Friends. The Macalope has some terrible news. Are you sitting down? It’s… it’s… about Samsung.
South Korean electronics giant Samsung reported a nearly 50 percent drop in third-quarter profit, as its smartphone business lost ground in an intensely competitive global market.
Whoa! Almost fiddy purcent?! That’s almost half! Well, cheer up, Samsung. The good news is you can keep losing half your profit and still be profitable forever.
But, so weird, right? The Macalope distinctly remembers being told that cheap phones from firms like Xiaomi and Huawei would affect Apple and only Apple. And yet here we are months later and it turns out it’s Samsung that’s taking the competitive global marketplace wedgie, not Apple. It’s almost as if Apple doesn’t differentiate on price but on something else.
So. Strange.
So strange that attempting to bring back the stylus didn’t result in gangbuster sales. Who saw that coming? So strange that Samsung didn’t “brute-force its way into taking more and more marketshare from Apple,” either. Clearly the smart money was on noting Apple was “getting its clock cleaned by Samsung” and predicting that soon everyone would develop for Android instead of iOS. Samsung devices always beat Apple devices. Everyone knows that.
Even if you could have foreseen the unimaginable—that their phone business would slump—you would have thought that they’d make up the difference with their smartwatch business. Particularly when the ads for it were so good and not at all seemingly aimed at creepy randos.
Truth be told, even the horny one himself didn’t predict that preorders for the iPhone 6 Plus would beat those for the Galaxy Note 4 in…
[Long pause for dramatic effect]
… South Korea. So, apologies, dear readers. Turns out South Koreans really do like larger phones and it’s not just about supporting the home team. Not only do they like larger phones, they really like better larger phones.
Well, OK. OK. OK. So, Samsung’s having a tough quarter. No biggy. The Macalope also remembers reading how its Knox security layer was going to blow the iPhone out of the water in the enterprise and government so any day now…
Oh, COME ON.
Yeah, turns out—funny story—Knox stores the user’s PIN in plaintext on the phone.
Well, it’s not funny if you’re trying to actually use it to secure things. Then it’s probably not a funny story at all. It’s funny if you have an iPhone, is what the Macalope means.
Is Samsung now doomed? No. Of course not. Samsung has a weapons division, for crying out loud. You’re never doomed when you have a weapons division. It’s a growth industry. No, it’s not doomed, but the reports of its triumph over Apple were, not surprisingly (to those of us paying attention) greatly exaggerated.