Category Archives: Apple

The iPhone 5s is outselling the 5c by a Factor of 3.4x

So much for demand for a “cheap” iPhone. In the first weekend it was available, the iPhone 5s outsold the 5c by a factor of 3.7 worldwide, says mobile and app analytics company Localytics. Apple hasn’t released the breakdown of sales for the iPhone 5s and 5c, and has only announced that 9 million iPhones were sold in the first weekend. Localytics, however, gets data from bits of code inserted into apps on users’ phones, which report back data like the model of phone being used. They make for an indirect but reasonably good measure of how many of each kind of phone there are.

One might expect that ratio to be skewed especially heavily towards the 5s in the US, where consumers are richer and the upfront price difference between the two is only $100 when buying them on a two-year contract from a mobile carrier. But in fact the iPhone 5c performed relatively worse against the iPhone 5s in the US, with 3.4 iPhone 5s selling for every 5c. (We’ve asked Localytics to tell us about the ratio of the two in emerging markets, but haven’t heard back yet.)
5s vs 5c us

Localytics didn’t release absolute numbers for how many iPhone 5s and 5c models its service saw; instead it looks at the proportion of all iPhones in its data that were the 5s or 5c. As expected, sales in the US, as indicated by the proportion of all existing iPhones that the 5s and 5c represent, were much higher than anywhere else in the world.

active iphones_global

And the network with the biggest sales of those iPhones was AT&T.

carrier

Methodology

Localytics is the leading analytics and marketing platform for mobile and web apps across more than 1 billion devices, 20,000 apps and 5,000 customers. Localytics processes 50 billion data points monthly. For this study, we examined over 20 million unique iPhones and investigated the breakdowns by United States carriers and by global activations. The timeframe for this study is all active iPhones from when the iPhone 5s and 5c were first released on September 20th, 2013 until 8 pm EST, Sunday September 22nd, 2013.

[Source: Localytics]

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Is iBeacon the real crack of iOS7 and NFC-killer?

At WWDC in June, Apple quietly announced iBeacon, one of the more prominent features of iOS 7. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, mentioned nothing about about it in the keynote, and Apple hasn’t provided any details about it; it was only seen on one slide in the WWDC keynote.

iBeacon Apple WWDC 2013 iOS 7

Nor did Apple say anything about it during the iPhone event Tuesday. But I’m sure this is going to be a big deal, and startup companies like Estimote agree, announcing its support for Apple’s technology Tuesday and releasing this demonstration video.

Why is that so? For a couple of reasons: it opens a door to new set of applications such as indoor maps and in-store marketing, it makes the internet of things a realty and it might kill NFC (near-field communications), the wireless technology most linked with mobile payments.

What is iBeacon?

Using Bluetooth Low Energy(BLE), iBeacon opens up a new whole dimension by creating a beacon around regions so your app can be alerted when users enter them. Beacons are a small wireless sensors placed inside any physical space that transmit data to your iPhone using Bluetooth Low Energy (also known as Bluetooth 4.0 and Bluetooth Smart).

For example, imagine you walk into a mall with an iPhone 5s (comes with iOS 7 and iBeacon). You are approaching a Macy’s store, which means your iPhone is entering into Macy’s iBeacon region. Essentially iBeacon can transmit customized coupons or even walking directions to the aisle where a particular item is located. It can prompt a customer with special promotions or a personalized messages and recommendations based on their current location or past history with the company. Smartphones that are in an iBeacon zone will benefit from personalized microlocation-based notification and actions.

iBeacon demonstration example mobile shopping

In the age of context, iBeacon can provide the information you needed when it is needed. Just like NFC, iBeacons even allow you to pay the bill using your smart phone. The best part? iBeacon can run for up to two years on a single coin battery and it comes with accelerometer, flash memory, a powerful ARM processor and Bluetooth connectivity. Also, you can add more sensors to iBeacon to provide better context.

What is BLE?

As the name implies, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is built specifically to consume small amounts of energy and make phone batteries last longer. But there are limitations with BLE when it comes to transferring data. BLE only supports very low data rates and you cannot stream audio using BLE. You can send small files using BLE and it is a good candidate for small data packets sent from wearable computing such as smart watches and fitness trackers. Built-in platform support for BLE was only added in Android 4.3 (some Android OEMs like Samsung and HTC did develop their own SDKs for BLE prior to Google releasing native support), which is why fitness tracker apps won’t work on some old Android phones.

Why it might be a NFC killer?

iBeacon could be a NFC killer because of its range. NFC tags are pretty cheap compared to NFC chips, but NFC tags are required on each product because NFC works only in very close proximity. In theory, NFC range is up to 20cm (7.87 inches), but the actual optimal range is less than 4cm (1.57 inches). Also, mobile devices need to contain a NFC chip that can handle any NFC communications. On the other hand, iBeacons are a little expensive compared to NFC chips, but iBeacons range is up to 50 meters. Not all phones have NFC chips, but almost all have Bluetooth capability.

Why it is so affordable?

Let’s go back to Macy’s. The average area occupied by a Macy’s store is 175,000 square feet, which is 16,258 square meters. iBeacon’s range is 50 meters (typical Bluetooth range), or 2,500 square meters. So a typical Macy’s store would need 7 iBeacons.

Estimote, a company which just launched to sell beacons, is taking pre-orders at the price of $99 for 3 beacons. The range of Estimote’s beacons is 50 meters, but the recommended range is 10 meters. If you go with the recommendation, you need 1 Estimote beacon for every 100 square meters, which would cost you about $5,000. If Macy’s wanted to add NFC tags (each at 10 cents) to all its products to send information to phones, it would cost $1,000 for 10,000 products, $10,000 for 100,000 products and $100,000 for 1 million products. NFC may not be needed on all products, but this will give a rough idea on how much it could cost.

Google’s focus is on NFC; it just added BLE support to Android

Google has been heavily focused on NFC from the beginning and it didn’t add platform support for BLE until the release of version 4.3. Lot of the apps that rely on BLE couldn’t release the apps for Android phones. Some Android OEM vendors recognized the need and rolled out their own implementations. Google finally listened to the demand and made it part of Android 4.3. But Google has continued to push on NFC and rolled out the NFC-based Android Beam in Android 4.0.

Apple’s focus on Bluetooth

iPhone5c20131-3

Apple has avoided NFC, and all the rumors about NFC getting added to iPhone 4 and iPhone 5 are turned out to be false. Instead of NFC, Apple worked on alternatives using Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. During the introduction of iOS 7′s AirDrop at WWDC in June, Apple’s mobile development chief Craig Federighi said, “There’s no need to wander around the room, bumping your phone,” referring how NFC phones need to be very close to transfer the data. As stated on Apple’s website:

AirDrop lets you quickly and easily share photos, videos, contacts — and anything else from any app with a Share button. Just tap Share, then select the person you want to share with. AirDrop does the rest using Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. No setup required. And transfers are encrypted, so what you share is highly secure.

New set of applications

With built-in microlocation geofencing features, iBeacon opens a door to new set of applications in indoor mapping. The GPS signals inside malls are very poor as the signals travel by line of sight, meaning they will pass through clouds, glass and plastic but will not go through most solid objects such as buildings and mountains.

This is the biggest problem for indoor navigation. Google has done in-store maps, but it couldn’t implement indoor navigation because of the line of sight issue. This is where iBeacon’s micro-location feature is going to shine.

From your smart phone, you’ll be able to connect to a nearest iBeacon and get its hard coded GPS location to navigate or use the signal to move to closer to iBeacon. iBeacon supports “enter” and “exit” events, so it can send different notifications while entering into the range and exiting out of the range. Imagine having a museum indoor tour with navigation, in-store navigation to the physical products, or navigation to terminals inside airports and subways.

