Re: Apple does not bake their own silicon
Samsung managed to undercut Nokia at the low end - who'd fought of competition for years, by having a really well managed supply-chain. They do lots of their manufacturing in China, so I don't see why they shouldn't be able to continue to make something on the low margin end of things.
My suspicion is that their problems are in the middle of the market (where they've got too many models), and at the top-end. In the mid-market they seem to have a lot of 'cut down' version of the top end stuff,that's still labelled Galaxy, but is £200-£300, while being worse than the sub £150 Lumias and stuff like the Moto G. At the top end, there's a lot of competition, and I suspect that although the list prices are really high, most are sold via the operators, and there's a lot of heavy discounting going on.
They're also a bit of a user-interface mess. I got my friend to buy a Galaxy Note. Lovely phone, and he got it so he could take photos onside, then sketch his designs on them, and email those back to the office for quoting. He's a cabinet maker. It took me about 2 hours to set the bugger up for him. It was too complicated for him to do it, he even struggled to set up his iPhone.
There were something like 160 settings in the main menu, and some of those had sub-menus. Plus there's setting up the main screen, short-cuts and widgets. Then getting the right apps. And it didn't help the Samsung duplicate almost all the Google apps. To be fair, some of theirs are better.
Then to add to the fun, they did a software update that broke the S pen, which was the whole point of the phone. Although they hadn't actually broken it, so much as removed the link between the original image-handling app and the pen. The update introduced another 2 s-pen image apps, but only one of these two could now be launched autmomatically when the pen was used - and the origianl app was there, but you'd have to take the pen out, find the photo you wanted to annotate, save it on the phone, then open the original app, then use that to open the photo. So I just set him up with one of the new ones, and taught him how to use that.
What this tells me is that they're a UI mess. There's probably no-one in overall charge of things, and it's all getting designed by committee or infighting. Remember Nokia guys? That didn't end well. It also suggest they're wasting loads of money on software development, given they're sometimes developing more than one app to compete with themselves. And yet their customers don't care if there's a Samsung calendar app, or a Google one. Just so long as they've got one on the phone. So they may as well save their money there. Or put their money where their mouth is and fork Android, or use Tizen.