After Steve Jobs, Apple has not produced a single innovative product. Will they become like a Samsung type company?..

Talking exclusively about design, Samsung is light years ahead of Apple. Isn't this fact enough that the Galaxy Note 8 makes the iPhone 7 Plus look old and unattractive?

Today, Samsung is leading the world in not only one, but FOUR technology sectors; those sectors are: TVs, batteries, chip design and smartphones.

Also, for a company that:

• In 2014, its total revenue was $305 billion and it spent $14 billion alone in advertising and marketing of its products.
• As of 2014, it has 489,000 employees worldwide — more than the number of people Apple, Microsoft and Google hired, combined.
• 17% of South Korea’s GDP is from Samsung.
• Samsung holds a 22.4% share of the global smartphone market in 2015. They sold over 325 million smartphones in that same year, while Apple moved 231 million units.
• They spent $14.1 billion on research and development compared to Apple’s $6 billion.
• The system-on-a-chip of iPhone 4 series, iPhone 5 series and of some major iPad series was manufactured by Samsung.
• It held 95.8% and 27.5% shares in the markets of amalode display panels and TVs globally.
• Samsung is composed of 80 different business including Samsung Heavy Industries, which builds 30 vessels every year.
• Samsung made fighter jets, helicopters, and mobile artillery for South Korean army.
• It owns South Korea’s largest theme park.
• They built some major skyscrapers including Burj Khalifa, Taipei 101, and Petronas Tower.
• Samsung donates $100 million to its non-profit medical center every year.    

How did Samsung develop a foldable phone, and why is Apple not doing it?

 The idea of a folding phone, particularly given a few decades of flip-phones way back when, is an extremely obvious idea. Making it work in the context of a modern smartphone is the trick.

It’s no surprise that Samsung is leading on this. But there are actually two primary reasons. One reason is that Samsung does this kind of thing all the time: they produce 20-something new smartphones in a year, and they’re always looking for the next big thing. Sometimes those ideas — the Galaxy Zoom for example — go nowhere. Others, like the Galaxy Note, become an industry fixture.

The other reason is that Samsung is a display company, and they’ve been making flexible OLED panels for half a decade or more. That’s not getting anyone all the way to a folding phone, but it’s a necessary component.

Apple, on the other hand, doesn’t make displays (though you can bet they’re thinking about it, as that’s one of the most expensive parts of the phone they don’t make in-house). So Apple has no direct control over display technology. They have the money to buy anything that can be bought… in fact, they bought a company that makes power efficient micro-LEDs, so they may some day be a display company. But not yet.

But when they did jump, they pretty much did it right. Sometimes better than it had even been done. Making a good idea great is Apple’s only remaining superpower. And the folding phone, right now, is kind of the worst great idea ever, because the idea itself is very cool, but the implementations are terrible. And expensive! I’m not willing to pay $1,000 for a new phone, much less $2,000+ for one that's not likely to survive a few years of regular use.

Apple’s specific quote is “The toughest glass in any smartphone, front and back.” That’s their claim.

 But if you’ll notice, they still say glass. Glass is always going to smash much more easily than less brittle materials. It’s always going to scratch more easily than harder materials.

It might also be an important data point to note that the first phone in Apple’s new “all screen, no button” form factor was the iPhone X. That was not only the most breakable iPhone in Apple history, but the most breakable phone of any kind, as measured on SquareTrade’s breakability index, with a rating of 90 (smaller is better), the record.

The iPhone 11 series has certainly improved on this, with a score of 73 for the iPhone 11, 65 for the iPhone 11 Pro, and 85 for the iPhone 11 Pro Max… still considered “high risk” on that last one. Unfortunately, SquareTrade doesn’t publish these numbers for enough phones to be a great benchmark, but it’s useful in comparing Apple and Samsung, or Apple to Apple over the years.

 But at least in the iPhone 11 Pro, they did something right. That thin bezel around the phone is made of stainless steel. If you drop the phone and it lands squarely on the edge of the phone, the glass might just make it. On the iPhone 11, though, it’s aluminum.