iOS is a bit more complicated to value, but they've made more than $10 billion just in app store commissions (even not counting increased sales of hardware due to iOS). So if you consider the cost of iOS development as weighed against their hardware sales, and book the software as profit, you'd get more than $10 billion. The real profit numbers are probably higher.
Anyway, the point is that there's no reasonable way to assert that either one of them isn't profitable.
Marginal? Holy shit, how isn't this completely transparent and dead, like my post will be?
Samsung is pulling in about $4B profit per quarter from their smartphones. "Marginal"? In what universe is $16B per year "marginal"? Certainly not this universe.
Just as a point of reference, Samsung's smartphone profits are greater than Walmart's profits. It's greater than the overwhelming bulk of world corporations.
Yeah, and the bit you're missing is that Google basically forces them the hardware manufacturers to compete in a way that means only one can win for any cycle. It's a zero sum game - the last couple of years Samsung has done well, but it's also integrated in a way that means it offsets investments in other areas (e.g their chip business). Most of the others have no hope of this - look at the bath that HTC has taken in the last three years, do you see Sony saying that they make money from mobile?
At the scale of investment required to run a mobile business, Android is generally a bad thing, it's commodifying them in the way that Intel did to the desktop PC market.
> Samsung is pulling in about $4B profit per quarter from their smartphones. "Marginal"? In what universe is $16B per year "marginal"? Certainly not this universe.
