Apple loses top phonemaker spot to Samsung | Hacker News Reader

Apple loses top phonemaker spot to Samsung

reuters.com

54 pointsilikecinnamon36 comments

One thing Samsung does to reel you in is to make ridiculous offers to existing customers. I'm not sure if Apple does the same or not.

For example, they'll often list a phone for say $1000. Then offer you $800 trade in on last years model, and maybe $500 on a two year old model, both objectively much more than the phone is worth. Pair that with EPP discounts that almost everyone qualifies for, RetailMeNot sitewide codes, credit card rewards, and random Samsung offers - you can often upgrade every year if you want for very little money.

Samsung also has much better lower end. The iPhone SE starts at 430$, compared to 200$ for a Samsung A14.

Often Samsung phones are even cheaper with a prepaid.

For 90% of people that A14 is going to give you the same utility. However Apple probably has a much better margin here.

They get to own the whole stack, if I buy an an Android phone I'm getting my apps from Google, my cloud storage from Google.

If I buy an iPhone I'm buying apps from Apple, paying for iCloud and Apple TV.

That A14 is surprising. It has a huge screen, decent battery, dual-sim, headphone jack, and can take a 1TB MicroSD. The one I saw didn't even have much bloat installed on it.

I actually was using a cheap Samsung phone( with a jack ) for a good while, but it lacked Esim.

I suspect at the lower end most people aren't buying 100$ earbuds so they might as well leave the jack.

And on the other end can have hi-res DACs not limited by crapily-negotiated codecs.

And for $250 you can get the A34 which has an amoled 120Hz screen (the A14 is LCD)

> both objectively much more than the phone is worth

Very attractive to someone like me who wrings the last vestiges of life from their phone, I was very surprised to get half off of the S22 when I traded in my ancient S7.

Either the company is making money or I'm keeping the money. For some reason people like it when the company makes money. I like it when I get to keep them.

But then they take you over the data harvesting coals

That's only in the US, they do that because they're not market leader there. Apple is still #1 in the US.

Here in Europe the deals are much milder unfortunately.

> both objectively much more than the phone is worth

I'd say $1000 is subjectively more than it should be worth, objectivity would be indicated by what the same phone could be acquired for by some other means; $800 for last year's model seems fair if it was initially priced at $1000. Whatever Apple is going to give you for your 1 year old Macbook or phone is just a laughably low amount aimed at the lazy rich and other stupid consoomers who deserve a bad deal if they'll go for it anyway.

Does there exist a market where you can convert the phone into $800 or $500? If so it is objectively worth that much. Otherwise it isn't. "Seems fair" has nothing to do with it!

Isn't that approximately what I said? As in, either brand new in box at the retailer or in the used market, the price will be set by whether potential buyers find it to seem fair or not.

Given market dynamics it was rather surprising that Apple ever reached #1 at all. Perhaps it will happen again in 9 months if there is some spike after the 2024 phones are released.

Regardless of volume, Apple takes the lion's share of profits, with Samsung a distant second (and I believe nobody in third place). ISTR that Apple + Samsung constituted something like 106% of the total industry profit, making it a lot like the airlines.

Based on what? "Budget" phone manufacturers (Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Transsion and many others in the long tail) make tens of billions of dollars in revenue every year and are very profitable.

Revenue, yes, but minimal or no profit hence the churn. You can look up the data if you have a statista subscription.

I'd think the financial reports of these companies are a much more reliable source than statista.

* Xiaomi made $2.4B in profit last year (https://qz.com/xiaomi-profits-earnings-apple-iphone-sales-ch...)

* Transsion $760M (https://simplywall.st/stocks/cn/tech/shse-688036/shenzhen-tr...)

* ZTE $1.3B (https://www.wsj.com/business/earnings/ztes-profit-rises-as-m...)

Plenty of others are private and don't publish financials but also don't operate in an environment where they can burn through hundreds of millions or billions of dollars without any expectation of profit.

Compare that to $97B profit for Apple in 2023.

Why do you need to compare anything? Read what we are discussing.

I agree with that part.

But like Apple, ZTE and Xiaomi have other revenue streams beyond handsets (don't know about Transson, but that seems like a pretty narrow margin). I took a whip through the Xiaomi financials and they talk about profit mix in percentages but I didn't see a break out by line.

In any case the analysts are pretty clear that Apple and Samsung are most of the profit in the handset sector and the churn at the bottom is all non-viable white label businesses. Whether a few inbetween like Xiaomi can sustainably make much profit remains to be seen.

I am interested to see if Apple's phone business (and I suppose smartphones in general) has seen its best days. I am going to replace my iphone in the fall, but merely due to age; I don't even know what model number apple is up to these days. The phones seem pretty much the same.

> I took a whip through the Xiaomi financials and they talk about profit mix in percentages but I didn't see a break out by line.

Xiaomi's phone is its primary business. If they were operating at a loss on their phones, they wouldn't have any other lucrative business to absorb that loss and turn positive on their profit.

> Perhaps it will happen again in 9 months

If China sales continue to plummet, it may be even lower.

I had a top tier Samsung phone the s22ultra. Within a little over a year the service basically stopped working. Samsung had tons of reports of other s22ultra with the same problem. Samsung basically said no refund no exchange. You can trade it in for 400 towards a new Samsung. This was a 1000+ dollar phone that barely made it past warranty.

I will never ever use a Samsung again. It was my fault for not checking the warranty. I should have known better when a 1000+ flagship phone only has a one year warranty it can't be very good, right?

I now just buy cheap phones cause that experience ruined me. Their support was so bad and they didn't care at all about the forums of people with the exact same issues. I don't know how this company is top seller. This surprises me so much.

I don’t know where you are from, but in the EU and UK, consumers get 4-6 years of hardware warranty, on all tech products. Look into the legislation. I got a MacBook replaced after 5 years.

There is certainly no such legislation in the UK.

Im not sure why are you so certain about it. I am living in the uk and the example I gave about the MacBook happened here. The law in question is the consumer rights act of 2015, specifically section 105. Scroll down on the page and read it. I invoked it 3 times already with different companies successfully.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/section/19/note...

Section 105 explains explicitly that it's not a warranty:

>For example, the statutory right may not be breached and so a consumer would not be able to obtain a remedy if, say, a very cheap kettle stopped working fully after four years, as a reasonable person might not expect a bottom of the range kettle to last that long.

We’re not talking about a cheap kettle however, are we?

You said

> but in the EU and UK, consumers get 4-6 years of hardware warranty, on all tech products

And thats true. A kettle isn’t a “tech product”. If it is one of the expensive IOT kettles, then it’s covered.

The law you linked to doesn't make any distinction between tech products and other products, so I'm not really sure what you're getting at at this point. It's clear that there is no 4-6 year warranty. There are other protections which are lesser and quite open to interpretation. It's definitely good to let people know about these protections and they are indeed useful, but they are not a warranty. The period of 'coverage' has nothing to do with the 4-6 year period mentioned in 105 (which is the limitation period for breach of contract), but rather the subjective interpretation of how long a 'reasonable person' would expect a given product to keep working without fault.

iPhones have only one year warranty in China too. Not sure why.

Also, I walked into an electronics store the other day and could tell between an iPhone and a Samsung phone anymore. Everything looks the same. They got the “iPhone look” market covered.

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