BLE is the answer to internet of things

To make the internet of things a reality, a sensor’s form factor is very crucial. Size, affordability and internet connectivity are the key factors in a sensor. The possibilities are endless if you could control all sensors these remotely; switching on the AC on the way back home, controlling the refrigerator temperature based on the weather, controlling the room lighting from your smart phone, and so on. Estimote is also working on reducing the size of its beacons so that that they will be more affordable.

Apple has found a smart way to wirelessly transmit data over short distances using BLE. So why do you need to bump your phone with another? Why do you need NFC if you could share the data with anyone in the region with the existing bluetooth technology?

BLE can solve these microlocation data challenges in ways that NFC can’t duplicate.

Hari Gottipati is a software professional, distinguished architect, thought leader, consultant, speaker and freelance writer who specializes in Open Systems, Java, internet scale computing/apps, big data, NoSQL, mobile and Web 2.0. He is currently working as a distinguished principal architect at Apollo Group and in the past he worked for many mobile startups, as well as big companies including Yahoo, Travelocity, and Motorola.

[Source: Gigaom]

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How Apple’s iOS 7 Changes Everything For App Designers

If you are a mobile developer getting to know what’s new in iOS 7, you’ve actually got it fairly easy. It’s the mobile designers who are banging their heads against the wall.

Everything app designers knew about the look and feel of iOS has basically been tossed out the window in iOS 7. Buttons no longer have borders, drop-down displays are translucent, icons are completely different. Designers are basically going to have to start from scratch with iOS 7 to make sure their apps fit with Apple’s new design guidelines.

It is about time too. On iOS, designers have had it easy for years as the basic user interface guidelines from Apple have stayed pretty much the same. Developers, meanwhile, had to deal with all the new features and functions that Apple released (Siri, Maps, AirPlay and so forth) as it iterated iOS through the years. Now, designers are getting their comeuppance.

Here are the major design changes in iOS 7 and some thoughts on how to get started implementing them.

9 Major Changes

iOS 7 has gone “flat.” If you don’t know what that means, you are probably not a Web designer. For those who are not in the know, flat design eschews shadows and emulating physical objects in design (like a bookshelf for Apple’s Newsstand) for simple constructs. iOS has also gone skinny, with the font and borders line having a lot less width than before. The color scheme is a bit different, with black and white modes, hints of red, blue and pastel all over iOS 7.

iOS 7 has some nine major UI differences from its predecessors:

1. Flat Design – See above. You will notice that the UI of iOS looks quite different in how it is presented. Fewer soft edges, more thin, hard lines. Depending on your perspective, this could be an improvement.

2. Font – The “skinny” aspect of iOS 7 begins with using Helvetica Neue UltraLight as a primary font. You can see this all over the design, though Apple makes it fairly easy to change the size of the font for different purposes.

3. Icons – Icons have been changed significantly. Most have gone borderless. Icons are resizable for different screen sizes (iPhone vs. iPad, portrait vs. landscape).

4. Colors – To accommodate the flat and skinny, Apple updated its primary color schemes to be blue, red, white, black and… pastel.

5. Borderless – You thought that you had your buttons down? Well, all of them are about to change. Solid-color buttons are (for the most part) out of iOS 7, replaced by buttons that don’t have border edges and float on top of the background.

6. Layers – This is where advanced designers are going to have some fun. The new UI layout allows you to present several different layers in one screen of an app. So you can align navigation and tab bar views with a custom view hierarchy to create a cool new interface. Layers also help with the fact that much of iOS design employs translucent windows.

7. Translucence – Say you have the drop-down notifications menu sitting over your app. Users will now be able to see the general colors of what is behind that menu.

8. Gestures – iOS 7 knows when someone is holding the device, allowing enterprising developers to manipulate the interface in some new ways. Apple also introduced new navigation choices, including the ability to return to the last app you were in with a swipe from the edge of the screen. You will also be able to change tabs in Safari with end-of-screen swipes or flick between messages in email.

9. Status Bars & Menus – Menus, controls, navigation and status bars are different by definition of the flat and skinny styles in the new UI and the different color schemes.

New User Interface Kits

If you are designing for iOS 7, there are three things you are going to get really used to: the new UIKit Dynamics, Text Kit and all the new features to implement the design changes in Xcode 5.

