How China's Xiaomi Does In A Week What Apple Does In A Year: Update Devices (opens in new tab)

100,000 phones a week? Big deal. Just over 5 million a year. If we're comparing to Apple, Apple sold 125M last year [1].

And 52 different version numbers. Support must be a nightmare, if it even exists outside of just "we'll give you next week's version".

These must be pretty minor changes if they're happening every week. How many of them are being passed through rigorous QA? I'm curious how many of the batches are just tossed due to a small error?

And man, would it suck to order a phone and then have it be obsolete within a couple of days of having it be delivered.

[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57540705-37/apples-fiscal-...

I used their Android derivative, MIUI, and found it to be very pretty, and featureful, but very unpolished. Seemingly unchanged functionality from the regular Android OS would not function correctly, in addition to some of their added features, and I eventually stopped using MIUI because of the constant minor bugs nipping at my heels.

I hope their hardware iteration doesn't end up the same way.

These engineers must be from a different species - my experience with HW is that it's very hard to change anything in a week, especially when you're building 100000. Then again, they have everything under one roof so they can probably just walk over to the PCB designer and then walk some more to the guy setting up the manufacturing equipment, who has reels of every known component in stock.

I'm curious what they change but web searches just return the same three sound bites.

Maybe consumption patterns are extremely different in that market, but it seems that continuously changing hardware of a phone is not really that consumer friendly.

My current Android phone (Galaxy Nexus) is almost two years old and my current iPhone is a 4S (running iOS 7). I will soon be upgrading both, but I can't really see myself changing devices more of then than that. It's a convenience and cost issue. Even if you make the data transition seamless and remove the cost barrier, you are still left with limit of how often people will want to change their routine.

Needless to say, the comparisons like this are meaningless, because Apple is much more than a fancy set of hardware. iOS 7 update made my iPhone 4S camera feel like a brand new piece of hardware, when all I did was update the software...

Im not surprised.

I've found that Chinese phones are very good quality and exceptionally great price. Not only phones, but I've also found that Android tablets are priced literally at 'throw away' prices.

For example, I just priced a 1.2GHz quad core android tablet running Android 4.2, 512MB ram, 4GB storage, with SIM slot, for $64. 1

I also bought a phone from China. It's a quad 1.4 GHz, 1G ram, 16G storage, 2 sim slots.. It's crazy fast, the size of a Galaxy Mega, and was $200. So yes, if you do choose to buy from China, you cut out the likes of the Wal-Marts and Best Buys. Instead, you can buy directly from the manufacturer and pay 1/2 what you would normally pay. And with some of these prices, they are approaching technology that I don't hurt much if I lose.

Now, please be aware, if you buy a Clone phone from China, you'll likely get ripped off. They are made intentionally to defraud and deceive. They do that to the poor saps whom buy them, as well as the people whom they pawn them to. And their components are usually pretty bad. If you stick with the obvious Chinese phones, you'll be much safer in the long run. Those are bought by the Chinese, whom see cheap as a bad thing. (Of course, the Chinese swoon after Samsungs and iPhones anyways...)

1 : http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Cheap-RK76-7-TFT-Touch-Screen... Unsure if reputable dealer, low sales numbers. Beware. Find at least 1000 sales.

Here's an experiment. Take all the forum members on macrumors and crowd source a new phone by taking all of their ideas. See what kind of mutant non-functioning phone results from a democratic process. One of the reason why Apple and Google's phones and OSs are successful is because there are visionaries (Ives, Jobs, Rubin) at the top coming up with new ideas, instead of taking a poll and purely going with consumer feedback.

If their products are crap, who cares how often they release them? But take a look at what they are offering for $300:

Specs: http://www.gsmarena.com/xiaomi_mi_3-5678.php

Design: http://www.gsmarena.com/xiaomi_mi_3-pictures-5678.php

It's mostly a marketing hype. Xiaomi is known for it's style for "releasing" a phone that's really cheap for the specs, but limiting the supply until when the price for the hardware drops. Hardcore fans who closely follow the company may get the phone early and brags to their friends about how good the phone is compared to the price thus driving up the hype, but when average consumer can actually get the device it'll not be so impressive anymore. Now with this reputation more widely known then before, they may be trying to lessen the doubt by promising "weekly" update of the hardware. Thus when they finally have a big enough margin to supply at scale, people won't think the phone is "old".

I find it really impressive that a company can roll out incremental changes to 100,000 devices in a week. I wonder if the author somehow got it mixed up and the updates to each weekly device aren't necessarily a week old. It's just rolling updates hitting every batch every week. That would make a little more sense. I think some other people have said in the comments that some changes just wouldn't fit into a week's time span. I suppose it would also make sense if all the changes were somehow tiny in nature.

Company like Apple COULD make different phones every week but there is no reasons why they wold want to do it. It is highly impractical for many reasons.

Imagine IF Apple just made one iPhone in different color each week. Then imagine if Apple tweaked the internals each and every week. They’d be supporting at least 52 different versions of iPhone every year.

The weekly “design, build, redesign and build” process should not replace a thoughtful R&D process.

This seems to me to reflect the difference between two cultures. China's tech ecosystem is still fairly young - I daresay it's like the old days of Apple in a garage, the old HP, etc. I think this post on Bunnie Huang's blog explains it (or at least explores it) a lot better than I can:

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=20

How are these changes implemented? Are they things that require moving buttons? Recasting dies? Or are they things like "this model april4-11-2013 has a malfunction charging on USB?" And it's fixing circuitry? This seems unrealistic, even if it was just releasing a new color.

Reading the article makes me feel that Xiaomi was a fun experiment started by the billionaire founder that turned out to be a successful venture.

It sounds very interesting to innovate hardware at that pace... and why not. Taking input from the users with such a fast turnaround is awesome too.

If only Google did the same with all Android devices, or at least a big "Google-approved" subset of them. They need to bring over the ChromeOS update system to Android, especially now that Chrome and Android have the same guy running them.

What are they changing? Are we talking "this week's model has softer bezels" or "this week's model has a new FM radio"?(which they do btw.)

It is a common misunderstanding. Xiaomi updates its beta channel once a week, and stable channel once a month. It is still an amazing pace though.

The whole point of the iPhone is that it is a pocket-sized general purpose computer, so that updates can happen via software instead of hardware.

That was like the 5th slide in the original launch presentation.

If you have change hardware to offer users an incremental feature, you're not really competing with the iPhone.