Comments here are out of their mind. Samsung's smartphone business hasn't been a profit center for quite some time. Majority of profit came from DRAM and NAND, and profit fall is directly attributable to recent price crash of both.
He may be right about Apple being 3rd, but Apple looks to be the only one making a decent profit from their phones.
How do they manage that when they have to pay for both hardware and software development, when all the others get the software for free?
People paid for it, even people who couldn’t afford it found a way to pay for an iPhone
The huge cash burst into Apple meant everyone was scrambling to deal with them.
Then economies of scale, negotiating leverage with third parties and sheer momentum propelled them
From a CPU perspective, they still are:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-re...
(for the rest of the features, that's indeed debatable)
Fun fact: Samsung made the chip for the first iPhone. Steve Jobs was so dissatisfied with the experience that Apple bought PA Semi to design the chips in-house.
I thought PA Semi's specialty was in power management and many didn't consider the acquisition a success as most key figures left the company not too long after the acquisition. Are you sure that Apple actually designed the SOC in-house? Wasn't it Intrinsity, Samsung's collaborator, that co-developed Samsung's Hummingbird core (also used in Apple's A4) to compete with Qualcomm's APs and go beyond the 1Ghz barrier, changed the game?
I always thought the Hummingbird was the breakthrough that made the A chips competitive -- Apple bought Intrinsity afterward.
Not that I'm against extra horse power, we'll find a use for it. But we're in "desktop land", almost, for smartphone CPUs. They're good enough.
The real smartphone battles now are in camera quality, gaming oomph and battery usage.
I think it's been longer. I'm on a non-flagship from last year, watching YouTube in PiP mode while writing this comment. Way more than necessary power for causing use.
Probably also a case of modest needs, but still.
When you buy the highend they become average in a few years which is completely useable. However, low end phones quickly fall behind the curve and only keep dropping.
Now, that’s not to say the phone will physically last longer. Just that having headroom becomes more noticeable over time.
It's their ecosystem, all their hardwares work very well between each other. You have Apple messenger on a macbook connecting to your iphone. For android you need to download pushbullet. I'm not in the ecosystem I prefer Android but I can see why people such as consumer would continue to buy Apple stuff. I'm not entirely sure about their laptops though...
Also Apple make a lot of money from services such as itune and their app store. Itune made more than Spotify. It all works together with their close ecosystem.
It's a real pain to move from apple to android because text messages goes straight to apple server. You need to sign off and jump a hoop to get text message back to android. Also getting mp3 off of itunes or getting bandcamp mp3s on to itune. It's like LA fitness, at least in 2010, where if you want to cancel your gym membership you need to download the pdf from their website and then mail it to the provided address and then they'll charge you anyway one extra month.
It's also only recently that the Apple ecosystem is relevant with Continuity stuffs. Before that, iPods, iPhones and iPads are all very isolated and don't require Apple ecosystem much.
TIL people are still sending SMS from their PC...
I'd say most of us will either use the Signal client or web.whatsapp.com without bothering connecting the actual devices together.
On one hand, smartphones are more or less commodities now. Most established smartphone makers can make great phones (at this point I only compare cameras and even then, they also to all be great) so it is only natural that margins become pretty thin. But right now they are just too thin and the ecosystem is not really healthy.
We don't really need another Apple making huge margins on its smartphone business though.
I think I'd argue we need another two or three. Monocultures are almost never a good idea in the long term.
Even Google is now facing the issue that despite Project Treble, most OEMs don't care to release newer versions or provide the respective upgrades, thus rending useless whatever they show at IO.
Because it shows.
Content and Apps. Apple takes a nice bite.
Samsung sells a commodity. Then people use the Google Play store and google makes money. I guess Samsung dreams of it's own phone OS. Was it LG or Samsung who bought WebOS?
Example: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07N124XDS a few months ago 32GB SODIMM was near unobtanium, a less known brand on eBay alone sold 'em for like 350-375 and now the Samsung ones are on Amazon at below 230 USD. Still has a 25-30% premium over smaller sticks but that's expected.
25B (2016), 47B (2017), 54B (2018). 2019 Q1 profit is similar to 2016 Q1 profit. Things are simply going back to 2016 before DRAM/NAND price craze.
Who's 'we'? Are you speaking on behalf of someone. Your sig doesn't hint at anything.
>Samsung said it received fewer orders from cloud service providers, such as Amazon, as well as from handset makers, such as Apple, which has recently seen a slowdown of its own smartphone sales. This low demand in the cloud services and smartphone markets for both DRAM and NAND flash chips have pushed the prices of these chips down.
>According to Bloomberg, data centers are still going through their unused memory chips right now, Apple has cut its forecasts for iPhone sales and China’s economy, which is Samsung’s largest market for embedded components, has also slowed down this year.
>According to IHS Markit, a research firm, the market for DRAM is set to reach $77 billion in sales this year, which is a drop of 22% compared to last year. In this last quarter, DRAM prices fell over 30% (38% for server DRAM), which is the “sharpest decline since 2011," according to TrendForce.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-q1-2019-earnings-p...
I think it basically boils down to few things.
1. Surprise Drop of Smartphone Unit Sold, we saw the first YoY decline in total Smartphone Unit shipment. ( Unit, not revenue ). Out of a 1.3B Smartphone market, even a 5% drop is a huge volume to fill.
2. Better than expected yield of 3D NAND. Which means you actually have an increase in output. And it just happen all three, Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron were able to yield better at the same time. To be fair they have been very conservatives with their estimate.
3. More Chinese DRAM and NAND are being used in the Domestic market. Which is unofficially required for selling phones in China.
All these along with the improved efficiency of DRAM and NAND Fabs for trying to fill orders during 2017 and 2018 without building new Fabs. Meant the DRAM / NAND are hit with a perfect storm.
I'm not aware of a similar pattern in DRAM, which if anything has been suspiciously high for a while to the point that many assume price fixing was to blame as has happened in the past.
[1] As well as AMD has been doing with Ryzen, most large computer purchasers are still Intel buyers and are slow to change.
finally