CompetitorsNarrow moat

Apple's competitive position is strange enough that the usual language fails. Its largest rival in software pays it roughly $20 billion a year and now supplies the brain of its assistant. Its largest rival in hardware manufactures the screen of its most important new product. The company beating it in its second-biggest market was nearly destroyed by American sanctions and came back. And the supplier it is most publicly dismantling spent a decade suing it. None of these are simply competitors.

Start with the scoreboard, because it is closer than the profit figures suggest. In the second quarter of 2026 Samsung shipped 62.7 million phones for 22.6% of the global market against Apple's 55.8 million and 20.1%¹ — Apple has never been the volume leader, and does not try to be. It sells roughly a fifth of the world's smartphones and collects the large majority of the industry's profits, which is a different game played on the same field. The field itself is shrinking: global shipments fell about 6.7% year on year to 277.5 million units, so share is now taken rather than grown into.

What makes these relationships worth their own pages is that Apple is on both sides of most of them. It buys from Samsung and sells against it. It takes Google's money for a search default that the courts have ruled anticompetitive, while Android takes the customers Apple does not want at its price points. It designs the silicon that makes Qualcomm's business smaller. In each case the commercial relationship and the rivalry point in opposite directions, and Apple generally arranges to hold the end of the rope that pays.

The exception — and the reason this page is not simply a victory lap — is China, where the competition is a genuine fight against a rival with a government behind it. Elsewhere Apple's rivals need it more than it needs them. In Shenzhen that is not true, and the four pages that follow are ordered accordingly: the paradox, the supplier, the fight, and the firing.