Two Apple rivals may come together in an effort to take on the iPhone, with a new report claiming that South Korean electronics giant Samsung has made a bid to buy struggling Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry for $7.5 billion.
South Korean electronics giant Samsung has officially unveiled the Galaxy A7, the latest entry in the company's premium all-metal Galaxy A series that brings a 5.5-inch Super AMOLED display, 2 gigabytes of RAM and an 8-core application processor.
Apple will reportedly turn to longtime supplier and sometimes-rival Samsung to fabricate the application processor for the forthcoming Apple Watch, while Taiwan's Advanced Semiconductor Engineering is said to have been chosen to package the new device's S1 processing module.
After being pushed downward across the first week of 2015, Apple's stock surged $4.14 today to close at $111.89, adding over $24.27 billion to the company's market capitalization.
Samsung Electronics has released "preliminary earnings guidance" for the December quarter, calling for revenues of around 52T KRW ($47B) and operating profits of about 5.2T KRW ($4.73B), a profit decline of 37 percent compared to the year-ago quarter — its first such decline for the holiday period since 2011.
Intel's mobile chip division has lost $7 billion over the last two years while heavily subsidizing the manufacturing costs of Android tablet makers agreeing to use the chipmaker's Atom mobile x86 processors. Microsoft's new Office for Android won't run on any of them.
Virtually everywhere in the world that research firm Kantar Worldpanel ComTech tracks smartphone market data, Apple saw marketshare gains, thanks to the popularity of its latest flagship iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus handsets.
During Samsung's keynote presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show on Monday, co-CEO B.K. Yoon advocated for an open, industry-wide "Internet of things" push, revealing plans to build in connected device capabilities across its entire product line within five years.
There's something about Apple that makes people lose their minds, particularly people who are journalists. The most likely explanation is that putting "Apple" in a headline is currently the most irresistible clickbait known to mankind. That, and there's no time for fact checking or any sort of basic research in today's BuzzFeed world of made up garbage.
The outlook remains murky for Apple's anticipated "A9" processor, expected to arrive in its 2015 iPhone, with a pair of new reports disagreeing on whether Samsung or TSMC will build the bulk of next-generation chips.
While Apple continues to expand its highly successful retail presence, Samsung's own retail experiment appears to be floundering, as the South Korean electronics maker has closed its flagship store in one of Europe's largest malls.
A survey of 880 college students conducted last week by Chegg found 51 percent named Apple as their preferred smartphone, tablet and laptop brand while 46 percent named Beats as their top pick for headphones.
In a bid to catch up with Apple Pay, Samsung is said to have turned to a startup company, LoopPay, in hopes of debuting its own mobile payments service with wide compatibility in 2015.
Apple's final quarter of 2014 is expected to set dramatic new records in iPhone sales and overall profits, but external issues out of the company's control will also play a part, ranging from cheaper oil to declining foreign currencies.
After Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. reportedly built the majority of A8 chips for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, Apple is said to have begun turning back to Samsung for its next-generation "A9" processor, which is expected to power the company's 2015 iPhone lineup.
The Google-branded, Motorola-built Nexus 6 attempted to incorporate a fingerprint sensor like Apple's Touch ID which debuted on last year's iPhone 5s. However, the feature was abandoned shortly before the phone's introduction.
Android Police named Apple's iPad Air 2 as its top tablet pick among "Android devices" for the 2014 holiday season, calling it "reliable, predictable, and very fast."
Qualcomm's upcoming 64-bit Snapdragon chips designed to power new high end Android flagship phones including the Samsung Galaxy S6, LG G4 and HTC One M9 are reportedly running into new issues that threaten to further delay any real competition to Apple's iPhone 6 juggernaut.
During an appearance before a U.S. appeals court on Thursday, lawyers for Samsung sought to have vacated the $930 million judgement awarded to Apple earlier this year in a landmark patent infringement lawsuit, saying the sum was "absurd."
Despite speculation that Samsung was planning to institute major personnel changes its mobile division, the South Korean electronics maker has instead announced that it will stay the course with its mobile management team.
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AppleInsider Staff
Sam Oliver
Daniel Eran Dilger
Mikey Campbell
Neil Hughes
Katie Marsal