UIKit Dynamics – Helps improve user experience by incorporating real-world behavior into apps. New behavioral changes in iOS 7 include Attachment (specifying a connection between two objects and moving then dynamically with each other) and Push (different angles and vectors in how an app is manipulated). The UI convention for gravity behavior  works on a coordinate system that charts points in the movement of the device. Understanding dynamics may be confusing at first, but it is one of the more interesting user interface elements in iOS 7.

Text Kit – The greatest aspect of the new Text Kit for iOS 7 is that it should allow designers to deploy text using significantly less code. Text Kit offers a high-level framework for handling text characteristics on pages and columns, around objects (like an image) and allows for designers to edit, display, store and create text.

Upgrading Your App Designs

Apple has 900,000 apps in the iOS App Store. All built on iOS 6 or before.  If that number includes your apps, it’s time to update.

This is where the new Xcode 5 Developer Preview will help. If you chose to create most of your buttons and menus and other simple functions using Apple’s standard iOS principles, then the Auto Layout function in Xcode will automatically update them for you. If you don’t use Auto Layout… well, time to get cracking on manually updating your custom design elements. You can, of course, also take a hybrid approach where you let Apple take care of the simple stuff and customize certain specific actions in your app. Many advanced developers take this approach.

Apple insists that every iOS 7 app do three things: update the app icon (120 x 120 pixels), update the launch image within the app and support Retina display with all artwork and images.

Apple suggests (though it’s not mandatory) that all apps adopt the translucent user interface elements, redesign custom bars, update background images to support borderless buttons and adopt dynamic types in the UIKit (see above).

If you think you can update your app and sneak it by Apple’s App Store review board without updating the UI, you are going to be very sorry. The design in iOS 7 is extremely important to Apple and a consistent look and feel across apps in the App Store has always been high on Apple’s agenda. As such, Apple offers three guidelines to keep in mind:

  1. Deference – The user interface helps users but doesn’t get in the way.
  2. Clarity – Everything (text size, icons, images) focuses on functionality through design.
  3. Depth – Layers and motion, “heighten users’ delight and understanding,” according to Apple’s UI Transition Guide.

That’s the primer designers need to begin thinking of updating app design for iOS 7. Make sure you familiarize yourself with all of Apple’s new guidelines before applying the paint.

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Apple TV and AirPlay Fuel Rise of Dual-Screen Apps

Dual-screen apps are a new phenomena, enabled by the advent of wireless technologies that allow for effortless pairing of a PC, tablet or smartphone with a TV. They are changing how people are interacting and “consuming” content within apps. For developers this creates many new opportunities to provide better experiences for their users, but it requires thinking about dual-screen setups from the start as well as new tools.

The opportunity for dual-screen apps is huge. And it’s more than just watching a video or playing a game: Dual-screen apps have the potential to transform the office meeting room, the classroom, the retail store, the hospital, and really any other context where people are interacting around content and information and where that information would benefit from rendering and display on a large screen such as a TV monitor.

To better understand this concept, it’s necessary to step back and reconsider the nature of how we write software and the user experience model for software.

The Evolution From Single Screen

Today, the predominant user-experience model for software and applications online is a single screen. We browse web applications on a desktop PC, mobile browser or tablet browser and interact with and consume content and applications on that screen. It is very much a single, individual user task. Likewise, we install apps onto these devices and consume and interact with information, perform tasks, make purchases, etc. through these apps. Again, this is a solitary single individual task.

As a result, when software creators plan their applications, they are typically designed and developed with this single user, single-screen concept in mind.

Dual-screen apps change all of that by shifting the software and user experience model from one user to potentially many, and from one screen (PC/phone/tablet) to two screens (phone/tablet and TV monitor). From a software development and user-experience perspective, the large monitor (which is the true second screen — versus the standard concept that considers the tablet as the second screen) becomes an open computing surface where one can render any form of application functionality, information, data and content.

