If Samsung's profits are falling as an Android manufacturer where does that leave users? It's not like Samsung was selling below cost. Without them the others would have a higher market share but would they actually become profitable?
Or is there just a glut of Android devices on the market to the point that no one would have an easy time making a profit in the current environment? Is this just a sign of a shake-up?
Perhaps Samsung's decline has been in part to the success of these other handset manufacturers?
As an outsider to this whole thing (Apple guy with little interest in buying an Android phone at this time) it has always seemed like there was a pretty big oversupply unless you only considered the flagship phones (and even then it's still arguable).
The market share between the various Android manufacturers starting to even out sounds good to me, but I wonder what it would do for prices and how that would effect Android vs. iOS.
But overall, Samsung still holds a big chunk of Android market share and it would take several years for that to come down to something we can consider as stiff competition. Samsung has a lot of muscle and money to continue its "hardware machine gun" spraying tens of devices to see what sells, which is also aided well by a big marketing budget (probably the largest marketing budget among all, including Apple and Microsoft in the mix).
The push to make Samsung more equal to other Android device makers could be from different directions. One is Samsung's desire to go with Tizen and sunset Android. This may not sit very well with the user base since the app market for Tizen needs to be built, and that's one reason why Tizen may likely shine in the nascent wearables segment than in the established smartphone, phablet and tablet segments. The other push is really good devices from HTC and Motorola that come with the latest version of Android and (especially for Motorola, in my knowledge) the ability to easily get updates easily and quickly. If HTC and Motorola survive for a few more years and continue whatever good work they're doing, then they do stand a chance to improve the overall market for the benefit of everyone.
Overall, this is much better for Android, rather than having one big company.
(In the airline case, this experience is in the realm of vastly lower ticket prices, rather than an actual comfortable flying experience. But the point remains that you can fly today for 50% of the real cost of flying thirty years ago.)
Unlikely. Carriers care about their margins. And if there are cheaper phones to sell that customers truly want, then the margins for the carriers can be higher as they can take a percentage of the price differences for themselves. Thus carriers want to have as low priced hardware as possible that still work on the high end networks and that customers want so they can sell more service subscriptions -- which is where they make their money.
Comparing Apple only to the manufacturers who had to deal with those two giant monopsonies who supplied the two basic requirements for a "Wintel" PC is missing the point massively.
It also makes things interesting for this time around as Google and ARM have very different business strategies than Windows and Intel did at that time.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong: hasn't Apple seen its Mac line market share grow for something like 26 straight quarters? And, since they're high-end / premium devices (> $1,000), the margins (and therefore profit) are higher (again, like iPhone).
http://www.asymco.com/2013/04/16/escaping-pcs/
This is more than the top 5 Windows vendors combined, and about as much all Windows vendors combined.
Microsoft on the other hand (though interestingly they actually made an overall loss that quarter as they wrote of a 7 Billion company they purchased a few years before) made about 4 bilion revenue and maybe 2-3 Billion profit from consumer Windows sales directly and that's not counting servers, or business licences, or Office each of which is roughly of the same magnitude.
Intel's PC client group took in 8.5 Billion that quarter. Possibly half of that being profit (overall gross margin was 58%.)
So Apple makes a lot of money from PCs, Microsoft and Intel have always made more.
Note that from selling iPhones and iPads Apple recently made more profit than Microsoft, Intel and a few others combined. But for desktop and laptops, Microsoft and Intel have always claimed the vast share of industry profits unless you go out of your way to exclude these two companies from the industry.
Which is strange, since Samsung top of the line are almost as expensive as Apples.
It's very odd to see that talked down as if it was a bad thing on Hacker News as in any story not involving Apple free-market competition would be hailed as the driver of basically all social improvement and technological progress in the last century or so.
Also, that's why it's not surprising that in this particular "race to the bottom" that there would still be high-end models being sold by HTC, Samsung etc., though you would expect them to be putting pressure on competitors to be offering more value and/or lower prices across their entire range.