没有哪个脑子正常的人会把自己的iPhone换成Amazon Fire。正如新闻网站Quartz的丹•弗洛默所言，自称手机的Amazon Fire明明是一款购物设备。

    话虽如此，上周三，由亚马逊首席执行官杰夫•贝佐斯在西雅图某仓库发布的智能手机Amazon Fire依然是一款不容小觑的设备，它令人从全新的视角审视亚马逊和苹果这两大科技巨头的商业模式。

    去年夏天，Asymco的贺拉斯•德迪欧在名为《苹果反对者》（The Anti-Apple）的文章中写道：“苹果（Apple）和亚马逊（Amazon）可谓“大同小异。”两家公司都致力于在受控且可预见的环境中，以便利性和易用性“取悦客户”。两者都拥有庞大的客户群（苹果有8亿用户，亚马逊有2.5亿用户）。而现在，两家公司都在销售智能手机，而且售价基本相同。

    两者主要的区别在于，苹果的使命是打造最好的产品，这也是苹果首席执行官蒂姆•库克常常挂在嘴边的一句话。

    亚马逊的Fire无需成为最好的产品，它只要足够好就行了。Fire的使命是，使用户能更顺畅的在亚马逊不断扩张的零售帝国进行冲动性购物。如果能通过名为Firefly的扫描购买功能做到这一点，亚马逊的2.5亿用户中，一部分原本使用较低端手机的用户就会购买Amazon Fire手机。

    但原本使用更高端手机的用户却不会降低标准。上周三，苹果的忠实粉丝对Fire的用户界面嗤之以鼻，说它“一塌糊涂”。目前，Fire仅在美国电话电报公司（AT&T）的网络上运行。除非开发者们相信Fire将大热，否则不会有大量针对这款手机开发的应用。而由于采用Android的分支版本，Fire无法运行苹果应用商店（App Store）或谷歌（Google）Play平台上购买的应用。

    不过，Fire还是比翻盖手机强：它自带1年免费Amazon Prime快递服务；它的摄像头据说相当好；它还有一些出色的功能（包括3D、求救以及scroll'n'roll功能）。而且贝佐斯大肆为Fire向每位登陆亚马逊的用户做广告。除非Fire在实际使用中出问题，否则它很可能将在由（把持高端市场的）苹果和（统治中低端市场的）三星（Samsung）支配的过度饱和的智能手机市场占据一席之地。

    亚马逊和苹果还有一个或许是最重要的区别：

    苹果的iTunes用户群正呈几何级数增长，但单位用户销售额正在下降。亚马逊用户群的增长没那么迅猛，单位用户销售额也比较平稳。（贺拉斯•德迪欧给出的图表转载如下。）

    德迪欧在四月份写道：“苹果的用户增长是扩大设备组合及分销的结果。而亚马逊的用户增长是扩大物流和商品组合的结果。后者难以在全球范围内实现。可以说，亚马逊无法获得苹果那样的几何级数式增长……因为它大部分销售的完成必须依赖卡车、道路和监管机构。”（财富中文网）

    译者：项航

    Nobody in their right mind is going to swap an iPhone for an Amazon Fire — a shopping machine that calls itself a phone, as Quartz’ Dan Frommer deftly put it.

    That said, the smartphone unveiled by CEO Jeff Bezos in a Seattle warehouse Wednesday is a serious device that puts the business models of two tech giants in a new light.

    “Apple and Amazon are much more alike than they are different,” Asymco’s Horace Dediu wrote last summer in an essay called The Anti-Apple. They’re both in the business of “delighting customers” in controlled, predictable environments with convenience and ease of use. They both have huge customer bases (800 million for Apple, 250 million for Amazon). And now they both sell smartphones. For roughly the same price.

    The main difference is that Apple’s AAPL -0.35% mission, as Tim Cook never tires of saying, is to make the very best products.

    Amazon’s Fire doesn’t have to be the best. It just has to be good enough. Its mission is to make impulse buying at Amazon’s AMZN -2.21% growing retail empire even more friction-free. If it does that well – using a point-and-buy feature called Firefly — some portion of those 250 million customers will trade up for one.

    But they won’t trade down. Compared with an iPhone, Apple loyalists sniffed Wednesday, Fire’s user interface is “a mess.” It only runs, for now, on AT&T’s T 0.45% network. There won’t be a flood of new apps until developers are persuaded that it’s going to take off. And because it uses a forked version of Android, it can’t run apps purchased on either Apple’s App Store or Google GOOG 0.28% Play.

    Still, it’s better than a flip phone. It comes with 12 months of free Amazon Prime shipping. Its camera is said to be excellent. It boasts some whizzy features (3D, Mayday, scroll’n’roll). And Bezos is not too proud to stick an ad for it in the face of every Amazon user who logs on. Unless Fire melts down in real-world usage, it will probably succeed in establishing a beachhead in an over-crowded smartphone market dominated by Apple (which skims off the cream) and Samsung (which, if you’ll pardon a badly mixed metaphor, mops up most of the rest).

    One more difference between Amazon and Apple, perhaps the most important:

    Apple’s iTunes user base is growing exponentially but its sales per user are falling. Amazon’s user base is growing arithmetically, and its sales per user are relatively flat. (See Horace Dediu’s charts, reproduced below.)

    “Apple’s user growth is a function of expanding its device portfolio and distribution,” Dediu wrote in April. “Amazon’s user growth is a function of expanding its logistics and merchandise mix. This is also not easy to do globally. Arguably, Amazon cannot scale in the exponential rates seen by Apple… because it has to depend on trucks and roads and regulators to complete most of its sales.”