Importantly, designers and developers need to shed the concept that “TVs” are for rendering video, and instead think about TVs as large monitors on which they can render applications, content and interactivity that’s supported by a touch-based tablet application.

The Social Computing Surface

While we have the greatest affinity for large monitors as fixtures of the living room, increasingly flat-screen monitors are a becoming a ubiquitous part of our social fabric. In fact, large monitors often sit at the center of any social setting. In the home, these large monitors provide a social surface for those sharing the living room space. Increasingly, monitors are a common part of nearly every business meeting room space — not for watching video, but for projecting shared content and business data and presentations that support business and organization collaboration.

Likewise, monitors are in medical and hospital settings providing visual information to patients. They are increasingly in nearly every classroom, whether through a projector or an actual TV monitor and support the presentation of information that is needed for a collection of students. Large monitors are increasingly ubiquitous in retail settings as well.

The key concept here is that this pervasive adoption of TV monitors is the tip of the spear in creating a social computing surface in the real world. Forget about social networks that connect people across their individual, atomized computing devices — the real social world is groups of people in a shared space (living room, office, classroom, store, etc.) interacting around information and data on a shared screen.

Until very recently, the way in which these TV monitors could be leveraged was limited to connecting a PC through an external display connector to a projector or directly to a TV. The recent breakthrough that Apple has fostered and advanced more than any other tech company is AirPlay and associated dual-screen features in iOS and Apple TV.

Specifically, Apple has provided the backbone for dual screen apps, enabling:

  • Any iOS device (and OS X Mountain Lion-enabled PCs) to broadcast its screen onto a TV. Think of this as essentially a wireless HDMI output to a TV. If you haven’t played with AirPlay mirroring features in iOS and Apple TV, give it a spin. It’s a really exciting development.

  • A set of APIs and an event model for enabling applications to become “dual-screen aware” (e.g. to know when a device has a TV screen it can connect to, and to handle rendering information, data and content onto both the touch screen and the TV screen).

With the existing Apple TV unit sales already outselling the Xbox in the most recent quarter, we can see a world that goes from approximately 5 million dual-screen-capable Apple TVs to potentially 15-20 million in the next couple of years, and eventually to 30-50 million as new and improved versions of the Apple TV companion device come to market.

As a result, it’s an incredible time to experiment with this fundamental shift in computing, software and user experience, to embrace a world where the Tablet is the most important personal productivity device, and the TV is a rich and powerful surface for rendering content and applications.

How Dual-Screen Apps Will Work

As we rethink the TV as a computing surface for apps, it’s really helpful to have some ideas on what we’re talking about. Below are a series of hypothetical examples of what is possible today and of course what will be even bigger as these new dual screen run-times proliferate.

Buying a House: Imagine you’re looking into buying a house. You open your tablet app from a reputable home-listing service and perform a search using criteria that you care about and begin adding potential fits to a list of houses you’d like to explore. When you select a specific house, the app detects you’re connected to an Apple TV and launches a second screen on the TV that provides rich and large visual displays about the house — HD-quality photos and contextual information about the house. Here, the power of dual screen is the fact that you and your spouse can sit in the living room and explore a house together without crouching over a computer or tablet on someone’s lap, and the house can be presented with HD-quality media and contextual information.

Buying a Car: Imagine launching the BMW app on your tablet and deciding to both learn about car models and configure a car — like buying a house, often a “social” decision between partners. On the TV, the app renders a high-quality rendition of the car. As you explore the car’s features from your tablet, associated media (photos, video and contextual metadata) render onto the large TV in front of you. As you configure your car using your tablet, it updates a visual build of the car on the large screen, providing an inline HD video for specific features.

Kids Edutainment: Looking to introduce your three-year old to key cognitive development concepts? Launch a learning app where the child interacts with the tablet application and sees visual information, animation and other content on the TV screen. Their touches on the tablet instantly produce rich and relevant content on the TV screen. Learning to count? Feed cookies over AirPlay to Cookie Monster on the TV who eats and counts with you. Learning about concepts like near and far? Tap the table to make a character move closer and away from you. Build a character on the tablet and watch the character emerge on the TV screen.

