Apple knows how to do one thing right: make a profit. Showing that there is in fact an "Apple tax", a research firm found that Apple made 77 percent of mobile device profit while only shipping 6 percent of devices. Incredible. With that 6 percent of the market, they brought in 43 percent of the market revenue.

Sure, Samsung has seen lots of success--they shipped twice as many smartphones in Q2 2012 as Apple did--but Apple made the majority of the profit. So, how do you determine who has been more successful, sales or profit? Clearly Samsung's per-device profit is much smaller than Apple's but most wouldn't have guessed that it was this much of a disparity.

[img]2[/img]

Raymond James Equity Research is responsible for compiling these numbers. Travis McCourt, who works for Raymond James, said: "Ultimately, profits are the feedstock of innovation; and, innovation drives profits. Until Samsung starts generating more profits than Apple, we would not be overly concerned with who has the unit share lead. Remember, HP and Dell still sell a lot more PCs than Apple sells Macs, but does it matter?"