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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

> Samsung is primarily a hardware company.

As is Apple

Apple sell a unified package of hardware and software. An iPhone without iOS is just another flagship phone with mediocre battery life and a good camera. Many (most) of the advantages of MacOS disappear if Apple supported the same range of commodity hardware as Microsoft.

Samsung can't credibly claim that their software is a selling point; for Apple, it's an integral part of their business.

Would it be more accurate to say Samsung is a hardware component company then?

Close to 50-50 according to their breakdown of revenue by business division [0]. Assuming "consumer electronics" and "mobile communications" mostly refer to selling finished products, and the other groups like "semiconductors" are for selling components.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/630434/samsung-quarterly...

Samsung is a big and diverse company, not really comparable to a more focused company like Apple. In addition to smartphones and components, they’re the largest manufacturer of TVs and a big manufacturer of appliances. If you look at the larger Samsung group, and not just Samsung Electronics, it includes one of the largest shipbuilders in the world, construction, life insurance, and more.

Apple doesn't do the sort of in depth R&D into things like displays that Samsung does. They do it with their A series chips, but for displays, modems etc. they source from the likes of Samsung etc.

You sure about that?

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/03/19/apple-mi...

Yes, am sure, they may have future plans to develop something in house, but I was talking about what's going on currently. I mean they probably have a lot of plans; develop their own modem, switch Macs to ARM etc. but that's not the reality on the ground at the moment.

Also, there's a lot of display tech that Samsung has, so Apple would either have to license these, driving the component cost higher, or work around them, which seems quite difficult.

I think there's still a fundamental difference in Samsung's focus on competing on hardware, while Apple seems to put more emphasis on building a custom software ecosystem, rarely caring (or perhaps needing) to be at the cutting-edge of phone hardware specifications.

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