After a recent talk I gave, a student came up to me and asked me for one bit of advice for someone’s who’s still in school but about to graduate.

I’ve always found these questions difficult to answer. For one, It’s been 25 years since I’ve been in college. I don’t remember what I wished I knew back then, and today I know even less about what would be useful to know right now.

So I backed off a specific, and shot for a general.

The advice was this: Habits are always forming. No matter what you do, you’re also forming habits too. Keep that in mind with whatever you do.

When we talk about habits, we generally talk about learning good habits. Or forming good habits. Both of these outcomes suggest we can end up with the habits we want. And technically we can! But most of the habits we have are habits we ended up with after years of unconscious behavior. They’re not intentional. They’ve been planting deep roots under the surface, sight unseen. Fertilized, watered, and well-fed by recurring behavior. Trying to pull that habit out of the ground later is going to be incredibly difficult. Your grip has to be better than its grip, and it rarely is.

So be aware of what you do, what you’re doing, and how you’re doing it. Every do digs deeper. Every does grips stronger.

This week’s Daily Updates have had a heavy international focus, especially on China but also India. This particular update is from this morning and seeks to understand why Apple fares so differently in these two critical markets. To read all of the Daily Updates for $10/month or $100/year, please visit the membership page.

Bloomberg writes about the iPhone’s appeal in India:

Apple Inc., which has struggled in emerging markets because of the price of its new iPhones, has devised a strategy for India that’s starting to pay off: It’s pushing older models that offer cachet at affordable prices.

The iPhone 4, which was released in the U.S. in June 2010, is still available. So is the iPhone 4s that went on sale in October 2011.

“You flaunt an iPhone, but you don’t flaunt an Android,” said Punit Mathur, a 42-year-old vice president of a digital media company who switched to a new iPhone 4s from a Nexus 4. An iPhone 5s that would cost 53,500 rupees ($874) is too expensive, “but the 4s is still an upgrade,” he said…

Apple’s approach in India has helped it build traction in a country where 225 million smartphones will be sold this year, said Brad Rees, chief executive officer of London-based Mediacells, a marketing company. Apple, the fifth-largest vendor in India, more than doubled sales there in the first quarter to 325,000 iPhones from a year earlier, according to researcher Canalys.

I’m honestly a little hesitant to jump on this article; it fits a little too neatly into the prevailing narrative about iPhones. Moreover, according to the numbers in the article, the iPhone is on pace to have less than one percent of India’s smartphone market, so the iPhone is not exactly dominating.

That said, the union of these two facts – that the iPhone in India has high-end appeal, but sells in infinitesimal numbers – lends credence to a point I made last fall in The $550 iPhone Makes Perfect Sense:

It’s not so much that the iPhone has saturated the American-style and European-style markets, and ought to focus on the Asian-style one; rather, the iPhone has saturated the high end in all three markets – the high end just varies in accessibility ($200 for American-style, $650 for Asian-style). And, if you accept that the iPhone is in roughly the same competitive position in all three markets – that the difference in market share is due to inherent structure of the market – then it’s not at all obvious Apple should focus on the SE Asia-style market. In fact, it’s obvious they shouldn’t.

My use of the word “saturated” was probably a bit strong, but the point I was making was that the iPhone skims the top of every market, and that their market share is simply a function of how rich a country is (as well as how subsidized the handset market is). I fleshed out this idea in a post about Apple’s growth in Japan:

It’s not that the iPhone has fully penetrated developed countries, leaving the rest – we’re not talking about a Pampers or Pepsi here, or some other consumer packaged good. Rather, the iPhone is an affordable luxury item; the percentage of the population to which it is affordable just happens to differ market-by-market.

The iPhone targets the high-end in all markets, not just developed markets.

To that end, it is very interesting to compare the underlying fundamentals of the Indian and Chinese markets. Why is it that Apple is doing so well in the latter, while barely penetrating the former?

