Apple's Beats brand in April unveiled the Powerbeats Pro, a redesigned wire-free version of its popular fitness-oriented Powerbeats earbuds.
Apple Surpassed Samsung as World's Largest Smartphone Maker in Fourth Quarter
The latest numbers from research firm Gartner reveal that Apple surpassed Samsung in worldwide smartphone sales during the fourth quarter of 2014 to become the world's largest smartphone maker. Samsung lost the top spot to Apple for the first time since 2011.
Apple narrowly edged Samsung as the two rivals had quarterly sales of 74.8 million and 73 million smartphones respectively. Apple's 20.4% market share was also marginally higher than Samsung's 19.9% share during the three-month period ending December.
"With Apple dominating the premium phone market and the Chinese vendors increasingly offering quality hardware at lower prices, it is through a solid ecosystem of apps, content and services unique to Samsung devices that Samsung can secure more loyalty and longer-term differentiation at the high end of the market," said Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner.Strategy Analytics reported in January that Apple and Samsung were tied as the top smartphone makers during the fourth quarter, although its findings were based on overall shipments and not actual sales. Samsung smartphone sales figures always have a margin for error, however, as the South Korean tech giant does not officially disclose smartphone sales and leaves research firms to estimate.
Samsung remained the top worldwide smartphone vendor in 2014 overall, with an estimated 307.6 million smartphone sales to capture 24.7% market share. Apple was runner-up with 191.4 million iPhones sold during the year, representing 15.4% market share. Lenovo, which acquired the smartphone making division of Motorola, finished third with 81.4 million smartphone sales in 2014 for 6.5% market share.
Samsung recently announced its latest flagship smartphones, the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge, each compatible with a new mobile payments service called Samsung Pay. The smartphones will be released April 10 in several countries. In the United States, the handsets will be available on AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile and also on sale through Amazon, Best Buy, Costco, Target, Walmart and Sam's Club.
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59 months ago
That's absolutely crazy when you consider Samsung targets the full range of prices all the way down to dirt cheap while Apple focuses on the high end.
That's like BMW outselling not just Lexus but the whole Toyota division too! Almost unheard of in business.
That's like BMW outselling not just Lexus but the whole Toyota division too! Almost unheard of in business.
59 months ago
Considering Apple released two phones in 2014, and Samsung released dozens, this is incredible, even if it's only a surge in the fourth quarter.
59 months ago
Whatever happened to removable battery, SD card, bloatware, low build quality
59 months ago
What planet are you on? The gs6 got nothing but amazing reviews from real world people holding the device.
Countless times they used the word premium and from what I saw most people were blown away from the gs6 design and build quality
Says the guy who's majority of posts support Samsung. ;)
59 months ago
Very good analogy. I suppose Apple does sell some mid-range priced phones (the 5C), but overall, very good analogy indeed.
Those are worlwide statistics we're looking at here. The iPhone 5c is still very much a high-end phone by global standards. An actual mid-range phone would cost half of the 5c's price. The 5c is basically an entry-level BMW.
59 months ago
True the price was crazy. Apple certainly didn't know how to price the iPhone, but at the end of the day it sold like crazy and customers were highly satisfied. After all there were no other Smartphones like it.
only sold like crazy after Apple dropped the price $200 and issued partial refunds to anyone who purchased before.
at the initial launch price it was mostly dead in the water.
59 months ago
Usually I don't check on BGR, Gizmodo, or whatever site that prefers writing love letters to Apple. But that 2nd and 3rd comment from the top made me go AMEN...
bgr.com/2015/03/01/samsung-galaxy-s6-edge-review-pt-1-hands-on/#
Other than TouchID which wasn't the first fingerprint scanner on a phone btw thanks to Motorola Atrix, I don't think Apple has really innovated in hardware since 2007. The newer features is based on proprietary software and generally rehashed of older ideas from other platforms. AirDrop is a copycat of Android Beam and iMessages is a copycat of BBM. Samsung was forward-thinking with the Note 1 and could be forward-thinking with the S6 edge.
It is thinking outside the box and getting out of your own comfort zone instead of playing it safe, rehashing old features, calling them new, and then suing others who actually take more chances than you do. We would still be stuck with toy-like sized phones made for kids if it weren't for those Hummer phones the late Steve Jobs kept dissing about. But wait when iPhones have their own three-sided display supplied by Sharp or LG by 2018... Revolutionary. Magical. Forward-thinking. Best iPhone they ever made. Cha-ching! More money in the bank refining an older idea from a rival company. Apple will refine it but it is like tracing a drawing or simply paraphrasing an original quote that wasn't yours to begin with.
So once again, eventually phones like the iPhone would have been created because the market was leaning that way so apple doing it meant nothing, but if Samsung hasn't created a phablet, the phablet would never exist?
Lol. The logic is hilarious.
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