Time to revisit this piece now that Samsung (and therefore Android) profit share has caught up with market share enough to overtake Apple:
http://daringfireball.net/2011/09/winning
"The iPhone, on the other hand, currently accounts for two-thirds of the mobile phone industry’s total profit. Mobile carriers need the iPhone today. Computer stores did not need the Mac.
It’s easy to pick and choose the numbers you want to back up the theory you prefer. So if you’re rooting for Android to dominate the industry, it is tempting to focus on unit sale market share, and to attribute Windows’s historical dominance to its massive unit sale market share. But you can flip that around, and argue that because I am rooting for the iPhone, I cherry pick the data to fit the story I want to see unfold — and so I say profit share is what matters, not unit sales, only because that’s the figure that puts Apple’s position in the best light.
But I like the odds that I’ll be proven right. Money is how you keep score, because it’s the one thing whose value everyone agrees upon. That’s what money is."