News Apple iPad Air and new Retina iPad mini unveiled

I wasn't referring to the success, but the "revolutionary ideas." As we've established, Apple doesn't invent - it 'innovates.' I'm not here trying to argue that the iPhone was unsuccessful - because it clearly wasn't - but rather that not a single individual technology inside that phone originated at Apple, a fact I think we have now covered rather well.

Apple excels at taking others' ideas, combining them into a single product with shiny design, and marketing the holy zombie Jeebus out of it. Sometimes this results in a hit (hello, iPhone) and sometimes a miss (goodbye, Newton and Pippin.) You jokingly suggest I believed that Apple's competitors didn't beat it to the punch (although, as the LG Prada proves, they actually did) because of some moral objection to success: I jokingly suggest in response that, had LG enjoyed a massive fan-base of Kool-Aid drinkers who would buy a turd providing it was encased in unibody aluminium and graced with the logo of their saviour, perhaps people would be desperately searching for stock of the LG Prada 5S right now. (Obviously untrue, but then if we're being ridiculous here...)

Incidentally, can we digress for a moment and recall the feature list of the original iPhone? I remember a friend getting one, and discovering that basic features - the ability to change ringtones or message tones, the ability to send or receive Vcards, cut and damn paste - were missing. Sure, they've been added since, but the original iPhone was hardly a perfect device.

 

Dominate? With 15%? Using IDC's 2Q13 figures, just 'cos that's what I happen to have to hand and I should really be doing real work right now (sorry boss!) rather than searching for 3Q13, Apple had a 13.1% share of the smartphone market - putting it very firmly in second place behind Samsung, which had a 30.4% share. That's more than double - the very definition of domination.

(Don't like IDC's figures? SA says 13.6% and 33.1% respectively - an even bigger lead for Samsung.)

 

Link? I'd be interested to read that.

 

Interesting - thanks for that. It shows a 'value share' of 53% for Apple and 47% for Samsung - although the 70% and 33% of your post is closer for 2012 figures.

 

Aye - nice work if you can get it! Not surprising given its market position, though: Apple's cheapest smartphone is pretty much the same price as - or more than - most of its rivals' flagship devices, which translates to high margins. Samsung, meanwhile, has a bunch of similar high-margin products - Galaxy S4, Galaxy Note 3 - but also a shedload of low-margin budget products. The result: Samsung easily outsells Apple, but does so by taking a hit on its margin. What is possibly more surprising from those latest figures is that Samsung is selling more than twice as many handsets as Apple yet is only six percentage points away in profit share despite the fact that devices like the Galaxy Y sell for a tenth of the cost of an iPhone.