Is Samsung a Better Choice than Apple?
Introduction
Apple and Samsung are two giants in the modern day electronics industry. Apple thrives on innovation and superior product quality, whereas Samsung focus on manufacturing excellence and cost-efficient product portfolio. Samsung offers products starting from $10 to $1000 in smartphone segment, whereas Apple offers its smartphones only at prices over $450 (Edwards, 2014). Apple does not sell its product at a cheaper price; still it is one of the most adored companies among the customers and shareholders alike. It is not easy to decide which one of these two companies is better. This paper upon examining various product, operation and quality features of both Apple and Samsung will establish that Apple is better than Samsung in many ways than one.
Apple iPhone is way better than Samsung Galaxy S. Apple is original. The iPhone is a fruit of years of hard work and research of the Apple engineers, whereas Samsung Galaxy S is a pirated version of iPhone. When in 2010, Samsung launched Galaxy S into the market, the design and features offered in the phone shocked everyone as Galaxy S was a duplicate copy of iPhone. The overall appearance of Galaxy S, its icons, screen, and even the box were same to same as that of iPhone. Several features such as "pinch to zoom" and "rubber-banding" were a direct copy from iPhone (Eichenwald, 2014). Steve Jobs, the then CEO of Apple, went furious as his teams who slogged hard for years to invent a breakthrough phone was copied shamelessly by Samsung, a competitor, that not only stole the sleek look of iPhone, but also copied several features of iPhone to build its Galaxy. Outraged, Steve Jobs took the matter to court accusing Samsung of piracy and patent violation and Apple won the case in the USA. Though Apple failed to get justice in Korea, UK and Japan, the US District Court in San Jose held Samsung guilty of patent infringement and awarded Apple with a compensation worth over $1 billion (WIPS, 2013).
Superior Sales Revenue and Profit Margin
Despite the act of piracy committed by Samsung to win over Apple, it has always lagged behind in sales and profit. Though in the initial years immediately after the launch of Galaxy S, Samsung crowned the market by selling 83.3 million smartphones against 50.2 million iPhone sales by Apple in 2013, Apple, however, has managed to come back to glory with its launch of iPhone 6 and reported sales of 74.8 million iPhones against 73 million smartphone sales of Samsung in the fourth quarter of 2014. In fact, Apple also surpassed Samsung in terms of its market share in 2014, which was 20.4% in the global smartphone market compared to 19.9% share of Samsung (Edwards, 2014). Compared to iPhone 6, which catapulted Apple to the number 1 position in the smartphone market again, Samsung has experienced a loss of 20% in sales and 49% drop in its profits in 2014, because its flagship product Galaxy S5 witnessed a huge decline. The only fault of iPhones was that the earlier versions before iPhone were smaller in size, but Apple responding to the growing demand of customers of bigger phones, launched iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus phones which with their big screen sizes gave the high-end models of Samsung such as Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 3 and 4 a huge competition (Edwards, 2014).
