smartphone market in the US. Pixel phones are US-focused, so I can't imagine they're that high worldwide. https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/us-smartphone-market-share The two big phone giants in the US are Apple and Samsung. Of which Samsung isn't muddling the hardware, OS, software distribution. Maybe platform ecosystem, but generally a Samsung smartwatch or headphones will work with any other Android phone just fine.

According to [1] the estimated number of iPhone users (leaving out any Mac users) in 2024 is 1.46 billion. [1] https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/number-of-iphone-users

> Americans spend more than 4 hours a day on their phones, and more than half say they are addicted to their cell phone. More like seven hours per day: https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/average-screen-time-on-iphone-android#… As long as phone screens continue to be perfect for handheld entertainment and phone apps continue to be designed for infinite thoughtless consumption, then the answer will remain "yes". I 1000% blame social media companies for intentionally designing their apps and the content presented on them to drive engagement and taking advantage of psychology that makes people want to scroll while they are driving, for example.

Twitter peaked at 368 million users 2022. It is among various analysts expected to drop 4% of users to reach approximately 2020 level in 2023, and another 5% more users in 2024 to reach 2019 level [0] That's not enough of a loss to motivate discarding twitter conversations. [0] https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-users-does-twitter-have

1: Reddit has ~1.6B monthly active users, compared to 0.3B in 2018. [1] So 2x user growth seems more likely to me than not. 2: You're the one who went with "invented" ;) 3: I know you're exaggerating, but I think you think you're exaggerating much less than you actually are. [1] https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/number-of-reddit-users/

Everybody's reporting "Reddit had 430 million monthly active users in 2020", so that's the half-billion that seems to be fact-based. Then the current 1.5B number seems to be based on extrapolation (1.66B in [1] for one estimate) based on previous growth rates. I shared your initial skepticism, but Reddit is the 20th most popular site in the world [2]. I know I have definitely been surprised and even shocked that certain extended family members and coworkers of mine have turned out to be heavy Reddit users. It's turned into this incredibly widespread site that almost nobody talks about "in real life". Of course, monthly active users presumably includes people who click on a Reddit search result once in the month. It doesn't mean they're using it daily and upvoting. [1] https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/number-of-reddit-users/#section-2 [2] https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/

The worldwide cell phone penetration rate is 91% https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world It’s not a money maker for them, I doubt they care.

>I don't see any win besides a minor convenience. A minor inconvenience multiplied by the number of smartphones (7.33 billion) is not a minor problem. It's not that it's a problem on the individual level, it's that we're roughly doubling the number of cables needed and halving their utilization at the same time. Yes I know android is more popular, but the issue is the two different cables needed. https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world

For the last 6 years, the average number of new smartphones sold per year was 1.5 billion. There are 6.5 billion people with smartphones in the world. So that's at most a 4 year churn rate. https://www.statista.com/statistics/263437/global-smartphone-sales-to-… https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world

> to literally 80% of all humans having them on their person at all times. While the number is high, it's not _that_ high (closer to 50%), at least from the sources I could find[1]. Where are you getting the 80% from? - [1] - https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world - check the references in the bottom for digging deeper

The first smartphones, in 2007, cost $750 in inflation adjusted terms. Only 40 million people worlwide, almost exclusively living in the developed world, could afford one. Today, smartphones are in the hands of over 3.8 billion people (approaching 50% of the human population) [1], with the most affordable today going for $50, and with far more capabilities than the 2007 iPhone. [1] https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world

So if we have 7.2 millions PEVs (all-electric + hybrid)[0] how does that compare to the 4.8 billion phone users (smart + feature)[1]? If we assume only 1 phone per person (and ignore how many are in landfills) that's 667 phones per electric vehicle. I wonder how that compares in terms of rare earth metal usage. The lifecycle of a vehicle is probably ~2-20 times that of a phone so let's say a single magnitude. That gives us 6600 phones per vehicle lifetime. Granted - the smartphone market will stay within a magnitude (not everyone can be an HK taxi driver with 7 phones) Now global EV adoption will increase by ~3 magnitudes by the time the market saturates and there might be a magnitude separating phone count from EVs. [0] https://evstatistics.com/2020/06/global-electric-vehicle-stock-reaches… [1] https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world

A lot of people are still using an iPhone 5S or an iPhone 6. From iPhone 6 to now, that's actually close to 1.7b iPhone sales. 1b active iPhones sounds very reasonable after accounting for breakage and the unused spares forgotten in a drawer. Apparently there's approx a total of 3.5 billion smartphone users today. https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world iPhones could be 30% of the market.

Your first point is not correct, there are about 3.5 billion smart phone users out there. https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world

> Making a "copy" of an iPhone costs $20 or $30 I think you might be off by a factor of ten or so. [0][1] [0]: https://technology.informa.com/596781/iphone-x-costs-apple-370-in-mate… [1]: https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-much-do-iphones-cost-to-make

No chance they have 1B DAU. That doesn’t pass the sniff test. That’s like 1.5B MAU, which is even more ridiculous. But let’s look.. 7 billion people, 4.5B have internet access. So more than over 15% of humans with internet access are using tiktok every day. 3.5B humans have a smart phone, so 1 in 3 are on tiktok every day? Nah. And honestly, I’m fairly even on china but I don’t really believe numbers the put out for most things. https://www.statista.com/statistics/617136/digital-population-worldwid… https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world