When it comes to China, I wrote the following when Apple finally agreed to a deal with China Mobile:

The two pertinent facts about China are that:

• There is tremendous income disparity
• There are a TON of people

So while many Western markets may have a greater percentage of the population that can afford an iPhone, the absolute number of Chinese who are potential customers is very high as well.

The chart is obviously inexact, but we can look at the actual numbers:

• The nominal GDP per capita in China is only $6,747 – clearly not enough to afford an iPhone!
• However, China has a Gini coefficient of 47.4, which is quite high (the United States is in fact quite close to China with a Gini coefficient of 45.0)

That means a relatively small number of individuals have an outsized share of income, but, because China is so huge, the absolute number of high income individuals is quite large.¹

India, on the hand, is just about as large as China, but has a very different economic profile:

• India’s nominal GDP per capita is significantly lower than China’s, coming in at only $1,504
• India also has much less inequality than China: the Indian Gini coefficient is only 36.8

The average is lower and there are fewer outliers, which mean many fewer people are in iPhone territory:

India has a lower average income and fewer outliers than China, which means a much smaller iPhone market

Ultimately, I think these numbers confirm my hypothesis: Apple is indeed the preferred vendor for people at the top of the market, but because the iPhone is priced (about) the same everywhere in the world, its market share is a function of a country’s average income and the way in which that income is distributed.

To be fair, this is hardly a controversial thesis: the more pertinent takeaway is that as long as Apple has globally available iPhones (which I don’t think will ever change), the chief constraint on Apple going downmarket in countries like India is the risk of forgoing profits in countries like China or in the West, both of which have plenty of people who can afford Apple’s prices. That’s why I continue to doubt we’ll see Apple abandon it’s lower-cost iPhone = old iPhone strategy in favor of releasing a new-to-the-world low cost device.

The full list of topics covered this week in the Daily Update include:

• Why Facebook is About the Explore
• NFL to Use Surface Tablets
• Mobileye IPOs
• Xiaomi Wins on More than Price
• Micromax and Local Taste
• Local Brands and Scale
• Sprint Abandons T-Mobile Bid
• Microsoft Hires New Head of Business Development
• Understanding China, or Not
• Apple’s China Risk
• China Cracking Down on Messaging Apps
• Apple/China Follow-up
• The iPhone in India (versus China)
• Buying Smartphones in the U.S.

To read all of these updates and to receive future updates, please visit the membership page and sign up!

I’d like to thank all of Stratechery’s subscribers for their support, and for making this site possible.

The post The iPhone in India (versus China), and the Week in Daily Updates appeared first on stratechery by Ben Thompson.

Christopher Mims, writing for Quartz, “2013 Was a Lost Year for Tech”:

2013 was the year smartphones became commodities, just like the PCs they supplanted. Even at the high end, Apple and Samsung’s newest flagship phones weren’t big leaps ahead from previous versions. The most that Apple could think to do with the new, faster processor in the iPhone 5S was animate 3D effects that make some users feel ill and a fingerprint sensor that solved a problem that wasn’t exactly pressing. Apple’s new iOS 7 mobile operating system, which felt “more like a Microsoft release,” crippled many older iPhones and led to complaints of planned obsolescence.

What a sad pile of piss-on-everything cynicism.

Was 2013 a seminal or particularly extraordinary year for technology? No, I’d say not. But it certainly wasn’t a “lost year”, by any measure. If indeed it was the year “smartphones became commodities”, how is that not a sign of remarkable progress? 20 years ago, dumb cellular phones were exorbitantly expensive and pagers were a thriving business; today, even commodity-level $100 pre-paid phones are full-fledged personal computers.

And for Apple, in particular, 2013 was a pretty good year (albeit one with a slow start). Mims writes:

If it’s in the nature of progress to move in leaps, there are necessarily lulls in between. Here are all the reasons 2013 was a great big dud for technology as a whole.

