As it has for several quarters now, Apple continues to trail the overall smartphone market's booming growth, with the company's 16.8 percent year-over-year growth in the first quarter registering as the lowest among top five vendors in a market that grew by 28.6 percent as a whole, according to a new report from research firm IDC. Market leader Samsung also trailed the broader market's growth as Huawei, Lenovo, and LG all jockeyed for position in the closely contested third through fifth spots in the rankings.
Worldwide smartphone shipments in 1Q14 in millions of units (Source: IDC)
Apple reached a new first quarter record, breaching the 40 million unit mark. The company saw double-digit growth in Japan as well as across multiple developing markets, including Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia. Still, this made for the lowest year-over-year improvement among the leading vendors. What remains to be seen is when – not if – Apple's rumored large-screen models will arrive on the market, filling a gap in the company's portfolio that has been exploited by the competition.
In the overall mobile phone market, Apple again outperformed most of the competition as feature phone sales continue to dwindle. With Apple's all-smartphone lineup taking nearly 10 percent of the overall market in the quarter, the company is within striking distance of Nokia, which garnered 11.3 percent of the market as it continues to be hit hard by the decline in feature phone sales and instability as it has shifted from Symbian to Windows Phone. Just days ago, Microsoft completed its acquisition of Nokia's phone unit, officially uniting software and hardware in what has been a close partnership over the last several years.
Worldwide mobile phone shipments in 1Q14 in millions of units (Source: IDC)
Apple last week announced record March quarter earnings on the strength of its 43.7 million iPhones shipped. The iPhone continues to drive Apple's overall financial performance, representing 57 percent of the company's revenue for the quarter.
Thursday October 10, 2024 8:26 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
iOS 18.1 will be released to the public in the coming weeks, and the software update introduces the first Apple Intelligence features for the iPhone. Below, we outline when to expect iOS 18.1 to be released. iOS 18.1: Apple Intelligence Features Here are some of the key Apple Intelligence features in the iOS 18.1 beta so far: A few Siri enhancements, including improved understanding...
Friday October 11, 2024 8:55 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
While the iPhone 16 series was released just a few weeks ago, there are already many rumored features for the iPhone 17 models, and especially for the Pro models. Below, we recap five key new features rumored for the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max so far: 24MP front camera for all iPhone 17 models: All four iPhone 17 models will feature an upgraded 24-megapixel front-facing camera, according...
Things are firming up for a big Halloween week for Apple, with the company's next operating system updates reportedly coming early in the week and hardware launches coming a few days later. Ahead of those hardware launches, we've recently seen what appears to be one of the most significant physical product leaks in years, while some of the new features in Apple's recent software updates have ...
Thursday October 10, 2024 12:10 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today stopped signing iOS 18.0, preventing iPhone users who have upgraded to iOS 18.0.1 from downgrading to iOS 18. Apple released iOS 18.0.1 a week ago on October 3. It is not unusual for Apple to stop signing older versions of iOS within a week or two after a new version of iOS is released. When Apple stops signing an update, it can no longer be installed on an iPhone due to a...
Friday October 11, 2024 3:55 pm PDT by Juli Clover
In iOS 18.1, there is a new option to set a "Primary" email address in the Settings app, which means it is easier to change the main email address associated with your Apple Account. The Primary email address is the one that is visible to other people when collaborating on and sharing documents, sending calendar invites, and more. Apple did not previously make it easy to change an Apple...
On this week's episode of The MacRumors Show, we discuss the unprecedented leak of Apple's M4 MacBook Pro models and the company's rumored move to more staggered hardware and software releases. Subscribe to The MacRumors Show YouTube channel for more videos Multiple leaks surrounding Apple's unannounced 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M4 chip recently surfaced online. The leaks began with unboxin...
Alleged photos and videos of an unannounced 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M4 chip continue to surface on social media, in what could be the worst product leak for Apple since an employee accidentally left an iPhone 4 prototype at a bar in California in 2010. The latest video of what could be a next-generation MacBook Pro was shared on YouTube Shorts today by Russian channel Romancev768, just...
Tuesday October 8, 2024 6:16 am PDT by Tim Hardwick
Rumors strongly suggest Apple will release the seventh-generation iPad mini in November, nearly three years after the last refresh. Here's a roundup of what we're expecting from the next version of Apple's small form factor tablet, based on the latest rumors and reports. Design and Display The new iPad mini is likely to retain its compact 8.3-inch display and overall design introduced with...
(I'll tell you what the point is... the industry needs to stop treating this as one giant monolithic market. It doesn't work that way in other industries... why does it work that way in the phone business)?
Apple's profits in the phone business are rising. Samsung's profits in the phone business got CUT IN HALF over the past year.
Apple is quality and Samsung is quantity. This is no surprise. I'd rather keep Apple focusing on quality as they are now. Samsung can keep making it's large quantities of questionable quality phones.
And Apple wins the profits from phones war also.
[edit] Samsung does make some ok phones. But a large number of them are not that good at all.
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Apple's profits in the phone business are rising. Samsung's profits in the phone business got CUT IN HALF over the past year.
Yet the problem is... Apple's market share?
This is the main point here. Apple clearly wins this war.
I am pleasantly surprised that Apple increased its global mobile phone share by a full 1% YOY. Considering that the market is being flooded with cheap smartphone then it is great to see Apple's share growing. Show that customers who had earlier bought cheaper phones are trading up to the iPhone.
Indeed. The term 'smartphone' market is a joke based on arbitrary distinctions. There will soon be only one 'phone' market and in that market Apple's share is and always has been rising steadily and is now up to 10%.
These reports have been able to suppress this story the last few years by continually moving more and more phones into the 'smartphone' category to make said category grow faster than Apple to make Apple look bad. This includes many Android devices with no data plans. However, within the next year they will run out of dumb phones to reclassify as smartphones and Apple's true growth will become impossible to hide. I'll make some popcorn...
The way iOS works seems obvious todaybut it's only obvious because it works so well. It's as if people think that's the way it should have always worked. But it didn'tnot by a longshotbefore iOS came around. We take it for granted today, but the first time I held an iPhone on June 29, 2007 it was like a magical little slab of aluminum and glass. All other phones seemed like ancient artifacts by comparison. And Eric Schmidt was sitting on Apple's board, funneling inside information back to the mothership. Changing their design from a BlackBerry clone to an iPhone clone. That fact is well documented.
I wonder if Tim Cook has been doing the same while sitting on the Nike board of directors? After all, Nike has been in the fitness business in some way shape or form since before Apple existed. And now all of a sudden Apple is coming out with fitness apps and hiring in that area amid strong rumors of a watch with fitness functionality. :eek:
