As it has for several quarters now, Apple continues to trail the overall smartphone market's booming growth, with the company's 16.8 percent year-over-year growth in the first quarter registering as the lowest among top five vendors in a market that grew by 28.6 percent as a whole, according to a new report from research firm IDC. Market leader Samsung also trailed the broader market's growth as Huawei, Lenovo, and LG all jockeyed for position in the closely contested third through fifth spots in the rankings.
Worldwide smartphone shipments in 1Q14 in millions of units (Source: IDC)
Apple reached a new first quarter record, breaching the 40 million unit mark. The company saw double-digit growth in Japan as well as across multiple developing markets, including Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia. Still, this made for the lowest year-over-year improvement among the leading vendors. What remains to be seen is when – not if – Apple's rumored large-screen models will arrive on the market, filling a gap in the company's portfolio that has been exploited by the competition.
In the overall mobile phone market, Apple again outperformed most of the competition as feature phone sales continue to dwindle. With Apple's all-smartphone lineup taking nearly 10 percent of the overall market in the quarter, the company is within striking distance of Nokia, which garnered 11.3 percent of the market as it continues to be hit hard by the decline in feature phone sales and instability as it has shifted from Symbian to Windows Phone. Just days ago, Microsoft completed its acquisition of Nokia's phone unit, officially uniting software and hardware in what has been a close partnership over the last several years.
Worldwide mobile phone shipments in 1Q14 in millions of units (Source: IDC)
Apple last week announced record March quarter earnings on the strength of its 43.7 million iPhones shipped. The iPhone continues to drive Apple's overall financial performance, representing 57 percent of the company's revenue for the quarter.
Apple today released iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4, the fourth major updates to the iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 operating system updates that came out last year. iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4 come two months after Apple released iOS 18.3 and iPadOS 18.3.
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The new software can be downloaded on eligible iPhones and iPads over-the-air by going to...
While the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max are not expected to launch until September, there are already plenty of rumors about the devices.
Below, we recap key changes rumored for the iPhone 17 Pro models as of March 2025:
Aluminum frame: iPhone 17 Pro models are rumored to have an aluminum frame, whereas the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro models have a titanium frame, and the iPhone ...
Apple's big developer event is a little over two months away, and rumors about what we can expect to see in Apple's next major operating system updates are becoming increasingly frequent.
A public release of iOS 18.4 is also imminent with a number of updates and improvements, although we won't be getting the major Apple Intelligence Siri upgrades that had reportedly been planned for this...
Saturday March 29, 2025 10:15 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple is reportedly working on a new Magic Mouse. Below, we recap what to expect.
The two key rumors for the Magic Mouse 3 so far include a relocated charging port, along with a more ergonomic design.
It was briefly rumored that the Magic Mouse 3 would also feature voice control, but that was misinterpreted information.
Relocated Charging Port
While the Magic Mouse switched from...
With the second release candidate of iOS 18.4 that Apple seeded out today, the company finally provided us with release notes that give a full rundown on what to expect.
There's an Apple Vision Pro app, new Apple Intelligence features for notifications and additional language support, plus an Apple News Food feature for Apple News+ subscribers, and several updates that should improve the...
We've been hearing rumors about a foldable iPhone for almost a decade now, but it looks like we might finally see the device come to fruition in 2026. We're going to be waiting many more months for the foldable iPhone, but so far we're hearing good things.
Apple wants to make it creaseless. It's taken Apple multiple years to design a foldable iPhone that it's satisfied with because Apple ...
Multiple sources have claimed that iOS 19 will introduce a new design with more translucent buttons, menus, notification banners, and more, and there is now another clue that points towards this glass-like appearance.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman today said the new design project is codenamed "Solarium" internally. A solarium is a room with glass walls that allow in plenty of sunlight, so this...
iOS 19 will not be available on the iPhone XR, iPhone XS, or the iPhone XS Max, according a private account on social media site X that has accurately provided information on device compatibility in the past.
The iPhone XR, iPhone XS, and iPhone XS Max all have an A12 Bionic chip, so it looks like iOS 19 will discontinue support for that chip. All other iPhones that run iOS 18 are expected...
(I'll tell you what the point is... the industry needs to stop treating this as one giant monolithic market. It doesn't work that way in other industries... why does it work that way in the phone business)?
Apple's profits in the phone business are rising. Samsung's profits in the phone business got CUT IN HALF over the past year.
Apple is quality and Samsung is quantity. This is no surprise. I'd rather keep Apple focusing on quality as they are now. Samsung can keep making it's large quantities of questionable quality phones.
And Apple wins the profits from phones war also.
[edit] Samsung does make some ok phones. But a large number of them are not that good at all.
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Apple's profits in the phone business are rising. Samsung's profits in the phone business got CUT IN HALF over the past year.
Yet the problem is... Apple's market share?
This is the main point here. Apple clearly wins this war.
I am pleasantly surprised that Apple increased its global mobile phone share by a full 1% YOY.
Considering that the market is being flooded with cheap smartphone then it is great to see Apple's share growing. Show that customers who had earlier bought cheaper phones are trading up to the iPhone.
Indeed. The term 'smartphone' market is a joke based on arbitrary distinctions. There will soon be only one 'phone' market and in that market Apple's share is and always has been rising steadily and is now up to 10%.
These reports have been able to suppress this story the last few years by continually moving more and more phones into the 'smartphone' category to make said category grow faster than Apple to make Apple look bad. This includes many Android devices with no data plans. However, within the next year they will run out of dumb phones to reclassify as smartphones and Apple's true growth will become impossible to hide. I'll make some popcorn...
The way iOS works seems obvious todaybut it's only obvious because it works so well. It's as if people think that's the way it should have always worked. But it didn'tnot by a longshotbefore iOS came around. We take it for granted today, but the first time I held an iPhone on June 29, 2007 it was like a magical little slab of aluminum and glass. All other phones seemed like ancient artifacts by comparison. And Eric Schmidt was sitting on Apple's board, funneling inside information back to the mothership. Changing their design from a BlackBerry clone to an iPhone clone. That fact is well documented.
I wonder if Tim Cook has been doing the same while sitting on the Nike board of directors? After all, Nike has been in the fitness business in some way shape or form since before Apple existed. And now all of a sudden Apple is coming out with fitness apps and hiring in that area amid strong rumors of a watch with fitness functionality. :eek:
