How Apple saved Taiwan and turns on tomorrow's people

Nokia’s move to slam a lawsuit down against the Apple juggernaut’s profit phone hasn’t dented iPhone enthusiasm one little bit.

The device is impacting everywhere right now, with Apple’s iPhone component partners in particularly jubilant mood as millions of the devices shift every 13 weeks.

Don’t believe us? Just take a look at a gaggle of small Taiwanese firms – Yageo, Cyntec, Polytronics Technology, Mag.Layers Scientific-Technics, Thinking Electronic and TXC – all of whom faced steep revenue decline in the current quarter in the generally depressed tech market.

As we know, Apple isn’t part of the “generally depressed tech market”, which is why those small firms are breathing a little easier following this week’s Apple results call, as they now know they’re going to see, “narrower revenue declines or flat revenues in the fourth quarter of 2009 thanks to the popularity of Apple’s iPhone”.

That’s good news for all Apple’s component suppliers, and pretty good news for the company’s growing army of iPhone app developers. To get a sense of that opportunity take a look at the Business Week video we posted earlier, and consider this:

DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole thinks the worldwide mobile and portable games market will reach $11.7 billion by 2014, which includes the PSP and DS, with Apple’s devices pushing 24 percent of software sales. He does expect Nintendo and Sony to lead the pack, but what’s not to love about Apple’s elegant and simple direct route to consumers through the App Store.

Happy consumers equate to happy developers (particularly since they can now get creative with in-app purchasing), happy carriers (just swoon at AT&T’s recent turn-on of 3.2 million iPhones in the US in its last quarter) and happy hardware and component manufacturers.

All this success is creating its own brand awareness mindwave, with a generation of US computer users now seeing Apple as the company which offers the solutions they can most relate to.

Think about what came out of this week’s Web 2.0 Summit, where Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy sat down with five US teens to find out what tomorrow’s people think about all this pervasive internet-connected social network-driven apps and taps milawakey…the upshot, of course, is “Teens love Facebook and Apple…and are confused by Twitter.”

“The kids also had good things to say about Apple. One said Apple had “won” with it’s “I’m a Mac vs. I’m a PC” television commercials, while another declared, “Windows would be a good prison guard, because it always locks up.””

Interestingly, the teens remarked that “all the hot girls use Hotmail”, and none of them owned an iPhone, which just goes to reinforce the notion that despite our excitement at the hottest and newest technologies, most human beings take time getting down to drink at the new tech pond.

So, where’s all this going? Quite plainly put – while Apple’s competitors seem engaged in an endless race just to catch up on where the company was yesterday, Apple is already in poll position to take on another apparition once today’s teens turn twenty and begin to invest in the gadgets they love once they start to pull in some of their own money.

And Microsoft? Microsoft, for all its anti-Apple-seeming ad campaign, is really engaged on a mission to convince Windows XP users (who let’s face it are customarily an older bunch of consumers than tomorrow’s people) that Win 7 (which has a few set-up problems in MediaCentre, we’re hearing) is as cutting-edge and cool as the Mac Redmond really really wants its existing veteran customers to avoid defection too.

No sense underestimating Ballmer’s boys and girls, however, they have succeeded in breaking some sales records with their new OS – but while Apple’s partners are currently seeing success, Microsoft’s wide collective PC industry continues to attempt to manage its way through a shrinking market, praying the software firm will make it rain with it’s all-new OS release.

Apple’s betting that rain falls over to the California coastline too, and so are those small and large component manufacturers way over there in China and Taiwan…

Hope you enjoyed this spattering of news, fact, and opinionated speculation.