{"by":"9oliYQjP","id":586387,"kids":[586411,586503,586425,586398],"parent":586313,"text":"I suspect this is Apple's response to a phenomenon originating from China. I've been reading up about the Chinese knock-off cellphone, or \"shanzhai phone\", industry. It has become an incredibly lucrative business. Why? Because, it's now possible for a company, comprised of a small group of 3-5 people, to design, build (or rather contract to a factory), and market phones. The technology has gotten to the point where most of the difficult technical design hurdles have been removed by the presence of a cellphone-on-a-chip so-to-speak. Sound familiar to anyone around here? So you have these tiny, agile startups being able to compete with the big boys. A lot of the big boys are still in denial, and will probably try to respond to the shanzhai phone industry by attempting to get the Chinese government to crack down on it. Not Apple; their approach will be to out-innovate these players by playing off the one weakness that they have: that they cannot design their own cellphone-on-a-chip.<p>I won't make any predictions about whether Apple will still be a dominant player in the cellphone market 10 years from now. However, I will say that this move almost surely guarantees they will still be in the game by then. Other companies that rely on the same logistics and supply chain that the shanzhai guys do probably won't be as lucky unless they change their strategy as well.<p>UPDATE: The reading I've been doing was on my iPhone and I didn't bookmark everything. But one article was definitely this one: <a href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/technology/28cell.html\" rel=\"nofollow\">http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/technology/28cell.html</a>","time":1241065296,"type":"comment"}