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Apple to beat Samsung in smartphone shipments for first time in 14 years
- davidcollantes 10mo agoSource: https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/Global-Smartphone-Forecast-for-2025 https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/Global-Smartpho...
- pu_pe 10mo agoLooks like Samsung decreased a lot because Xiaomi ate their lunch, which doesn't surprise me.
- tooltalk 10mo agoI'm surprised that Samsung managed to stay #1 globally for so long after forced out of China, after Xi's rise to power in 2013.
- HPsquared 10mo agoThat goes both ways though, there's a slight but growing taboo about Chinese brands for many in the West. Edit: not forgetting tariffs and sanctions, of course.
- tooltalk 10mo agoAll smartphone manufacturers were in China when Xi started shaking down the industry back in 2013 under the banner of "In China, For China." Samsung has diversified away and to Vietnam and India since, but I don't think we want to have a supply-chain all consolidated in one location/country. I'm otherwise of opinion that the West's decisive counter measures are necessary against China's mercantile practices.
- vondur 10mo agoAren't they really big in other parts of the world, like Europe and Latin America?
- tooltalk 10mo agoThat's how Samsung maintained the global top seller status after the Korean companies was forced out of China.
- maxglute 10mo agoWell huawei ban bought samsung sometime, scared PRC brands from expanding into north american market. TBH Samsung was still pretty dominant until PRC brands really turned dial on hardware while Samsung stagnated until they couldn't. The latest round of hardware is pretty good, as in PRC flagship parity worthy. TBH the Koreans are very talented, they don't have the numbers to keep up with PRC speed / product cycles, but if they can iterate proper flagship every other year, they'd be in a good place. Also not putting ads on fridges.
- tooltalk 10mo agoSure, I'm actually old enough to remember Huawei's Ascend sold under MetroPCS in the US back in the early 2010's. Leica collaboration with Huawei in 2016 worked wonders and other Chinese smartphone makers definitely stepped up, but, by this time, Samsung's China sales fell off the cliff by ~70+% to a low single-digit market share from its 20% peak in 2013 under Xi's "In China, For China" campaign. Not sure if Huawei was ever a threat to Samsung or Apple outside China as most of Huawei's growth was in China only and there was no other single major market in which Huawei came close to Apple's or Samsung's. China is also the only major market where Samsung's market share is less than 1% and I'm very disinclined to believe this is coincidence. I think the common misconception is that Samsung was "outcompeted" by Huawei when it was in fact forced out of China. This practice became quite common in other industries too after Xi -- eg, all foreign competitors in EV batteries business such as LG, Panasonic, Samsung, etc were also effectively banned in China under Xi's Made-In-China 2025, launched in 2015 to protect local "champions," such as CATL/BYD.
- maxglute 10mo agoSamsung share was dropping in PRC before Xi, i.e. when cheap domestic brands started eating the bottom. Samsung flagship was still popular, i.e. the low single digit highend, then the Note battery recall drama happend and basically THAAD right after and the double whammy basically killed Samsung in PRC. Now do I think Samsung could have recovered and held on like Apple with domestic competition, probably not, samsung not as sticky as life style choice. Before Huawei sanction global shipments went from 100m to 200m in like 4 years (double digit YoY growth) while samsung was declining from 300m in same time period. Everyone saw which way the trend lines was going, especially in HW flagships. MIC2025 is like for establishing nascent industries, i.e. your batteries example. PRC companies get whitelist/subsidies for a few years then opens to foreign players after CATL becomes incumbant. Samsung mobile doesn't fit MIC2025 pattern since PRC already established phone manufacturing before MIC2025 started, entire low&high spectrum by 2015. It's not some strategic industry being spun up from 0, they already knew everything about phone production from Foxconn. There's no reason to force Samsung out of PRC, domestic phones already got CATLized and was outcompeting Samsung by then. Also it's not like Samsung was formally "kicked out", they left after seeing same writing on the wall. If Samsung got kicked out, like even informally, there'd be transition plan, i.e. get a local player to take over Huizhou company seen in other MIC2025 plays. Factories don't sit idle. Instead Samsung picked up and left and basically Huizhou become ghost towned.
