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January 9, 2012

Apple expects to sell no less than $10 billion worth of iPads and about $9 to $10 billion of Macs to business and enterprise customers this year, according to Forrester’s latest Global Tech Market Outlook.

Those are 68 percent and 55 percent increases, respectively, over last year's numbers, and this is blowing away even the most optimistic sales forecast set forth no less than just three months ago. And in 2013, spending on iPads and Macs could hit $17 billion and $13 billion respectively. Slowly but surely, Apple is making inroads into the enterprise IT segment, a sector traditionally dominated by Microsoft and IBM.

And, as Forrester notes, that is somewhat totally unexpected. “The biggest disruptive force in the computer equipment market right now is Apple,” the research firm says in its report. “This is a surprise, because Apple has not and does not directly address the corporate market, while turning a wide variety of consumer technology markets upside-down."

"But its rapid growth in the corporate market has been the big surprise of 2011, and it will be even more of a factor in 2012,” continued Forrester.

As Forrester explains, “The Apple assault on the corporate market has so far taken place without much formal Apple support, and probably without Apple itself understanding its full extent and the near-term impact this will have on its sales. That’s simply because corporate adoption of Apple products has been largely non-existant so far, but this is rapidly changing.”

But here's the question on everyone's mind-- if Apple isn't aggressively pushing its hardware into the enterprise market, how is it getting there? Well, employees of Fortune 500 companies and also of smaller businesses are buying iPhones and iPads, and sometimes even MacBooks, as well, and most of the time with their own money.

And their employers are increasingly supporting them on the back end as well. Sometimes, employers are even subsidizing them for their use. This is the “consumerization of IT” we’re hearing so much about these days, and clearly it’s working very much in Apple’s favor.

In other mobile news

You can expect no less than about 80 new mobile devices featuring wireless charging that will be demonstrated over the next few days at CES 2012, and Motorola is expected to push the technology to the top. The presentations will take place at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and most of the products will be the usual battery replacements and cases which are still necessary to wirelessly enable the mobile devices.

Motorola's endorsement could be critical for the Qi charging standard, but it suffers greatly from not being embedded in devices until chargers are widespread, which won't happen until devices support it sometime later this year.

In a pre-CES interview last week, the Wireless Power Consortium said that it would be demonstrating a tablet with the technology built in, which would be launched later this year. But given all the noise made around wireless charging, it seems likely that it will come from from Motorola.

The real issue with wireless charging is that it solves a problem which really doesn't exist. Electric toothbrushes make effective use of wireless connections, for the sake of water impermeability. But elsewhere, the universal adoption of microUSB has made keeping things topped up a great deal easier.

Very few people will go to the effort of buying, and fitting, a special case just to avoid pushing a plug home, but if the technology were built in by default then more people would buy charging plates which would, in turn, encourage greater embedding of the technology.

The Wireless Power Consortium is probably right that this CES will be important for the future of wireless charging, but which direction that future goes is still far from certain, even with Motorola's support. Google acquired Motorola Mobitity in August of last year for $12.5 billion.

In other mobile news

On any given day, 3G networks are struggling hard to support the rapidly increasing demands of smartphone users as their new devices require more and more data from the internet, says a report by market research firm Arieso.

4G and LTE networks make better use of wireless spectrum and are a lot more efficient, but that's not the case with older, third generation systems.

What's more, iPhone 4S users use twice as much data as iPhone 4 users, and three times as much as iPhone 3G users. Arieso, measured the overall data consumption of 1.1 million mobile internet customers in Europe, the U.S. and Africa over a 24-hour period in November and found disparities in internet consumption according to the devices used.

And the Apple iPhone 3G was taken as the benchmark. Users of the HTC Nexus One, the HTC Desire and Samsung Galaxy phones downloaded more data than users of Nokia phones or BlackBerry mobile handsets.

HTC owners seemed to be the biggest data uploads: HTC Desire S users typically shifted out 3.23 times as much data as iPhone 3G users.

Increased ease of use, more data intensive background apps and efforts to stick more content in the cloud have pushed data consumption right up. And faster phones with more functions chomp through more megabytes.

Michael Flanagan, CTO of Arieso, said that the biggest single factor pushing the rise was likely to be the move towards device synchronisation and sharing content between devices.

