Apple Hammers The Competition

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published May 5, 11:48AM EDT

Quick Read

iPhone 17 Dominates
Samsung Runs Far Behind
Lack Of AI Doesn’t Matter

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Apple Hammers The Competition — © IPhone 16 Pro series (CC BY 4.0) by Jakub CA

The gold standard of smartphone industry research is CounterPoint. It recently released its report on global first-quarter sales. One point is that the top 10 brands accounted for 25% of the market. The real headline should have been the extent to which Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL | AAPL Price Prediction) controls the market.

Counterpoint’s Global Handset Model Sales Tracker showed that the Apple iPhone 17 was the top product based on unit sales. This was the most important part of the data. Second place on the list was the iPhone 17 Pro Max, followed by the iPhone 17 Pro. The iPhone 16 held sixth place behind the Samsung Galaxy AO7 G4 and Galaxy A17 5G. Commenting on Apple, Senior Analyst Harshit Rastogi said, “iPhone 17 continues to outperform its predecessor owing to key upgrades like higher base storage, camera resolution, display refresh rate, bringing the smartphone closer to the Pro variants and providing overall value for the larger market.”

The success of the iPhone 17 also showed up in Apple’s earnings. Apple reported quarterly revenue of $111.2 billion, up 17% year over year. Diluted earnings per share were $2.01, up 22%. iPhone sales rose 22% to $60 billion. Apple management said the demand for the iPhone 17 was “extraordinary.”

We’ve repeatedly noted that demand for the iPhone 17 has been strong despite the lack of AI features. Under a deal with Google, Gemini will provide most of those features. It has also been pointed out, over and over, that Apple has stayed out of the battle over AI dominance that has led large tech companies to spend what will probably be $800 billion this year on data centers. This construction has been slowed, in many cases, by a lack of electricity and water. Local residents in areas where these could be built have also slowed the process. Yahoo recently reported that half of all planned data centers have been slowed or canceled. In the meantime, Apple’s investment in the sector is a rounding error.

Maybe the Counterpoint research data shows that AI is not as important as many people think it will be–at least to the personal use market.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.