He’s got it all backwards. The nature of progress is to move incrementally. The great leaps are exceedingly few and far between. One needs to pay attention, to learn to appreciate fine details, in order to appreciate progress as it churns. Compare today’s iPhone 5S to the original 2007 iPhone and the differences are glaringly obvious. But some petulant tech critics dismissed every single subsequent iPhone as disappointingly incremental, lacking “innovation”. The iPhone 3G merely added faster cellular networking, which the iPhone “should have had” all along. The iPhone 3GS was “just” a faster 3G. The iPhone 4 introduced retina-caliber displays, which almost everyone, no matter how cynical or inclined to piss on anything nice, agreed was innovative — but soon forgotten by those who bought tickets on the Antennagate Express, a train which took a months-long trip to Nowhereville. (The iPhone 4 was in production for three years, and the GSM antenna design remained unchanged throughout.) The iPhone 4S? Just a faster iPhone 4. Lather, rinse, repeat each successive year. Yet here we are today with an iPhone 5S that’s 40 times faster than the original. (Photo from iMore.)

Today we have mobile phones and tablets running on a 64-bit desktop-caliber CPU architecture. Four months ago, we did not. If you’re not excited by the performance of the A7 SoC or, say, the quality of the iPhone 5S camera, why even bother writing about technology?

No one could argue that iOS 7 wasn’t a major update, so instead Mims takes to disparaging it. Is iOS 7 an improvement in every single regard? Certainly not. But on the whole, it’s quite good, introduces some well-needed conceptual cohesion, and best of all, it shows that the company is not afraid to boldly move forward from the Steve Jobs era.

The whole “planned obsolescence” thing — started [started by New York Times economics columnist Catherine Rampell, Rampell][nyt], but promulgated by Mims himself after the ball got rolling — was a pile of horseshit. No company in the computer/mobile industry makes products that hold their value longer than Apple’s. Used two-year-old iPhone 4S’s can be sold for $200; three-year-old iPhone 4’s still sell for $100 or more. What other companies make cell phones that retain any value at all after two years?

Which release of iOS was it that caused no problems whatsoever for some number of users upgrading older iPhones? Where is the mobile operating system that does a better job supporting older hardware than iOS?

It’s a throwaway line, Mims’s description of iOS 7 as having “crippled many older iPhones and led to complaints of planned obsolescence”, but it — along with the general “Apple Trap” narrative spawned by Rampell’s piece in The New York Times Magazine — exemplifies everything wrong with how Apple is covered by the technology press.

It begins with a pernicious lie: that Apple somehow booby-traps its devices to malfunction after a certain too-brief period to spur upgrades to brand-new products. The lie is most easily disproven, objectively, by the aforementioned high resale value of used Apple products, including the iPhone 4 at the core of Rampell’s personal tale of upgrade woe.

iOS 7 did cause real problems, some quite severe, for some users upgrading older iPhones (and I have no reason to doubt that Rampell was one of them). This happens with every major update to every operating system. Were the upgrade problems with iOS 7 any worse than previous versions of iOS? If so, not by much, from what I’ve seen. And even so, is this not an obvious possible consequence of the magnitude of the changes in iOS 7? On the one hand, the tech press clamors for more innovation at a faster pace from Apple; on the other, when the company redesigns every single visual element in the entire OS, bugs are held up as evidence of a deliberate conspiracy rather than honest (and as anyone who has ever worked on software would understand, inevitable) mistakes.

It’s a damned if they do, damned if they don’t scenario for Apple. If a three-year-old device doesn’t qualify for an iOS upgrade, one could argue that Apple is excluding it out of spite, to pressure the user to buy a new device just so they can run the latest software. But if Apple does provide an update for a three-year-old phone, and the upgrade proves problematic for some of them, then they’re accused of booby-trapping it, suckering users into upgrading their iPhones to a version of iOS that makes them run worse, so that the users will run out and buy a new iPhone.

What sense does this conspiracy theory make, though? There certainly is some lock-in to any platform, but can we not all agree there is less lock-in in mobile than anything else? Everyone is a recent switcher — iOS and Android are both relatively new platforms. Just a few years ago BlackBerry was riding high. In some ways, it’s easier to switch from an iPhone to an Android phone than it is to switch to an iPhone on a different carrier.

If older iPhones suffer upon being updated to iOS 7 — getting slower, or worse battery life, or losing Wi-Fi — to such a degree that the users conclude they now need to buy a new phone, would not the most likely and logical result be that it would inspire many of them to switch to Android (or Windows Phone, or anything) rather than to buy another iPhone?

If your car breaks down after just a few years, are you not more likely to replace it with a different brand? To posit that Apple customers are somehow different, that when they feel screwed by Apple their response is to go back for more, is “Cult of Mac” logic — the supposition that most Apple customers are irrational zealots or trend followers who just mindlessly buy anything with an Apple logo on it. The truth is the opposite: Apple’s business is making customers happy, and keeping them happy. They make products for discriminating people who have higher standards and less tolerance for design flaws or problems.

Android devices are famously slow to receive major software updates, and tend to get none at all. The carriers control the updates for Android phones, and the carriers really do want you to buy a new phone as soon as your two-year contract is up. Even with Google’s Nexus phones — for which Google, not the carriers, issues software updates, like Apple does — they only support an 18-month window for OS updates. Thus their own Galaxy Nexus phone, released in November 2011, did not qualify for the Android 4.4 update released a few months ago.

Apple supports four generations of iPhone with iOS 7, Google just two generations of Nexus phone with Android 4.4 — but it’s Apple that has widely been accused of devious “planned obsolescence”.

A few weeks ago, I read a piece by Sean Hollister for The Verge, on the rapid decline of hardware keyboards for smartphones (Hollister is a fan). What caught my eye, though was this passage at the outset:

I bought a Droid 4 twenty-one months ago.

As a devout user of physical QWERTY keyboards, I’m pretty sure I’m screwed.

My two-year contract expires in just three more months, but I don’t know if my phone will make it. I touch-type all my interviews into my Droid, but it’s simply not reliable anymore. There isn’t a day that goes by without some app experiencing crippling slowdown. The phone just can’t seem to hold a charge.

He seems neither outraged nor surprised that his phone, well under two years old, experiences “crippling slowdowns” every single day and “just can’t seem to hold a charge”. His only concern is that he can’t replace it with a top-tier new phone equipped with a keyboard.¹

Mims’s claim that “2013 was a lost year for tech” seems of the mindset that the role of the pundit is to drag everything and everyone into the muck, to piss on anything nice, to presume that Sturgeon’s estimation [Sturgeon’s estimation] of how much of everything is crap was 10 percent short.

But not everything is crap.

2013, like every year, brought us technological progress and wonder in doses large and small and sometimes surprisingly delightful. Computers have always been too difficult to use by non-experts; thanks to the iPhone and iPad — and, yes, Android and Windows Phone, too — we as an industry are finally producing devices and software that are good enough for non-experts to use with confidence. We’re crossing a hump where computers — in the form of tablets and phones — are finally a source of fun rather than fear and confusion. To dismiss the progress achieved during 2013 in this decades-long crusade is just sad. While Mims is apparently waiting around for jetpacks and self-driving cars, iPads are changing the way the world works.

That which escapes the grasp grasps of Sturgeon’s Law and achieves genuine excellence deserves to be celebrated, not torn down through false equivalences and the sensational exaggeration of imperfections. Call the imperfections out, to be sure — the job of the press is not to whitewash or cheerlead, either — but keep them in perspective; write about them in proportion to their severity and actual prevalence and relevance. There is a profound difference between that which is crap and that which is merely flawed.

There’s a nihilistic streak in tech journalism that I just don’t see in other fields. Sports, movies, cars, wristwatches, cameras, food — writers who cover these fields tend to celebrate, to relish, the best their fields have to offer. Technology, on the other hand, seems to attract enthusiasts with no actual enthusiasm.

Bizarre, creepy new ad from Samsung.

And here’s one from Nokia. [one from Nokia][n]. No idea what is going on in that one.