- alephnerd 10mo agoThat happened due to the China-South Korea trade war following the installation of THAAD in SK in 2016 [0]. Notice how the Chinese OEM spike and Samsung's decline happen following the 2016-17 diplomatic crisis. It was also during this period that Korea Inc began shifting to Vietnam [1][2] and India as a result. Additonally, that spike for Xiaomi and other Chinese OEMs also happened right when Chinese OEMs expanded their India business in 2015-17 [3][4][5]. On that note, notice how all those Chinese OEM saw sales dropped and then flatlined from 2021 onwards. While the pandemic did play a role, India began lawfare against Chinese companies following the Galwan Crisis in 2021 [6][7][8] with the Indian government de facto forcing Chinese firms to "indianize" [9] - which ironically is similar to how the Chinese government operated in the 2000s and 2010s with Western firms and what the Chinese government leveraged against Korea a decade previously. [0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-12/china-said-to-assess-using-trade-to-hurt-south-korea-over-thaad https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-12/china-sai... [1] - https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20181122001200320 https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20181122001200320 [2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-02/s-korea-deepens-vietnam-ties-as-tensions-with-china-u-s-linger https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-02/s-korea-d... [3] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/baxiabhishek/2017/09/12/the-rise-and-rise-of-chinas-xiaomi-in-india/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/baxiabhishek/2017/09/12/the-ris... [4] - https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/vivo-to-double-india-manufacturing-capacity-by-next-year-4378510/ https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-techn... [5] - https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/oppo-grew-1578-on-year-to-grab-third-spot-with-9-smartphone-market-share-in-india-canalys/56759157 https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/oppo-grew-... [6] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-seizes-725-mln-xiaomi-funds-foreign-exchange-case-2022-04-30/ https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-seizes-725-mln-xia... [7] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-accuses-chinas-oppo-551-mln-tax-evasion-2022-07-13/ https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-accuses-chinas-opp... [8] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/indias-enforcement-directorate-arrests-vivo-mobile-executives-sources-2023-10-10/ https://www.reuters.com/world/india/indias-enforcement-direc... [9] - https://etplay.com/business/why-chinese-cos-have-been-indianising-themselves/1736794995485 https://etplay.com/business/why-chinese-cos-have-been-indian...
- tooltalk 10mo ago
- ortusdux 10mo agoApple has done a great job capturing the gifting market, which shows up in their Q4 numbers.
- rhetocj23 10mo agoApple makes you feel something for many people. Many on here dont get it.
- spogbiper 10mo ago[flagged]
- barbazoo 10mo agoNot because Apple made a jump in sales but mostly because Samsung has been on a decade long decline.
- nextos 10mo agoSamsung has good hardware, but their software is really mediocre, at best. Many of their devices are laggy and slow down further after some updates. This is the case even on high-end devices. Our 12-month-old Galaxy Tab is slower than a 7-year-old Pixel. Hard to understand. Plus, they make really odd tweaks to the UI, such as adding a permanent button overlay that clashes with most hamburger icons in websites and apps. This drives novice users insane. If you wanna ship a custom Android, at least get it right. Otherwise, just stick to stock. Sony does this really well: https://developerworld.wpp.developer.sony.com/open-source https://developerworld.wpp.developer.sony.com/open-source
- StopDisinfo910 10mo agoSamsung hardware is not what it used to be. They have been shipping the same camera block for something like three or four models. Compared to what Chinese competitors like Xiaomi or Oppo offer, it doesn't look that great anymore. The poor software is just the cherry on top.
- malfist 10mo agoOn top of buggy software they just have user hostile design choices. Like forcing agreements to sell health data if you want a step counter, or shoving ads in your face that you can't disable without hamstringing functionality. Makes me think about switching if alternative markets really do come to iOS and they get a real firefox
- jeroenhd 10mo agoSamsung makes a lot of cheap and mid-tier devices with little RAM and not so powerful SoCs. Google also uses slow SoCs, but at least they compensate in hardware. If you just buy a high-end phone, Samsung is generally fine. If you buy anything cheaper than that, or god forbid buy a phone through a carrier that pumps it full of crap, you're gonna have a terrible time when apps get slower and bulkier and shittier and the hardware shows its age.
