I got an email from Andy Rubin this morning reminding me that the coming release of the Essential Phone that he will shortly be releasing to market. This may be the biggest challenge to the iPhone’s dominance ever. Rubin who came out of Danger, Microsoft, and Google and is credited with creating Android which eventually took the lead from iOS in mobile. Rubin is the only guy that ever really seemed to scare Steve Jobs in recent years. Apple is in a tenuous position because they are largely using lock in and an increasingly false sense of status to hold customers and, except for the period when Samsung’s phones were catching fire, have had trouble getting new customers. In fact, their most recent success appears to mostly come from price increases and cost reductions. I doubt having a key differentiator as being the most overpriced phone will be a winning strategy.
However, their coming iPhone 8 10th anniversary phone is supposed to be a world beater (but things aren’t looking good) and it better be with an estimated retail price well over $1,000. But the Essential phone is also a technology showcase, it may have better core technology than the iPhone 8 but lag on things like screen and new technologies like iris recognition. However, it is priced a little over half what the iPhone 8 suggesting you could buy it and a decent small drone for the price of the iPhone 8. And given its small initial shipping volume, it will be both more elite (rare) than the iPhone 8 and far cheaper. That could be a huge problem for Apple.
