After Apple restated its December quarter revenue guidance to account for weaker than expected iPhone demand in China, media across the spectrum has cranked their clickbait content generators up to 11 to take full advantage of AAPL panic season. Unfortunately, what almost all of them are writing is ignorant gibberish that has nothing to do with actual events.
While Apple's critics are scrambling to portray its restatement of guidance as some sort of evidence of a "lack of innovation" or "pricing that's too high," the reality is that it's simply evidence that President Trump's tariff war on China has hurt a key Apple market. Apple has never been better positioned— and its competition is now performing so badly that any one of them would love to be in Apple's shoes.
Looking back at the last month of 2018, Apple revealed how its technology was literally saving lives. However, it also had to contend with lawsuits and a new PR misstep with its iPad Pro.
It's only on reflection that you find July contained a lot of news about Siri but we didn't need long-term testing to come to some conclusions about Microsoft's Apple-killing new Surface — or to back away from taking photos on a Samsung. Taking a look at Apple's July 2018.
Apple's hardware designs, software, icons, marketing, retail strategy, and branding have all been closely copied by its rivals. One thing they aren't copying is Apple's vast, premium installed base of loyal buyers. That's the primary foundation of Apple's wildly successful, global business that's uniquely selling massive volumes of luxury-class, premium-priced products in markets where competitors fight over sales of low-priced commodity units with thin margins. Why can't anyone else achieve what Apple has?
Samsung's X5 portable SSD is a beast with best in class performance, but a price tag above what the average consumer will need. We review the red and gray device and compare it to a pair of other extremely capable SSDs from GDrive and Glyph.
Samsung might be supplying Apple with a new touch-integrated OLED panel allowing for thinner iPhones, a report claimed on Wednesday.
At its Snapdragon Tech Summit, Qualcomm outlined its new 855, a chip it hopes will power the next generation of premium Androids. It addresses silicon work Apple has driven in its Application Processors leading up to the latest A12 Bionic, but it's less clear who will be building high-end Androids with Qualcomm's most advanced processor yet, and for how long.
Apple's largest supplier— and the primary source of the flexible OLED panels used in iPhone X and the new iPhone XS lineup— reported 24 percent year-over-year growth in its Q3 revenues from its semiconductors, memory, and display panel unit, an increase it attributed to "increasing demand for flexible [OLED] panels." That supplier was Samsung, and the "major customers" it credited clearly included the world's largest seller of high-end OLED phones. Why aren't Samsung's results attributed to being an "iPhone supplier"?
Smartphone users in the United States will be able to use Verizon's 5G wireless network in the first half 2019 starting with Samsung devices, the carrier has announced, a move that means the main rival to Apple in the market will have a headstart on the iPhone in offering the high-speed connection to consumers.
While some rivals appear set to launch hardware with support for nascent 5G wireless technology in 2019 at some point, Apple looks like it's going to wait another year before making an iPhone that can use them — like it did twice before.
Samsung's first smartphone using the South Korean giant's recently-demonstrated foldable display could be introduced in March, a report claims, launching alongside 5G-equipped Galaxy S10, the 2019 refresh of Samsung's flagship smartphone.
Samsung has revealed a prototype flexible display at its developer conference in San Francisco, with the demonstration of the "Infinity Flex Display" allowing for a tablet-sized mobile device to be folded in half to the size of a smartphone.
In the September quarter, Apple was the main beneficiary of a 67 percent surge in global smartwatch shipments year-over-year, delivering 4.5 million Apple Watches according to research estimates published on Friday.
The global smartphone market is "effectively in a recession," Strategy Analytics claims, with the firm's estimates suggesting Apple is holding its own in a declining marketplace despite showing minimal growth in its latest results.
Samsung is reportedly working on three different versions of its upcoming "Galaxy S10" flagship phone, including a low-cost one that more people can afford very similar to the approach that Apple has taken with the iPhone XR.
Russian brand ambassador for Samsung Ksenia Sobchak is reportedly being sued by the South Korean smartphone producer, for allegedly being caught in public using an iPhone X instead of handsets she was supposed to be promoting.
Samsung has commenced production of chips using a 7-nanometer process, a move that brings it in line with Apple's A-series chip partner TSMC, giving the iPhone supplier potential competition for future iPhone processor orders.
Analysts and commentators who spent the first half of 2018 insisting that Apple's $999 iPhone X was suffering from "disappointing" sales because of its premium price, a supposed "lack of innovation," and controversial design choices that included a camera "notch" are now telling us that Chinese companies that struggled to profit from high volumes of cheap phones will now successfully sell expensive models with an imitative notch.
Despite promising class-leading performance from the Galaxy Note 9 in August, Samsung's flagship phablet failed to beat out the then nine-month-old iPhone X with A11 Bionic processor. Let's see how the Note 9 fares against a current Apple handset: the iPhone XS Max.
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Daniel Eran Dilger
William Gallagher
Andrew O'Hara
Roger Fingas
Malcolm Owen
Vadim Yuryev