- gmueckl 10mo agoSo dark patterns to increase peer pressure and hard vendor lock in work then: exploiting networking effects and social pressure like green vs. blue bubbles, technically unnecessary hard requirements for other devices that are locked into the same garden prison, random compatibility restrictions/omissions in built in apps etc. Apple really is far from innocent. They just pull their customers over the table in such a smooth way that it feels like nest warmth to them.
- throwfaraway4 10mo agoOr maybe they make better phones?
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoI got tired of Android after 9 years of being Android only. I just wanted a phone that worked. Apple made said phone. Android feels like your younger cousin's sketchy Windows computer. I remember changing from like 2 different Android phones over a period of 4 years or so, and my amazing megapixel photos looked nowhere near as good as my cousins 5-year-old iPhone photos.
- drchickensalad 10mo agoMy iPhone friends literally grab my s24 ultra camera when we take pictures at cocktail bars and tell me to send them the picture
- giancarlostoro 10mo agoThe only time my wife has been jealous of someone elses photos was when my mother in law got a new iPhone and we were five years into ours, far longer than I ever held on an Android phone for.
- check1234123 10mo agoI switched to IPhone 13 pro 3.5 years ago and I have the completely opposite experience. It doesn’t “just work”. - Swipe typing is so horrible I had to disable it. - Notifications are extremely large and you have less control over what type of notifications you want to receive. - You can’t transfer files by simply connecting your phone to a PC. - Videos played in Safari don’t automatically rotate to landscape mode (nor there is a button to quickly do this) unless you disable portrait lock from control center. If you lock this again hoping it will stay in landscape it will switch back to portrait mode. - You can’t set alarm on a certain date. - You can only snooze the alarm for 9 minutes (I think you can configure this in iOS26, but this was unacceptable even 5 years ago) - Apps get killed or stopped in background extremely frequently which means that if you have some long running task you need to keep the app open. - Hotspot automatically disconnects even with a Macbook (Windows/Linux is much worse). I used to live without home internet relying on hotspot feature. IPhone hotspot proved to be extremely unreliable. This is not even mentioning more technical things like sideloading, torrent client etc.
- jp191919 10mo agoIt also doesn't help that google have steadily been increasing their market share.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- techsystems 10mo agohttps://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-smartphone-share https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-smartpho... So every quarter this year except the last quarter, Samsung outsold Apple. So they're predicting that Q42025 for Samsung will be miserable sales or Apple will have skyrocketed sales?
- gbear605 10mo agoThe iPhone 17 (released in September) is selling extremely well, and Apple sales tend to be concentrated in Q4 due to the new phone (and the holidays, though those should also affect Samsung).
- aljgz 10mo agoI belong to one demography of ex Samsung customers: I've blacklisted them for hurting UX to show ads. Last device: my very high-end OLED TV has the worst menu navigation, just to take me back to the home screen where they hoped to show ads to me. Once I realized they are analysing my content, even when coming from an external device to send home for ADs, I just disconnected it from the internet. I'll not buy anything again unless they change this and stay away from it long enough to repair the damage to trust. Not buying an Apple device either, but for different reasons.
- MBCook 10mo agoTBF: Apple has slowly been on the “push our services” ads thing. At least not other companies. But they’re doing it. And it’s annoying.
- JSR_FDED 10mo agoPut an AppleTV in front of it and use it like a monitor. I’ve been blissfully unaware of the TV vendors’ bad software and invasions of privacy for years
- aljgz 10mo agoThe only apple product I ever bought has been an ipad with the huge disappointment that every app gets paused when not focused. I don't want to pay a company that deliberately limits my ability to use the product. My TV is being used as a second 4k 144hz monitor for my Fedora 43 + KDE on AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU, watch movies on it, play games, etc, and don't have to put up with limitations of Apple ecosystem.
