Hardware

Apple buys a lot of components from competitors like Samsung for the iPhone. So it may be news that they are buying that many, but to say that Apple is going to the competition... Samsung is way bigger than phones. Phones are a small part of their business, and a bigger part, arguably, is providing components to competitors.

One thing that is funny about that is, Samsung makes super-fast NVMe SSDs. They're used in gaming computers — and iPhones. Samsung doesn't put them in Galaxy phones, even the super expensive folding ones. They use UFS instead. It's cheaper — and, in practice, it performs about the same. UFS is probably even the smarter buy here. On paper, NVMe is faster, but if it doesn't work out to a discernible difference, or you can find gains elsewhere and/or that isn't your bottleneck, by all means, use the cheaper part.

Also, while Samsung builds the screens (and SSDs and some other components), they don't spec them. Apple specs them. Apple just doesn't have the facilities to build them. Apple is some office buildings and a bunch of stores. Look at Samsung, in Korea. They're freaking huge. Apple doesn't build the shit it makes, they have the Chinese, the Indians, and the Vietnamese do that. Samsung does build, and they have the manufacturing footprint for it. Apple has a cute spaceship HQ, but Samsung does real shit in their buildings.

(Declaration of bias: I use a Galaxy S10 and an iPhone 16 Pro Max. Yes, the 16PM is 5 years newer, but guess which one's more comfortable to hold, has a more intuitive launcher (home screen), and has the better keyboard by far? Hint: it's not the one I watch videos and read books on.)