Even though Android is the dominant operating system on the smartphone market, Apple’s Siri leads the U.S. market for voice assistants on mobile phones with 45.65 percent. Even though available on most Android devices, the Google Assistant only has a market share of 28.9 percent while Samsung’s Bixby even ranks below Amazon’s Alexa, a voice assistant which is not native to any Smartphone.
When people think of Apple, they think of hardware first. The MacBook, the iPod and the iPhone in particular – those are the products that have made Apple what it is today: the most valuable company in the world.
Over the past few years however, another part of Apple’s business has quietly overtaken all but one of the above. Apple’s services segment accounted for more than $9 billion in revenue in the second quarter of Apple’s fiscal 2018 (which ends in September), making it the second largest contributor to overall sales behind the company’s cash cow, the iPhone, which accounted for 62 percent of total sales between January and March.
With Apple Music, Apple Pay, iTunes and the App Store as well as iCloud and Apple Care, Apple’s services business has become a beast of its own in recent years, nearly doubling from $16.1 billion in sales in 2013 to $30 billion last year.The company’s ambitions go much further than that though, as Apple executives have said they plan to hit a target of $50 billion in services revenue by 2021.
When the Mobile World Congress kicked off in Barcelona, many of the world’s largest smartphone brands used the gathering of the mobile industry to present their latest offerings on the world stage. While Apple is known to skip MWC, Samsung shows off its new flagship Galaxy S models to get maximum attention. Having had to move the Galaxy S8 launch to March last year, the Korean electronics giant returned to the big stage, unveiling the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus.
Interestingly Samsung and Apple follow polar opposite approaches in the smartphone market. While Apple is decidedly minimalist in how many different models it sells and focuses on the high end segment of the market, Samsung releases numerous new models each year. While the Galaxy S and Galaxy Note models compete with Apple for the premium segment, Samsung also has cheaper models on offer to compete with Chinese brands in Asia and at the lower end of Western markets.
It is impossible to say which approach is the right one, as both Samsung and Apple are exceptionally successful in what they’re doing. It appears, however, as if several smartphone makers have started trimming their phone line-up to focus on fewer models recently. As our chart, based on data from GSMArena’s phone database, shows, five major smartphone brands, including Samsung by the way, released significantly fewer phones last year than they did in 2016.
