🚀 Good morning! Keep on rockin’ in the free world!

The smartphone game

• Last night, Apple posted quarterly sales figures showing it sold $71.6 billion worth of iPhones in the three months to the end of December, which is pretty handy.
• Not too shabby!
• 90 days in a quarter, $71.6 billion …closing in a billion a day in iPhone sales.
• Yeah, that’ll do nicely!

Counterpoint Research, by chance, posted its Q4 2021 US smartphone sales report today, finding exactly those happy times for Apple (sales up 17%), while Samsung, Motorola, OnePlus, and Google (sort of) all did well too.

• Samsung’s Galaxy A12 was the best-selling Android phone of 2021, proving that price point matters and that enthusiasts who don’t want a Helio P35-powered phone don’t matter as much as the $180 price for one of the better sub-$200 phones.
• Samsung sales grew 11% year-on-year, and that was without the Galaxy S21 Fan Edition which was super delayed. Counterpoint pointed to a mix of the A series phones and “strong performance of foldables” helping the growth, which was interesting to see: just how well did foldables do?
• Elsewhere, the demise of LG propped up other winners, including Motorola and its best-ever sales figures.
• Then there’s OnePlus. My colleague Hadlee posted that OnePlus stopped chasing enthusiasts, and it seems to be paying off. Although OnePlus commands just 2% of the market, sales were up 524% YoY, thanks to carrier deals for its Nord devices with T-Mobile.
• Google showed growth: Counterpoint looks at 56% growth, with its own silicon powering the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro.
• I’m somewhat unsure how good that is? Google is really trying with the Pixel 6 series, won accolades, and still is stuck at 1% of the smartphone market.

Roundup

• 📁 Future dual-folding Galaxy device could have weird way to store an S Pen (Android Authority).
• 📲 TCL 30V launches in US: One of the cheapest mmWave phones (Android Authority).
• 🤭 Heh: Google mistakenly lists ‘Pixel 6a’ in coloring book for Superfans (Android Authority).
• 🍎📈 Apple just had the biggest holiday quarter in its history: apart from the iPad, everything, especially the iPhone 13, was monstrously good, even if the supply chain held things back a touch (Ars Technica). (A rare double emoji!)
• 😷 iOS 15.4 beta supports Face ID while wearing a mask, with a small trade-off: reduced security (Engadget).
• 💻 Gaming Chromebooks with full RGB keyboard could be on the way (CNET).
• 🍪 Google has a new plan to kill cookies, but people are still mad (Wired).
• 🔇 Spotify was never going to drop Joe Rogan: “Rogan’s podcast remains number one on its charts in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand … Neil Young, in contrast, is the 778th most popular musical artist.” (Wired).
• 🔋 Ford says it has 10,000 orders for its E-Transit (Jalopnik).
• 🔴 Perseverance Rover has shaken out the pebbles that were lodged in its sampling system, and you can see the before/after pics that showed the rocks flung loose (Gizmodo).
• 🌎 “You can rename Earth. What would you name it?” (r/askreddit).

Friday Fun

Good news, it’s happy large boulder the size of a small boulder day!

There’s also the less famous, large boulder the size of a large boulder day coming up.

Rock steady! Cheers, Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.