Sales Reporting: As a sales manager, you walk into your team conference room with a TV monitor mounted on the wall. You kick open your Salesforce.com tablet app on your tablet and begin filtering and bringing up specific reports on your tablet, and with the touch of a button you push unique visual reports onto the shared surface of the conference room TV. Here, the sales manager wants control of the searches and filters they have access to and only wants to render the charts and reports that are needed for the whole team to see.

Board Games: Imagine playing Monopoly with your family in the living room — one or two or maybe even three touch devices present (phones, iPod touches, iPads). Each player has their inventory of properties and money visible on their device. The app passes control to each user as they play. On the TV screen is the Monopoly “board” with a dynamic visual that updates as users play — the movement of players, the building up of properties, etc.

The Classroom: A teacher walks into a classroom with an Apple TV connected to a HDMI-capable projector that projects onto a wall or screen. From their tablet, they pull up an application that is designed to help teach chemistry and the periodic table — they can control which element to display up on the screen, and the TV provides rich information, video explanations, etc. The app is designed to provide ‘public quiz’ functionality where the TV display shows a question, presumably related to material just reviewed or from homework, students raise their hand to answer and then the answer and explanation is displayed.

Doctor’s Office: You are meeting with your doctor to go over test results from an MRI scan. The doctor uses his or her tablet to bring up your results, picks visuals to throw onto the TV monitor in the room, then uses his or her finger to highlight key areas and talk to you about they’re seeing.

Retail Electronics Store: You’re at a Best Buy and interested in buying a new high-quality digital camera. A sales specialist approaches you with tablet in hand and asks you a few questions about what you’re interested in while tapping those choices into their tablet app. From there, it brings up on a nearby TV display a set of options of cameras — based on further probing, they drill into a specific camera choices which brings up a rich visual with a video overview of the specific camera that you’re interested in.

Consuming News: A major revolution has just broken out in a nation across the planet. Timehas captured incredible audio, photos and video of the events. You and your friends sit down in front of the TV to learn more. You open the Time Magazine tablet app and bring up a special digital edition about the revolution. From the tablet, you flip through and render onto the TV rich HD-quality photographs, listen to first hand audio accounts (accompanied by photos) and watch footage from the events. The app renders a huge visual timeline of the events that led up to the revolution. It’s an immersive media experience that can be easily shared by friends and family in the living room.

Consuming Video: Last but not least, of course, dual-screen apps will be essential to any app that is about consuming video — whether a news or magazine app, a vertical website (think Cars.com, BabyCenter.com, AllRecipies.com, etc.), or of course a catch-up TV app from a TV network or show that you care about. You open the app on your table to explore what to watch, and when you’re ready to watch the show instantly pops onto your TV in gorgeous HD quality, and the tablet app becomes your remote control and presents relevant contextual information about the video, episode or what have you.

The Coming Dual-Screen Revolution

This is such a groundbreaking approach to apps and software we expect lots of others to try and emulate what Apple is doing. Already, Microsoft is promoting the ability to use its Surface Tablet in conjunction with apps built for the Xbox. Samsung has introduced features in its tablets and TVs to enable easy media sharing from your tablet or phone onto a Samsung Smart TV, and surely Google will follow suit with similar features to AirPlay in the Android OS. Apple is still early in deploying this technology — it’s sometimes flaky and a little bit hidden from end-user view — but I expect major changes in the coming months and years.

Virtually every application that exists on the web and phones and tablets likely has a dual-screen use case. Simply put, Web and app designers and developers need to imagine a world where the tablet and TV are a single run-time for their applications which each screen providing distinct value for the user controlling the app and the user consuming rich media and information on a large display. Sometimes this is just one person (like picking and watching a show or playing a game or learning something), but crucially and very often I believe that these apps will be designed with multiple users — and a social context — in mind.

[Source: Mashable]

Nielsen: Your kid wants an iOS device for Christmas, don’t mess it up!

