Apple to beat Samsung in smartphone shipments for first time in 14 years
sherwood.news48 points by avonmach 8 hours ago
48 points by avonmach 8 hours ago
Not because Apple made a jump in sales but mostly because Samsung has been on a decade long decline.
Samsung 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
Odd. I've had the Z Fold 5 and now 7 and the last few years' worth of Samsung firmware has been excellent for me. Perhaps they build 'for' their flagships and let devices that perhaps have lower tier chipsets run slowly?
I have the Z Fold 4 (EU) and it performs well to this day. It even got the Android 16 upgrade.
Samsung 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.
Samsung 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.
On 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
I recently got a Samsung device for testing, and the experience was terrible. It took three hours to get the device into a usable state.
First, it essentially forces you to create both a Samsung account and a Google account, with numerous shady prompts for "improving services" and "allowing targeted ads."
Then it required nine system updates (apparently, it can only update incrementally), and worst of all, after a while, it automatically started downloading bloatware like "Kawai" and other questionable apps, and you cannot cancel the downloads.
I wonder how much Samsung gets paid to preinstall all that crap. The phone wasn't cheap, either. The company seems penny wise and pound foolish.
I don't disagree with Samsung's decline, but:
> Sales of the iPhone 17 series in the U.S. — including the iPhone Air — during the first four weeks after launch was 12% higher than that of the iPhone 16 series, excluding the iPhone 16e, the research firm said. In China, a critical market for Apple, sales of the iPhone 17 series during the same period were 18% higher than its predecessor.
So iPhone 17 is selling well. I think it's fair to call it a hit. Do they make another hit next year? Who knows (I'd bet against it), but they won this year's game I believe.
If it weren't for the S-Pen, I'd ditch Samsung in a heartbeat.
The day iPhone has a built-in EMR/AES stylus is the day I become a customer (despite being an Android lifer).
Don't think that will ever happen though, despite Apple shipping Pencil for iPads.
Samsung has definitely built a (small) moat being the only vendor with that offering.
The rumors say Apple is shipping their folding phone next year, I'm crossing my fingers that one might have stylus support and then it'll meander its way back to the regular phones.
That'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.
> 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?
It also doesn't help that google have steadily been increasing their market share.
So 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.
Or maybe they make better phones?
I 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.
I 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.
> - You can’t set alarm on a certain date.
I have some alarms for specific dates, do you mean a single use alarm?
> - 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)
To this day I miss one alarm that LG phones had where it would make me do more work to even dismiss it, on purpose, because I am known to just turn it off and keep sleeping.
> - 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.
I have not had this issue, though I did have the issue of not realizing that since I had bought my phone through Apple instead of through T-Mobile my data / hotspot plan was not the right one, I realized this after I left T-Mobile for Mint, but I rarely if ever use hotspot.
> - Swipe typing is so horrible I had to disable it.
I had the 12 Pro and now the 17 Pro, I rarely do swipe typing, voice to text is slightly more annoying, I would hope that in this world of AI that Apple would improve their voice to text, it just doesn't hear me at all half of the time.
> - You can’t transfer files by simply connecting your phone to a PC.
Apple has always been all about being on Apple, so yeah, though I have gotten my Linux to mount files from the iPhone before, doesn't look pretty at all mind you, but I can take a rough but full snapshot of all my images on my phone..
My iPhone friends literally grab my s24 ultra camera when we take pictures at cocktail bars and tell me to send them the picture
Weird take. Android is still ~80% of the market.
very weird indeed. Apple has ~20% of the global smartphone sales, but 80% of global industry profit.
pareto?
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?
The 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).
Looks like Samsung decreased a lot because Xiaomi ate their lunch, which doesn't surprise me.
I'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.
That 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.
All 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.
Well 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.
Aren't they really big in other parts of the world, like Europe and Latin America?
That 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-sai...
[1] - https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20181122001200320
[2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-02/s-korea-d...
[3] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/baxiabhishek/2017/09/12/the-ris...
[4] - https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-techn...
[5] - https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/oppo-grew-...
[6] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-seizes-725-mln-xia...
[7] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-accuses-chinas-opp...
[8] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/indias-enforcement-direc...
[9] - https://etplay.com/business/why-chinese-cos-have-been-indian...
>> That happened due to the China-South Korea trade war following the installation of THAAD in SK in 2016 [0]. <<
Not really. THAAD really plays no part in Samsung's fall in China. Samsung's smartphone sales in China was already down by -70% by the time THAAD broke out in 2016 from its peak in 2013 and still went down further to less than 1%. Samsung packed up and closed the last Chinese factory in 2019 -- went to Vietnam instead.
Patrick McGee recently released Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company: it better describes the anti-foreign political situation in China at the time and what it meant to the smartphone industry. And how Apple avoided Samsung's fate, but is now captured by it. See Chapter 26 "Despot" and on.
Apple has done a great job capturing the gifting market, which shows up in their Q4 numbers.
I 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.
TBF: 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.
I know why someone would buy an iPhone or a Pixel. I guess people buy Samsung because they're sold in stores?
They 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.
Ship 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.
This is the best supply chain in the world. They ship _because_ they're selling.
They offload unsold inventory to the big mobile network carriers. Has nothing to do with supply chain.
Selling phones really has turned Apple's course around. Jobs made a good call
This comment really reminds me of that old Onion column The Outside Scoop by Jackie Harvey.
I 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.
I 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?
What 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.