Apple was right to kill the 30-pin dock,
but wrong to wildly profit from it
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| Only temporary until Lightning.com eats your lunch |
On the one hand, it arguably helped the company shrink the size of its new phones. But on the other, it renders all existing iPhone-docking accessories redundant. Imagine you are a hotel with a radio/speaker that guests iPod plugs into in over 5000 rooms or a chain which may have 250,000 rooms worldwide?
To bridge the gap, Apple has released a 30-pin-to-Lightning dock adapter -- but it's charging $40 for it.
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| My evidence My Camera. Walgreen's "decks the walls" with iPhone stuff people will buy and trash their planets and futures with all this made for non-life essential consumption plastic. |
Plus I just updated the software in my iPhone 4 and the 30 pin will no longer send signals to my flat screen (which uses a 30-pin HIMI adaptor and then only streams moving content).
It's hard to imagine that Legos, Tron and a Brachiosaurus could have anything in common. And yet they do: They're all variations of an Apple iPhone dock. Since the iPod was introduced in 2001, accessory makers have been looking for ways to capitalize on Apple’s devices, and it’s easy to see why.
In 2011 the global market for mobile phone accessories will rake in an estimated $34 billion in revenue. Apple-approved products—accessories made by Apple or branded by Apple—make up about $2 to $3 billion of that. Apple's share may not be the largest, but according to Michael Morgan, senior analyst for mobile devices at ABI Research, there's a reason iPhone 5 accessories were popping up online in anticipation that the phone would be released this month (it wasn’t).
Unlike with other companies, the makers of accessories for Apple’s iPod, iPhone and iPad don't have to worry about whether the devices will sell or if consumers will want accessories for them. In other words, Apple’s recent lineup has become the equivalent of a sure thing.
Four years ago, in the pre-iPhone era, the accessories market—while not small—was certainly more fractured. This was due, in part, to industry issues, such as the number of different-shaped devices, mobile vendors who created their own accessories, and low attach rates, meaning the number of accessories and related products sold for each phone was not high.
Since every Walgreen's has even jumped into the game dedicating prime realty to showcase only a very limited number of accessories, a domain like Lightning.com could become the Zappos for all accessories for every cell phone. Except Apple holds the trademark, so they can be the ones who like in Music and Apps, sell other people' stuff.
Says renowned Pulitzer prize winning environmentalist Perry Beam, "Pretty amazing all this need for stuff that wasn't needed 4 years ago and that our parents and their parents lived very well without. But as long as we have an economic system based on infinite growth using finite resources, people will buy and trash their planets and futures with all this made for non-life essential consumption plastic.
Sources: Wired The Fiscal Times
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