> Counter-example in a mature industry: Porsche. When the GTR was launched 9 years ago, people were hyping it to be the death knell of all other performance cars. Instead, today we have a wider selection of very good cars and the GTR is no longer the no-brainer choice for performance enthusiasts. Yes, it still offers good performance-value, but there are other good choices out there as well. Of all the car makers, Porsche was thought to be the most severely impacted by the GTR and yet they have gone on to greater heights.

Ya I wouldn't make the mistake of saying that it's the death-knell of the smart phone. I just think we'll be seeing a significant contraction of the market that has driven the insane profits apple has had for the past few years. Certainly smartphones will be a massive and massively profitable product for years to come.

> How much money is Huawei making from selling Android phones? What about that Google ad revenue in China, how's that doing?

Much less, even more so in unit terms. I wouldn't invest in Google or Huawei at the moment either. I'm not short Apple because I think those companies are going to do well, I think they're all likely to do poorly. Google and Huawei will expand their market a bit, I think, but their unit economics suck relative to Apple so it won't matter as much.

> Microsoft's chances at mobile at this stage are as good as Ted Cruz's winning the Republican nomination. Some number closer to zero. Again, how much is Google making from Android phone sales? How are the Nexus sales numbers?
Google's competitor is not Apple. Google's competitor is Facebook. Luckily for Google, Facebook is banned in China too.

Totally agree. Again, I don't expect Google to do well at the expense of Apple. For Google phones are just a way of pushing their services, so gaining market share vs Apple doesn't help them all that much in terms of their bottom line.

> The smartphone is a very interesting product. It is used multiple times a day, is cheap enough to be ubiquitous yet still offers value to people who seek to differentiate. In my view this is only the beginning of the smartphone race. Technologies like NFC/Apple Pay are still in their infancy and are not widespread enough. There will be more sensors, better imaging technology, more features that people would desire.
How the differentiation is implemented, matters. You will not find someone cross-shopping Hermès with Coach. Similarly the large majority of people will not cross-shop a Ferrari with a Nissan. That is not to say anything about the value of the brand. It just means there are different markets being served.

Ya, I don't disagree here either. I don't expect Apple to lose significant market share in places where they're already established. I mostly expect that the upgrade rate will slow, and they will not gain new market share in India and China. The sum of those two things is a substantial decline in profits for them over the next couple of years.

I could certainly be wrong about all this. It's actually the first time i've ever shorted something, and it's kind of just an experiment to get my feet wet with more exotic trades. I don't claim to be any sort of expert on the subject :).