When people were trying to figure out what to give this past holiday season, many, it seems, decided on an Apple.
The company’s iPhones and iPads collectively accounted for the lion’s share of devices activated worldwide in the week leading up to Christmas, as this chart from Statista — based on data from Flurry Analytics — shows. Although Samsung’s devices were a distant second this holiday season to Apple’s in terms of new device activations, the South Korean company’s share was up five percentage points from 2016. Indeed, all six of the top Android device makers in terms of holiday activations saw their share rise from 2016 — at the expense of smaller players.
That’s not the only area where smaller things lost out this holiday season. So-called phablets — smartphones whose 5-inch to 6.9-inch screens are large enough to allow them to substitute for tablets — accounted for more than half of all devices activated during the week leading up to Christmas. That’s up from 37% in the same week in 2016 and 27% in 2015. Although some of that gain has come at the expense of tablets, more is coming from the sales of smaller-sized smartphones. Devices with screens smaller than 5 inches accounted for a little more than a third of all activations in the week leading up to Christmas this year, compared to more than half of all activations in 2015.
Samantha Lee/Business Insider
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The Next Smartphone by the BI Intelligence Research Team.
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