[lbo-talk] Is Iphone mostly white?

// ravi ravi at platosbeard.org
Fri Sep 21 18:46:36 PDT 2012


On Sep 21, 2012, at 4:44 PM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
> [WS} I made them up. I meant to say "it is mostly marketing that is
> driving the I product craze" - people lining up in the middle of the
> night to be first buy a new i phone etc. I am not implying that Apple
> does not make excellent products - it certainly does - but it is not
> the product functionality that is driving the I-phenomenon.
>

The lining up perhaps, and even the general smartphone craze (in the sense: do we really need to SMS, check Facebook and email so frequently? difficult to point to objective reasons to justify this “need”). But otherwise, I don’t think Apple does marketing any more than the other players, and the marketing seems to be intentionally mid-brow (even the music is 60s rock or its modern equivalent). I would venture that Apple likely spends much lesser in advertising (which admittedly is only part of marketing) than its competitors by volume.

A lot of factors affect the iPhone vs Android stats. The iPhone for a while was available only on AT&T and Android gained market share pretty much using this wedge. Further, Apple controls how much telcos can fuck over users, so telcos in turn aggressively push Android and Windows Phone devices over iPhones, to their users.

This page — http://technologyuser.com/2011/04/07/apples-market-footprint-and-racialethnic-glimpse/ — dated Apr 2011 says the numbers point differently:


> What may surprise some is that there is a racial/ethnic difference. The iPod and iPhone have reached their highest usage rates among adults identifying as Asian/Non-Hispanic and Non-White/Hispanic. Apple iPod penetration of Asian/Non-Hispanic online adults is 52% and among Non-White/Hispanic adults the rate is 42%. Apple iPhone penetration is 5% of online adults, and a more than triple 16% of Asian/Non-Hispanic adults and 12% of Non-White/Hispanic adults.

While this one — http://engagingcities.com/article/study-highlights-increased-smartphone-internet-use-minorities, http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Smartphones/Summary/Key-Findings.aspx — says the opposite:


> One-quarter (26%) of black cell owners say that they have an Android device, which is significantly higher than the rate for both whites (12%) and Latinos (16%). By contrast, just 5% of African-American cell owners own an iPhone, which is half the national average.

This latter page also has the interesting finding that African Americans and Hispanics proportionally own/use smartphones more than Whites.

—ravi



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