So the parent got flagged after I did the math. I hope you don't mind my posting it here just to qualify what the justification looks like: The exaggerated use-case: 0.0000000001% is: 0.000000000001 (10^-12) Multiplied by 1,460,000,000 ---- 0.00146 persons. And we already know that there are at least 2 people (myself and parent up there) who are interested in that. This is off by a factor of 1000. I'm willing to guess that it's actually off by a factor of at least 1,000,000, possibly 10,000,000. It seems completely reasonable to me that we could find in the entire world of iPhone users 146,000 people who would want to setup their own photos backup. All of this is simply to say that the user base is absolutely massive, and we need to appreciate how huge it is. Even a very very small subset of users represents a very large number of actual people. [1] https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/number-of-iphone-users (further upstream sources are provided there)

I think a key difference is that Android for most people is a mostly-closed ecosystem. Most people can only install that which has been added to the small selection of app stores and the OS configuration is at least partially locked down. There have been an uptick in malware targeting Android [1] just one recent example but people are not installing as many random applications and vulnerable frameworks such as Wordpress or random apps that lack GPG verification, curl | sudo bash. This puts the onus on Google and wireless vendors to manage the security of these devices and most applications. If some day there is a truly open Linux distro on fully unlocked-by-default phones that come with root access enabled and said phones are adopted by the masses and people can tweak the OS however they wish without using debugging tools or installing custom images then I think the phones will almost be on equal footing to Linux desktops, gaming and graphics power aside. They key part being adopted by the masses. Even Android is not a majority market share [2] so people would have to target apps that Android, Apple and others share. [1] - https://www.scmagazine.com/news/malware/letscall-vishing-malware-andro… [2] - https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/us-smartphone-market-share

Let's assume an average iPhone battery is 5.45Wh and that they are charged to full every other night. That is 0.99kWh/year. We know there are 136 million iPhone users in the USA (1) so we are looking at 134GWh of electric consumption shifted to green generation. Now assuming those phones were previously charged on the standard energy mix in the USA that is 0.368kg of co2 saved per device per year, or 501,584,76kg of co2 saved. That seems like a huge number! But is it? Well let's put it in perspective. A flight from Heathrow to New York emits 312kg of co2 per passenger (3) so we have saved the equivalent of 600 fully loaded transatlantic flights. There are ~1700 flights a day so it doesn't seem like a huge difference. Disappointing. But it seems like a pretty easy win so at this point I ask why not do it? I'm a big believer in aggregation of marginal gains and there are 10x that number of iPhones worldwide and many more Androids. (1) https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/number-of-iphone-users (2) https://carbonfund.org/calculation-methods/#:~:text=We%20calculate%20e… (3) https://www.nesta.org.uk/press-release/gas-boiler-emits-more-annual-co… (4) https://www.eurocontrol.int/news/celebrating-100-years-transatlantic-f…

I attended a talk at the Royal Geographical Society where someone explained that given current trends, the super rich would own X00% of the planet if current trends continued for fifty years. And I never understood it. It's like, yeah, ok, if your model of wealth is that there are literally 100 gold bars somewhere then yes, that would be a contradiction. But firstly, lots of things are S-curves, not exponents, and secondly, we can just change what we measure. It looks to me that this comment is talking about something like this article: >http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9902/11/50pc.idg/index.html Ok. Well, the US is a few hundred million people in a world of 6-7 billion. So yes, doubling would have been impossible. But it happened. According to some source that i just googled[2] there are 6 billion smartphones right now. So this schmuck thought that computers were hitting the wall coming up to 150million. That's an order magnitude of wrongness, and I bet you, the average person in the US today has multiple computers more powerful than a 1999 computer. One in their phone, one in their iPad, one in their laptop, one in their fridge, one in their coffee machine, one in the doorbell, one in their robot hoover, one in their thermostat. I mean.. it's a mad lack of imagination. [2]: https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-world

Skimming through the numbers in the article[1] linked to from here, it's very interesting to see the dynamic that Apple has managed to create around depreciation. A 2 year old iPhone can still be traded-in at roughly 50% of the value (whether to Apple or a third-party). The effect that this creates is that it becomes quite reasonable to buy the latest iPhone every two years after trade-in. I'm sure this has a big impact on new device sales, one of the factors as to why Apple beats records every year. On the flip-side, I believe the reason they are able to do this, as the article here notes, is that their phones just last long (hardware/software). My iPhone 8 is not very old, but I'm not planning to stop using it for another 2-3 years at least (unless it shatters). In some ways, this reminds me of ThinkPads, just in terms of how long they can serve their purpose. I'm honestly getting kind of "bored" of Apple devices, but I fear Android devices may not have the same solid 5 - 7 years of support, and as is evident from this article, trade-in value. [1] https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/cell-phone-depreciation-report-2019-20…

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/26/whatsapp-phone-c… https://www.forbes.com/sites/briannawiest/2019/11/04/millennials-hate-… https://bgr.com/2018/12/09/millennials-phone-calls-survey/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/mobile-chat/why-millennials-dont-pi… https://www.inc.com/john-brandon/why-millennials-dont-like-to-make-pho… https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/nz-life-leisure/110277251/why-are-m… https://jeffjbutler.com/2019/04/02/why-millennials-dont-like-to-make-p… https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/why-millennials-ignore-calls https://medium.com/swlh/why-you-should-never-cold-call-a-millennial-an… Etc etc etc etc I literally don't think I've been called unannounced by someone under 40 in a decade. In fact I think it's now something of a social faux pas to call unannounced. Maybe the people around your tables are just really rude?