Dilger: Hey, what about the trouble in Androidland?

One of Apple’s fiercest defenders comes to Apple’s defense.

From Daniel Eran Dilger’s Apple note sends media pundits into a fit of histrionic gibberish:

Apple now expects to report about $84 billion in revenues in Q1, compared to its record year-ago Q1 revenues of $88.3 billion. That’s a revenue decrease of less than 4.9 percent YoY, significantly less than half of the 12 percent crash Samsung Mobile IM suffered last quarter without anyone even noticing, let alone causing any faces to melt, and not even comparable to the 22 percent crash that the media shrugged off in October while only modestly acknowledging that the Galaxy S9 wasn’t exactly a hit…

That means Apple was grazed by the bullet of weakening Chinese demand while Samsung has been taking a solid punch directly to the gut every quarter. So why are pundits freaking out about Apple’s relatively minor shift in expected guidance, while shrugging off Samsung’s even larger hits against a much smaller and far less profitable business —like in Q2, when Samsung IM earned $2.2 billion while Apple reported profits of $12.612 billion?…

One of the favorite cheers of Android promoters is that these companies are generating market share on volumes of devices sold. Unfortunately, one quarter of “share” is a Pyrrhic victory for factories that produce large volumes at near zero profits. That’s because buyers are just as likely to buy their next Android from another commodity factory.

There is no loyalty in Androidland, no reason for Android licensees to even try to keep old phones working, no point to subsiding battery replacements, and no hope for any licensee to ever build an installed base of loyal buyers. It’s a vicious cycle of self-defeating greed and cheap efficiency that’s effectively cork-screwing a hole for itself into the ground.

My take: Dilger with a head of steam. His favorite target, after the Android apologists, is the business commentariat. Here’s the start of his jeremiad:

Like recent batches of Romaine lettuce, the stomach-churning word-salad served up about Apple over the past couple days doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the issues the company actually, and specifically, detailed for its investors. In fact, virtually all of it appears to have been prewritten and simply queued up to have been printed whether or not Apple had issued any statement, or even if the company hadn’t faced any problems in China at all.

It’s like a sentient broken record that can’t stop playing itself. All the former business magazines that are now just branded blogs with contributor networks agree: Apple’s problem in China this quarter is really evidence that “its devices are now so expensive and the improvements to them so minimal that many users prefer to fix them and postpone buying a new one,” as virtually every one of these content mills plunked out as “news” this week.