Apple Hammers The Competition

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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) 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.

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