Let us now harken back, if you will, all the way to those heady days of the spring of 2014. Val Kilmer was the Ice Man, college dorm rooms were grooving to the sounds of Peter Gabriel’s So and the entire country was soon to be mesmerized by the baby stuck in a well.
Wait, that was 1986. Sorry, it just seems so long ago that we were being told how Xiaomi was going to kill Apple in China, the United States and, eventually, the off-world colonies. Because it’s just obvious that everyone wants cheap phones and they care about literally nothing else. This much we can all agree on.
Or, well, the Motley Fool’s Chris Neiger who called Xiaomi “the real iPhone killer” could agree on it. The Macalope and others pointed out several times that Samsung was more likely to suffer than Apple because of Xiaomi’s ascendancy because Apple didn’t compete at the low end of the market. Sure enough, that’s how it played out. Who saw that coming?
Oh, right, the Macalope and others. How silly. What a crazy thing to say and then say again as if to draw further attention to it. The Macalope regrets over-emphasizing the point that this was entirely knowable before the fact.
Disclaimer: He does not actually regret over-emphasizing that point.
Here’s where it takes a turn, though. Because despite what you might have read in the papers, history didn’t end last year. While Apple continues to sell iPhones like they’re whatever the Chinese equivalent of hot cakes is, Xiaomi’s fortunes are not assured, either.
Well, that’s annoying. Because Huawei is even harder to pronounce than Xiaomi. The Macalope usually just stuffs his mouth with alfalfa and hopes no one notices.
“Did you say ‘hoywoy’?”
“Uh, nnnnnnno?”
Well, don’t think that the eternal wheel of Apple doom ever stops spinning. Because this latest ascendant is also a threat to Apple.
…Apple is facing more competition, and Huawei is one of the formidable Chinese challengers.
Spin, wheel of Apple doom, spin!
The country’s smartphone makers might finally be ready to overtake the [sic] China’s top market share—and the world’s— from Apple and Samsung.
There are only three certainties in life: Death, taxes and Apple doom.