An article from the Wall Street Journal featured a remark by noted hardware analyst Stephen Baker regarding both Apple’s and Samsung’s holiday sales figures. While many were relying their faith on the fact that Apple would experience a boom due to the Galaxy Note 7 crisis, Baker confirmed that the Cupertino giant’s lack of a “wowing product this year” meant that the unfortunate Galaxy Note 7 users opted for other high end Galaxy mobile phones instead of Apple’s iPhone 7.
According to Baker,
Most of those who bought or wanted to buy a Note 7 opted for a different high-end Galaxy phone. Samsung was able to fend off other Android competition, and Apple, too, thanks to Apple’s own lack of a wowing product this year.
As per the September announcement, Apple didn’t release the first weekend sale numbers of iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus because it decided that the numbers were no longer a representative metric for its investors and customers. And due to the safety issues, Samsung also halted the sales of Galaxy Note7 worldwide in early October.
But Chetan Sharma, another industry analyst added to Baker’s thread remarking that iPhone’s “lack of convincing enough feature set” could not convince the users of potentially exploding Galaxy Note 7 to change the ecosystem. Consumer tech and mobile industry consultant Chetan Sharma said
Apple has the strongest ecosystem, with its hardware, software and app and content stores, iPhone users looking for an upgrade stick with Apple. But in a year when Samsung dropped the ball in a huge way.
He also added that the iPhone manufacturer didn’t have a phone with a compelling enough feature set to lure Samsung owners away. In another dataset provided earlier this week by Flurry, regarding the top device activation by the manufacturer between 12/19 and 12/25: Apple topped the list with 44% activations while Samsung only enjoyed the second spot with 21%.
Meanwhile, in the comparison to last years data Apple has dropped from 49% and Samsung have mounted from 19%. The conclusion of both these analysts state that both Apple and Samsung have made certain errors this year that has acted adversely to their growth.
Mr Sharma summed up this year’s performance for both Apple and Samsung, when he said that
the timing couldn’t have been worse for Samsung and it couldn’t have been better for Apple. But the truth is neither company capitalized this year.