Secure and User Friendly Operating System
In terms of operating system too, Apple fares better than Samsung. Apple uses the operating system iOS, which is exclusively its own, in all its gadgets including iPhones, iPads, Apple TV, and iPod Touch. On the other hand, Samsung uses Android, a product of Google, as an operating system in its gadgets. Android is a Linux-based partly open source operating system the basic features and interface of which are customizable from top to bottom, but the design elements in iOS are more user-friendly. Both Android and iOS use touch interfaces with a lot of similar features including pinch and zoom, tapping, swiping and so on. Just like a computer desktop, both the operating systems boot to a home screen. The home screen of iOS features only the rows of applications icons, whereas the home screen of Android accommodates the space for the use of widgets that feature auto-updating information related to emails and weather forecasts (Edwards, 2014). The iOS interface allows a dock for users to pin the most frequently used apps. There is a status bar located at the top of both Android and iOS, displaying information such as Wi-Fi, time, battery life, and cell signal. In addition to that, Android's status bar features the number of new emails received, reminders, and messages (Diffen, 2014). However, despite the similarity of the features between the two operating systems, survey report on user experience shows that iOS7 and iOS 6 are far more popular than Android and other mobile operating systems such as Blackberry 10 and Windows Phone 8. Below is showcased the Pfeiffer Report of 2013 on the user experience of mobile operating systems:
Source: (PRBP, 2013)
Better Privacy Protection
Android receives its applications from Google Play, which offers 600,000 apps compared to 700,000 apps offered by the Apple app store in iOS. In terms of privacy and security, iOS is better than Android (Diffen, 2014). Since Apple reviews all its apps and verifies the identity of app publishers, it is less likely for the apps offered by the Apple apps store to be vulnerable to malware attacks. In Android, while installing apps on phone, the user faces requests for permission from the apps. Either the user can accept the request sent by the apps for permission or deny the installation of the app. It is either all or nothing. Apps developers taking advantage of this feature request for a lot of unnecessary information from the user, including access to photos, contacts, identity, calendar, files and call information (Diffen, 2014). In comparison, iOS does not allow the apps to send permission requests for so many details. Only the details necessary for the running of the apps are allowed. For instance, if someone installs an app to edit images, the apps will only send request to get an access to photo albums. iOS users also can go through the list of apps that have access to their personal data including location and contacts and they can turn off the access if they wish not to share their personal data any longer (Diffen, 2014). Apple also has a very rigorous testing cycle for each of the apps before making them available in the App store. Because of this rigorous process, apps published in Apple store are less prone to virus or malware attacks and seldom fail to deliver. On the other hand, as Android, used in Samsung phones is an open source system, apps are developed and posted by anyone from anywhere in the world and many a time these apps are published in the store without proper quality check and testing process (Eichenwald, 2014). This makes Samsung phones vulnerable to virus and malware attacks.
Conclusion
Apple and Samsung are the two most popular companies of our time. Samsung has slightly higher revenue than Apple, but the profitability of Apple is far superior to Samsung. Samsung sells products at all segments in the electronics market and focuses on cost sensitive customers. However, Apple focuses on the higher end of the product segment. Therefore, almost all of the Apple products are of superior quality than Samsung products. For example, Apple iPhone series has far superior design, performance and security features than Samsung’s flagship galaxy S series. Apart from product superiority, Apple also scores heavily over Samsung on reliability of the software and privacy features. Android operating system used in the Samsung phones is more vulnerable to malware and virus attacks than iOS. Also, hackers can easily get personal information from Android operating systems than Apple’s iOS. As iOS is solely used by Apple and by no other manufacturers, the maintenance of quality and security features of the operating system is easier for Apple. Almost all the apps available in the Apple store goes through rigorous security testing before being published for the users. Although Samsung is closing in on Apple in many features and operational excellence parameters, still Apple is not only way ahead of Samsung, but years ahead of the whole market.
References
Edwards, J. (2014). Apple Has Forced A Huge Change At Samsung — As These 2 Phones Unveiled Last Night Show. Business Insider. Retrieved on 22 July, 2015 from <http://www.businessinsider.com/samsung-v-apple-smartphone-sales-and-profits-2014-10>
WIPS. (2013). Samsung vs Apple. Retrieved on 22 July, 2015 from <http://customer.wips.co.kr/mail/newsletter/2013/0117/Apple%20and%20Samsung_Final_Report_JP.pdf>
Eichenwald, K. (2014). The Great Smartphone War. Vanity Fair. Retrieved on 22 July, 2015 from <http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/06/apple-samsung-smartphone-patent-war>
Pfeiffer Report Benchmark Project (PRBP). (2013). How iOS 7 Stacks Up: Smarthphone OS User Experience Shootout. Retrieved on 22 July, 2015 from <http://www.pfeifferreport.com/v2/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/iOS7-User-Experience-Shootout.pdf>
Diffen. (2014). Android vs. iOS. Retrieved on 22 July, 2015 from <http://www.diffen.com/difference/Android_vs_iOS>