- chankstein38 10mo agoThat's because Samsung's new offerings are trash compared to where we were a few years ago. I have the S24 Ultra and in my opinion it's better than the S25 ultra. The camera, the features, maybe it's better built for AI but I don't want Samsung's garbage AI on my phone. Even the new S-Pen loses features to the old one (one of the main features I used too, the remote shutter). The Object Eraser feature recently updated to have an "AI Object Eraser" and now a simple removal of a sign in my picture adds an "AI Generated" watermark onto it. They spam me every time I use the regular Object Eraser to try the AI one, it's really not impressive in any way and now adds a watermark even for the simplest modifications. Definitely all around seems like Samsung is on a decline. I probably won't be buying a Samsung next time I need a phone, though I won't be buying Apple either.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago> Definitely all around seems like Samsung is on a decline. I probably won't be buying a Samsung next time I need a phone, though I won't be buying Apple either. Same here, used to have a Samsung, moved to Moto G which was the best phone I had so far, currently on a iPhone 12 Mini, and want none of these phones anymore. I just want something that doesn't get in your way, and actually have some well-thought UX, especially when connected to the car. CarPlay is a whole dumpster-fire of failed UX experiments it feels like, is actively dangerous, and iOS in general have so many hidden patterns I'm still discovering today (guessing they also add new gestures all the time) that it feels like I only understand 20% of the phone's features. Someone recommended me Sony for Android + higher quality hardware, where the company also doesn't seem hellbent on screwing you over inside the phone OS itself. What do people here with Sony phones think about them?
- devilbunny 10mo ago> feels like I only understand 20% of the phone's features This is a persistent problem with iOS. Features are added but not really mentioned. The online manual is very focused on "how do I..." without giving a clear overview of "here's everything you can do. New gestures are added without giving an obvious way to reverse them if you accidentally trigger one.
- 1970-01-01 10mo agoShip more don't mean sell more. It means the factory workers screwed more together and they want to sell more. That's all. The market decides who's beating who.
- throwfaraway4 10mo agoThis is the best supply chain in the world. They ship _because_ they're selling.
- 1970-01-01 10mo agoThey offload unsold inventory to the big mobile network carriers. Has nothing to do with supply chain.
- jm4 10mo agoI don’t know how Samsung has been getting away with it for so long. They have this stellar reputation as a premium brand when they are more akin to Roku. Their software experience is among the worst in the industry. Their hardware isn’t as good as people perceive it to be either. I bought 5 of their TV’s and there aren’t 2 that display colors the same way with the exact same settings. The quality is abysmal.
- jimnotgym 10mo agoI saw a set of reasonably high end 'Colour True' monitors, and they all looked markedly different until they were profiled. Did you compare to a set of other companies TVs before deciding Samsung was garbage?
- jm4 10mo agoWhat does testing some other brand have to do with anything? If I put 5 of the exact same TV’s next to each other and they all look different, they are objectively bad quality. Maybe someone else makes something better or worse, but the ones in front of me are still bad. I literally had all these screens next to each other displaying the same image. It was not possible to adjust them so they all looked the same. The lighting inside the screens wasn’t even consistent. They had different hotspots.
- xnx 10mo agoI know why someone would buy an iPhone or a Pixel. I guess people buy Samsung because they're sold in stores?
- globular-toast 10mo agoRound here many people think there are only two manufacturers of phones: Apple and Samsung. You'll struggle to find someone who isn't "in to tech" who has heard of Pixel. I've never had a Samsung but use Android and numerous people have referred to my phone as "a Samsung". So it's a stronger brand than you might think.
- poisonborz 10mo agoThey were solid top in quality for 15 years for Android. DeX, pen features, camera software was solid. OneUI became very customizeable. But it was stably boring at best, and atrocious at worst, and they couldn't ship any other standout feature that wasn't scrapped soon after. Now they shipped the same camera on their most sold flagship phone 3 years in a row, same battery size for 5 years. Flip-flopping between Qualcomm CPUs as their own couldn't compete after years of trying. They don't deserve the spot they have for quite some time now.
- the_black_hand 10mo agoWhy are Samsung so big on the folding phone nonsense?
- GoToRO 10mo agoI went in a shop to see this nonsense with my own eyes,and I almost bought one.
- vardump 10mo agoWell, Samsung chose for example to stop supporting micro SD cards. Samsung just keeps chasing Apple, so I don't see any point to buy their phones anymore. The only unique selling point Samsung has left I can think of are foldable phones.
- RadiozRadioz 10mo agoI don't think anybody except you, me, and other geeks on forums like this, care about SD cards. I wish it were different.
- frogperson 10mo agoAll they have to do is put out a high end phone, vanilla android, unlocked bootloader, hardware switches, and sell it as a developer phone. they would sell a ton.
- aceazzameen 10mo agoI don't think they care about the hardware anymore. They want people in the Samsung ecosystem logging in with a Samsung account being served Samsung ads in every Samsung app.
