Sony make great phones. Their features tend to be on par, or even better than, those of Apple devices. Waterproofing, camera quality, screen quality, design - they're all great. But the general public don't seem to realise this. For the majority of people in the market for a high-end smartphone, Apple is their first and often only choice. Even HTC and Android, who seem to have a grasped a good foothold in the field, lag behind Apple when it comes to high-end phones. It's a shame that most of their revenue is coming from their lower to middle end phones, as their high end ones are their flagships, and have so much to offer.
So if Apple aren't making better phones, why are they getting more of the market? It's simple - better marketing.
To a lot of people, Apple is synonymous with cool. If you have the latest Apple device you know your stuff, you're on top of the tech game. Apple don't sell devices - they sell a lifestyle. All of their marketing has to do with the ways their products can enrich your life in very human ways. Their latest campaign, 'shot on an iPhone 6', finally addresses the issue of poor camera quality by showcasing ordinary people capturing everyday scenes. Their campaigns have always saturated the market, and since the release of those colourful iPod ads - or even earlier, with their Macs - Apple's brand has been imprinted into people's minds.
While they've recently downsized to focus on the three core areas of Sony Pictures Entertainment, PlayStation and Image Sensors (which are, somewhat ironically, used in iPhones), Sony used to be involved in all types of electronics, and their products are still everywhere. Sony movies, tvs, phones, camera, audio equipment - the Sony logo is everywhere, and people know and trust their products. But they didn't differentiate themselves enough when it came to mobile phones. People see your phones - they're like a status symbol you carry around in your pocket. And while Sony is fine for televisions and home sound systems that not that many people see, a Sony phone doesn't have the same prestige as an Apple one does when used in front of your friends.
Android face a similar problem, but for entirely different reasons. Google has a noble philosophy geared towards open-source and user-driven products, rather than making a profit. Their platform is open and free to hardware partners, which, while fostering creativity, isn't the best for protecting it from being taken, twisted and developed into cheap imitations sold to the lower-end market. Although their intentions were noble, the use of Android on these knock-off devices has sadly cheapened the brand as a whole. While they've been able to use this strategy to flood the market, with 80% of all smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2014 running Android, the cheaper price meant that this massive market share only accounted for 11% of the profits in that same quarter.
It could be argued that the same thing happened to laptops and desktop devices - people were (and still are?) willing to pay good money for Apple MacBooks, but are more hesitant to spend comparable amounts on other PCs.
This is bad news for everyone, including Apple. Competition fosters creativity, and boundary pushing, and the search for the next best thing - without competition, the ideas go stale, and the market goes with it.
And that's exactly what happened with MacBooks. It's been years since a big upgrade; Apple dominate the market, and people are willing to pay for the next model up with barely any changes, so why should they put in the extra effort?
We don't want the mobile phone market to lose momentum, and Sony's hinted departure isn't a good sign. So let's hope that the other brands lift their game and get their brands back in shape.
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*Statistics and figures taken from Paul Lin's article for the Australian.