Looking at the iPhone 4S, there are a finite number of differences between it and the iPhone 4, so we can look at it and assess the impact of the new features.

Additionally, it seems that the cloud-based features of the iPhone 4S can make a small difference. For example, when the iPhone syncs content with Mac computers, it appears to use a bit less bandwidth as a bonus to the user.

The Ariesco report also noted that on the day it created the survey, it measured an average of about one percent of extreme users that were responsible for about 50 percent of all mobile data downloads.

Considering that the results included dongle users, it's likely that these will be torrent downloaders on laptops with no-limit internet SIM cards watching 2-hour movies.

In other mobile news

Wireless Industry News could not confirm this as of this morning, but there are some reports today that Apple could be opening new store-within-a-store locations in a few Target locations later in 2012, enabling it to expand its retail reach into smaller metro areas in the U.S. where the cost to open a flagship Apple store would be too high and impractical.

According to a source familiar with Apple's plans, the company could begin operating Apple-branded areas within 20 to 25 larger Target stores in smaller cities which can't support a standalone Apple Store.

The initial opening would be a small start, given that Target, the second-largest discount retail chain in the U.S., already operates 1752 stores in the country.

So far, Apple has opened no less than 359 of its own corporate retail stores across the globe, 245 of which are in the United States.

Apple currently also operates a "store within a store" at over 600 Best Buy locations, some of which feature staffing by Apple Solution Consultants. Best Buy has over 1,000 total stores in the U.S.

Apple once had similar arrangements with Sears, Circuit City, Computer City and Office Max but were terminated ten years ago when the company focused its efforts on CompUSA and its own new retail stores. CompUSA has since gone out of business, and Best Buy was brought back as a "store within a store" retail partner in 2005.

In October 2002, Apple began selling its iPod at all Target stores. Tim Cook, then Apple's executive vice president of Worldwide Sales and Operations, said in a statement at the time "We’re thrilled that Target will significantly expand the availability of Apple’s award-winning iPod to even more customers."

He then added "Apple has placed an operable iPod on display in each of Target’s 1,148 stores, so every Target customer can use and listen to an iPod before they buy."

Target then became the first retailer outside of Apple and Best Buy to begin selling the iPad in October of 2010.

A month later, it announced that it would begin selling Apple's iPhone 3 GS and the iPhone 4 in just over half of its stores, about 850 locations equipped with Target Mobile sales centers.

Target has since adorned its electronics sections with official Apple signage. With the move to opening full Apple mini-stores in new Target locations, the retailer could move beyond iOS devices to sell Apple's full product range, including Macs and AirPort wireless routers.

If this is true, it can only be good news for Apple. The maker of Mac computers, the iPod, iPhone and iPad will report its numbers on January 24, and most wireless industry analyst expect that Apple will surpass its sales numbers and profit projections set forth late in 2011.

In other wireless news

Today's mobile phones are dubbed smartphones simply because they feature more functions and are usually more complex than a typical device made in 2006 or before. And now handset makers are promising us phones that will be even smarter if all goes according to plan.

In the past couple of years, the focus has been mostly on making it easier for mobile users to make specific requests by swiping fingers, but the next batch of smartphones should be a little more proactive we are told.

To be sure, our close relationship with our mobile phones is still based on various commands and responses. Google's search engine is smart-- ask it to find "streets of New York" and it points you there, with some famous NYC landmarks.

But beyond appointment reminders and a few other simple things of similar nature, smartphones are, for the most part, not smart at all.

Case in point-- Nokia did try in the past to integrate its mobile handsets with some kind of intelligence, initially giving a Special Award to MoBots and then developing the similarly functional Nokia Bots. MoBots was very basic, responding with preprogrammed actions to a specific stimulus such as being in a particular location at a particular time. But other than that, the rest of the device was dumb, to say the least.

Nevertheless, Nokia Bots went a little further by suggesting (based on previous behavior) what time you might like to wake up in the morning, recommending that you charge your phone before you sleep, or changing the handset profile while you're in a meeting, etc.

And to a certain 'limited' degree, bots are clever somehow, and they can mimic some intelligence well if properly configured, but sadly Nokia Bots has been languishing in Beta for almost two years now, and shows no signs of appearing in the wild any time soon. Which leaves Motorola as the unlikely leader in the quest for a smarter smartphone.

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Source: Forrester Market Research.

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