- vel0city 10mo agoThis is the truth. They would prefer you use Tizen instead of Android, they just can't convince app makers to build to it yet.
- ChocolateGod 10mo agoI have a Samsung Galaxy and their build quality is still pretty solid especially compared to the Chinese brands (I'm grateful Samsung didn't copy their ugly camera bumps) but the battery size is mediocre and the software is somehow worse than all the Chinese iOS clones.
- danielbln 10mo agoSamsung is quite hesitant to hop onto the silicon carbon battery train. I guess they are more conservative after the burning battery debacle a few years ago, but still, I look over at those juicy 7000+ kWh phone batteries and I wants it.
- herbst 10mo agoThe idea is to buy a normal Chinese android Phone, not a iOS clone. That's where the good and cheap devices are at
- Grisu_FTP 10mo agoAs someone who bought mostly Samsung phones before (went from Samsung A3 2015 -> S8 -> Z Fold 4 -> Z Fold 6), their recent few years have been painful to watch. I’ll take the Z Fold series as an example since that’s what I use, but from what I heard their other devices aren’t better off. The Z Fold 7 is a downgrade over the Fold 6 I have in every way in my opinion (but I can at least thank the Fold 7 for making the Fold 6 new in a sealed box cheaper with 512GB than an iPhone 17 Pro Max with 256GB and thus making an upgrade viable). And it seems like this has been happening to their other devices as well. I won’t buy another Samsung phone (and foldable at that; Samsung had the only good format, IMO). Just a few things which would make me never buy a Fold 7: No Under Display Camera, instead it has a big hole (This cam is used only for meetings anyway, for selfies you use the main camera anyway. A big uninterrupted plane of screen is far far far far better than a better cam for meetings that gets compressed and then is a tiny square in the corner anyway.) No unlockable bootloader worldwide (is a OneUI 8 issue, not specifically a Fold 7 issue) They made it thinner instead of giving it a bigger battery, which makes it way harder to open and hold No S-Pen support (Seriously, why? The Fold is one of the main devices where a pen is cool. It makes more sense to include it in the Fold than the S Ultra.) They completely destroyed the aspect ratio (The outer screen was thin and tall, perfect for one-handed use, kinda like a TV remote; you can reach everywhere with one hand. The inner screen still is taller than it is wide, while almost being 4:3. This makes older content like shows and emulated games fill almost the entire screen without giving overly huge black bars on 16:9 content. Now on the Fold 7 the outer screen is almost like a normal phone and the inner screen is almost a perfect square. This makes the outer screen way worse to use one-handed and the inner screen has huge bars on everything and apps that are fullscreen scale terribly with just a few way oversized UI options showing.) It is thinner, too thin. The Fold 6 was perfect in that regard, but when I tried to open the Fold 7 on one of those showcase units in a store it was not possible to get a good grip on the side to open it. Instead they should have just increased the battery size or included the S-Pen in the bottom like with the S Ultras. Worse hinge that snaps open after 90° instead of being able to stay in almost every angle like the Fold 6. The only upgrades are: The camera isn’t that much worse anymore (Literally 0 use for me, I never take images and the ones I do are pretty much only to note something quickly, but I understand that that was a huge downside for most people so that is a good upgrade.) Better dust protection Snapdragon X Elite (This is the one thing I wish my Fold had) And all of these downgrades for 100€ more MSRP. Also those downgrades are just what I remembered off the top of my head. Most of the compromises were just to make it thinner (the removal of the UDC and S-Pen support and the worse hinge for example), which like I said was in and of itself a downgrade. To me it feels like they only listened to the reviewers that never used a Fold and after their 2 hours of the hands-on experience will never use one again. It’s not a normal phone; it’s not supposed to be. So trying to make it 1:1 like a normal phone removes everything that made it good because I specifically didn’t want a normal phone. Especially since the biggest issue was the price, so increasing the price further (over the already increased price of the Z Fold 5/6) is so stupid. But enough of my rambles, I’m probably the only person that uses their Fold this way if I look at all the reviews which call the Fold 7 the best foldable Samsung ever made and a huge improvement over all the other Z Folds. I hope it was at least somewhat readable since it’s still very early, I’m tired, and English isn’t my native language.