Apple or Samsung? According to the technology news that circulates, the big technology companies compete and hate each other. Don't be so sure…
Of course Samsung also wants to sell more phones, but it makes money when Apple has more iPhones. Google gets paid when Apple sells more subscriptions iCloud and Amazon wins as long as Netflix continues to grow.
Does it sound strange? Perhaps, but it also means something else. All of these companies are not only competitors: they are also customers of each other.
iPhone X: From Samsung, Toshiba, Intel and Texas Instruments
The iPhone X may be Samsung's most profitable phone.
Apple can build the iPhone X, but Samsung is making the OLED screen that makes it so much so. The cost of the screen is 100 dollars. Add 100 dollars with some other Samsung parts and you will come close to the view of some analysts who believe Samsung earns more than any iPhone X sale than from every sale of the Galaxy S8 – at about $130 per device.
Regardless of whether this is true or not, every iPhone X sold is profitable for Samsung, as described in the Nerdwriter video below:
Here is to mention that Samsung is not the only technology company to have accessories in the iPhone X. Mark Bourgeois Gurman he says that Intel and Quallcomm provide two modems, Toshiba provides the flash storage and Texas Instruments one or two different components. Yes: The iPhone X was partly built by Apple.
Apple, of course, competes with these companies, but that doesn't stop it from buying their components. The iPhone is the best selling phone every year and Apple works with whoever can deliver the best price for the parts needed to build it – even to its rivals.
Google hosts Apple's iCloud service, Spotify and Evernote
If you use iCloud because you do not trust Google, news will not like: iCloud data has been stored by Google for years. Apple does not advertise it, but 2016 has begun to use the Google Cloud platform to host the service.
This makes sense as Google can offer much cheaper storage even if Apple creates its own cloud servers. Apple is not the only company that uses Google storage space: Spotify and Evernote are also paying Google for storage, according to Google.
Yes: Google hosts Spotify, Google Music's main rival. It also hosts Evernote, which competes with Google Keep. And they host iCloud, which competes with both Google Photos as well as with Google Drive for subscribers. Whatever service you use, Google is the one that gets paid.
Amazon hosts virtually all other services.
But Google is not the biggest player in the Cloud storage game. This title belongs to Amazon, whose Web Services provide at least one service than you use everyday.
Netflix is one of the largest Amazon Web Services customers. Hulu and PBS also use Amazon to view videos. Reddit, Airbnb, Lyft and Dropbox are also hosted on Amazon Web Services. And even if you do not use any of these apps, some of the pages you opened today are on Amazon S3.
So Amazon, which is almost invisible to the average user of the Internet, wins annually around 17,4 billion dollars.
Foxconn manufactures virtually everything
Playstation 4, Nintendo Switch and XBox One are manufactured by the same company. The same is true for the iPhone, Kindle and laptops from companies such as Dell, Toshiba and HP.
Foxxcon, has many factories in mainland China, and last year won 131 billion dollars from manufacturing products for other companies. You've probably heard about this company, probably because of the terrible working conditions and suicides of the workers.
Although Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are fighting for their console supremacy, a company can win regardless of the product.
So it's pretty safe to say that technology companies are competing, but also working together.
It is easy, as a user of these products, to think white-black. Maybe you like Google and Android or you think Apple is a terrible company. But technology companies are not thinking about these terms, because one depends on each other to build their products and offer their services.
Be careful what you will say the next time you talk to someone using a different platform.
