Shares of Apple increased nearly 2 percent today to close at $98.79, close to the peak the stock has traded since diving below $100 after the company reported its fiscal Q2 earnings. Within two weeks, Apple will announce its earnings for Q3, which ended in June.
With Apple's upcoming "iPhone 7 Plus" rumored to feature a dual-camera design for better pictures, competing smartphone maker Huawei has pushed to market their own two-lens system. But in an attempt to suggest the Leica-branded lens can produce DSLR-quality images, the Chinese company actually used a picture shot with a full-fledged DSLR, not its new smartphone.
Apple's year-over-year drop in smartphone sales during the March quarter also caused the company to lose marketshare, though part of the shift can be linked to fast-rising Chinese smartphone makers, according to new research data.
Google's forthcoming Daydream platform for virtual reality has support from Android device makers including Samsung, HTC, LG, and Huawei, though the hardware is predicted to only be "slightly better" than Samsung's own Gear VR.
During the March quarter Apple's iPhone remained firmly in second place in global smartphone marketshare, but saw a significant drop year-over-year to 15.3 percent, ceding some ground to up-and-coming Chinese vendors.
Chinese and Taiwanese smartphone suppliers are reportedly scaling back component production in the wake of Apple's iPhone SE, which appears to be impacting the sales of local smartphone brands.
Apple's smartphone marketshare in "urban China" dropped 3.2 percentage points year-over-year during the spring quarter of 2016 — marking the company's first such decline in the region since August 2014, according to research data published on Wednesday.
Google's ability to distribute new Android updates has always lagged far behind Apple's iOS, but the situation is even worse in China, where the "Lollipop" version 5.x, introduced in 2014 alongside iOS 8, has only reached about a fifth of all devices, two thirds the distribution it has achieved elsewhere.
Hong Kong broker CLSA reports a continued "loyal following" for Apple in China, noting that half of smartphone buyers intend to buy from Apple, compared to slipping interest figures for Huawei, Samsung and Xiaomi.
Performance benchmark vendor Antutu presented iPhone 6s as the best performing smartphone of the year, despite being compared against high end Androids with more RAM and faster CPU clocks driving four times as many cores.
The iPhone 6s was the most searched-for consumer technology item this year in Google's annual Year in Search rankings, published on Wednesday, though Apple did have competition from companies like Samsung and LG.
Apple's share of the global smartphone market rose 0.6 points year-over-year to 13.1 percent in the September quarter, although Google's Android cemented its lead as the world's dominant mobile platform, Gartner said in research data released on Wednesday.
A deleted Amazon page for the upcoming Huawei Watch may add to evidence that Google is planning to make the Android Wear platform compatible with iOS devices.
Apple's iPhone continues to gain marketshare despite a slowing global smartphone market during the second quarter, doing particularly well in China — where the overall market actually shrunk by 4 percent year-over-year.
Despite the country being a key market continuing to see tremendous growth, Apple nevertheless lost ground in China to native phonemakers Xiaomi and Huawei during the June quarter, according to Canalys market research data teased on Monday.
Though slowing as a whole, the global cellphone industry — including both smartphones and feature phones — saw several platform rankings shake-ups during the June quarter, with Apple rising to second place and helping to push Microsoft into fourth place, according to Strategy Analytics data published on Thursday.
While the Apple iPad held on to its position as the leading tablet brand worldwide during the June quarter, the gap with other tablet makers shrank — as did the market overall, according to IDC research data released on Wednesday.
IDC research data published on Thursday shows that Apple's share of the global smartphone market grew to 14.1 percent in the June quarter, up from 11.7 percent in the same period a year ago — largely at the expense of Samsung.
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Daniel Eran Dilger
AppleInsider Staff
Roger Fingas
Neil Hughes
