[Inside Chodong] "Please Buy Me an iPad"...What Samsung Is Missing Despite Its 81% Market Share

"Please buy me an iPad." Recently, my daughter, who is in the second year of middle school, started asking me to replace all her Samsung Galaxy smartphones and tablets with Apple products. She doesn't have any complaints about the performance or specs of Samsung devices, but her thinking is that since most of her friends use iPhones and iPads, she'd prefer Apple products over Samsung. For teenagers, among whom peer culture and a sense of belonging are more important than anything else, Apple has taken root as a trend and a must-have cultural marker.

Of course, on the surface, Samsung still maintains dominant market power. According to nationwide smartphone usage data released by Gallup Korea in July, Samsung's domestic market share stands at an overwhelming 81%. However, the market landscape among consumers in their 20s and younger is completely different. In particular, 67% of women in their 20s use iPhones, and over half of adolescents aged 13 to 18 have said they intend to purchase an Apple device as their next smartphone. This means that, even though many teenagers currently use Galaxy devices because of their parents' choices or mobile carrier arrangements, they are fully prepared to switch to the Apple ecosystem when they are able to make independent decisions in the future.

The way these younger generations choose Apple is characterized by continuity. For people in their teens and twenties, the iPhone serves as a gateway to a "large-scale software infrastructure" that continues with the iPad, MacBook, and Apple Watch. What happens when future generations take photos, generate text, learn, and communicate—all within the Apple ecosystem? As artificial intelligence (AI) advances based on everyday data accumulation from users, Samsung's mobile AI risks becoming trapped at the level of a "B2B assistant" that summarizes meeting minutes and translates work emails for older generations. Losing ground among teens and those in their twenties should be recognized as a crisis that could result in Samsung eventually surrendering the entire market in the next 10 to 20 years.

Samsung must escape the trap of its 81% overall market share and focus on retaining future generations. How long users remain within the Samsung ecosystem is a more crucial performance indicator than shipment volume.

Despite building excellent products, Samsung has failed to imbue its devices with an appealing and attractive cultural narrative that would make people want to own them. The intense excitement at Apple stores every new iPhone release, with people staying up all night to be the first in line, contrasts sharply with the calm, last-minute queues that form at Samsung stores only as opening time approaches.

For this reason, it is time to move beyond the engineers' perspective, which focuses on proving camera resolution or processor speed. Samsung needs to move past its reputation as a "technology brand" and find ways to create "software-based lock-in." The quality of premium hardware, as seen in devices such as the Galaxy Z Fold8, has already reached a high level. Now is the time to redesign the brand experience—beyond simply folding and unfolding hardware—by building exclusive software-based communication platforms or subcultures that only Galaxy users can enjoy. The very act of holding a Galaxy device should become a symbol of belonging to a trendy in-crowd.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.