Month: January 2024

Enlarge (credit: Andrew / Flickr)

Market research firm IDC has released some stunning smartphone market share numbers for 2023. The number one smartphone OEM is now Apple. The IDC says Apple hit an "all-time high market share" number for 2023 and that Apple has "the number 1 spot annually for the first time ever." The analyst group says this represents "a sort of shifting of power" in the smartphone market.

That all-time high market share puts Apple at 20.1 percent for 2023, a 3.7 percent growth over 2022. Nearly everyone on Team Android is way down, with Samsung now in second place after losing 13.6 percent in 2023 for 19.4 percent market share on the year. Chinese firm Xiaomi is down 4.7 percent for 12.5 percent market share, and Oppo (the parent company of OnePlus) dropped 9.9 percent and is fourth, with 8.8 percent of the market. Next up is "Transsion," a company that is definitely not a household name but is big in emerging markets like Africa. Transsion is a big winner, with 30 percent growth from 2022 to 2023. With 8.1 percent market share, it takes the fifth spot.

The IDC's market share charts for 2023. (credit: IDC)

Apple is usually not first in sales because the average iPhone purchase is much more expensive than an average Android phone. Samsung's cheapest phones can be had for about $50, and while you can get a wildly expensive foldable that costs a lot more than an iPhone, Samsung's bestselling models are often the midrange "A" series, which are in the $200–$450 range. Other Android manufacturers are in the same boat, with low-volume halo products and high-volume cheap devices.

Enlarge (credit: Reza Estakhrian)

It’s taken a while, but social media platforms now know that people prefer their information kept away from corporate eyes and malevolent algorithms. That’s why the newest generation of social media sites like Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky boast of being part of the "fediverse." Here, user data is hosted on independent servers rather than one corporate silo. Platforms then use common standards to share information when needed. If one server starts to host too many harmful accounts, other servers can choose to block it.

They’re not the only ones embracing this approach. Medical researchers think a similar strategy could help them train machine learning to spot disease trends in patients. Putting their AI algorithms on special servers within hospitals for "federated learning" could keep privacy standards high while letting researchers unravel new ways to detect and treat diseases.

“The use of AI is just exploding in all facets of life,” said Ronald M. Summers of the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Maryland, who uses the method in his radiology research. “There's a lot of people interested in using federated learning for a variety of different data analysis applications.”

Enlarge / Artist's conception of iOS developers after today's Supreme Court ruling, surveying a new landscape of payment options and subscription signaling. (credit: Epic Games)

The Supreme Court declined to hear either of the petitions resulting from the multi-year, multi-court Epic v. Apple antitrust dispute. That leaves most of Epic's complaints about Apple's practices unanswered, but the gaming company achieved one victory on pricing notices.

It all started in August 2020, when Epic sought to work around Apple and Google's app stores and implemented virtual currency purchases directly inside Fortnite. The matter quickly escalated to the courts, with firms like Spotify and Microsoft backing Epic's claim that Apple's App Store being the only way to load apps onto an iPhone violated antitrust laws.

The matter reached trial in May 2021. The precise definitions of "games" and "marketplace" were fervently debated. Epic scored a seemingly huge victory in September 2021 when a Northern California judge demanded that Apple allow developers to offer their own payment buttons and communicate with app customers about alternate payment options. An appeals court upheld that Apple's App Store itself wasn't a "walled garden" that violated antitrust laws but kept the ruling that Apple had to open up its payments and messaging.

Enlarge (credit: Darrell Gulin)

In a striking experiment, scientists from the French Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the University of Montpellier have observed the impact of selective pressure on a flowering plant. By comparing the pansy flower variety of today that grows in the Paris region to those regrown from the seeds of the same variety collected in the 1990s and 2000s, the researchers have observed notable differences.

According to the study’s co-author, Pierre-Oliver Cheptou, the plant’s evolution over this period has resulted in a 25 percent increase in self-pollination (or selfing) in modern two plants. “We also noticed a 10 percent decrease in the flower size and a 20 percent reduction in the nectar production, which suggests the decrease in rewards for pollinators such as bumblebees,” he said.

To confirm this outcome, Cheptou and his colleagues conducted behavioral tests involving bumblebees "which preferred the ancestor plants,” Cheptou said.