When it comes to devices, kids’ holiday wish lists are simple this year. The most-wanted gifts are predominantly from one company—Apple.  According to a recent Nielsen study, Apple’s popularity leading up to the holiday season continues a trend seen over the last couple of years, with American kids aged 6-12 generally more interested in the latest iOS offerings than other consumer electronics and gaming devices.

Approximately half the children surveyed expressed interest in the full-sized iPad (up from 44% last year), and 36 percent in the new iPad Mini. The iPod Touch and iPhone are also coveted devices among these young consumers (36% and 33%, respectively).  Kids are also likely to ask for dedicated gaming hardware this holiday, with 39 percent excited to own Nintendo’s just-released console offering, Wii U, and 29 percent indicating they want a device from that company’s portable DS family.  Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 also proved appealing, with approximately one-quarter of kids 6-12 saying they want these high definition consoles.

Among consumers aged 13 and older, tablets and full-sized computers were the top electronics choices, with roughly one in five indicating they want to acquire the iPad (vs. 24% last year), any other tablet, or a computer.  Reinforcing the notion that the tablet market is one to watch, non-Apple devices—lead by Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Samsung Galaxy offerings—proved nearly as desirable as the iPad among teens and adults, while e-readers showed a slight decline in interest from 2011.  Consumers 13 years and older were also interested in purchasing the Wii U, the iPhone and Internet-enabled TVs.

With discretionary dollars and heavy competition across gift categories, these study results suggest that consumer electronics and gaming devices should be an exciting sector to watch this holiday shopping season.

[Source: Nielsen]

Apple Reality Distortion Field

Do Apple lovers really “think different?” What makes those who don’t buy Apple products turn away from them? This infographic gets to the bottom of why people buy Apple products, and what keeps them from buying them. And it shows how they feel about those products once they’ve bought them.

You’ll probably agree, there’s something about buying an Apple product that makes people act differently. It could be part of that famous “reality distortion field” associated with Steve Jobs, or maybe it’s just because Apple products are actually superb. The survey behind this artwork aims to quantify that thinking, measuring the differences of opinion between Apple lovers and Apple haters.

Some of you might say there’s no reality being distorted at all, and Apple products are just far superior to its competition. At the same time, many of the 48% of U.S. adults who’ve never owned an Apple device probably don’t think Apple products are insanely great, but point to Apple aficionados as simply insane. Others in that group just plain can’t afford Apple’s expensive baubles.

What’s the truth? It wasn’t the mission of market research firm Ask Your Target Market (AYTM) to find out whether subjective opinions and feelings about Apple products were true or not. The goal was to measure the difference in thinking between those who embrace Apple products and those who don’t.

Using its Ask Your Target Market research platform, AYTM Research tapped into its huge hoard of 4.5 million consumers in multiple countries to come up with the data behind this lovely infographic. Take a look at the full data set here.

If you’re having trouble understanding this unusual infographic, here’s a quick guide: On the left side are those who haven’t bought Apple products, and on the right are those who have been enveloped in Apple’s alleged reality distortion field.

What do you think? Are you trapped in Apple’s reality distortion field? Is there even such a thing?

[Source: Ask Your Target Market]

How the iPhone 5 Has Affected the Smartphone Market

With all the new smartphones announced over the past few months — including the iPhone 5 — it should come as no surprise that many people are looking to buy a new smartphone.

AYTM Research, working with Mashable, conducted a detailed market research study of the smartphone market as it stands now at the end of 2012, and created this exclusive infographic looking at what prospective buyers are most interested in, particularly looking at the iPhone market.

Some of its findings:

  • 73% of people looking to buy a smartphone in the next 6 months are already smartphone owners
  • Current Android owners are 2.4x more likely to switch to an iPhone than vice versa
  • 87% of current iPhone owners plan to buy a new iPhone in the next 6 months
  • Only 9% of current iPhone owners are considering a switch to Android

Check out all of ATYM’s findings in the infographic below. What do you think about the stats?

How the iPhone 5 Has Affected the Smartphone Market [INFOGRAPHIC]

[Source: Mashable]