My latest at Forbes: Here’s a fun one. According to Counterpoint Research’s Q1 2026 data, Apple is the world’s top smartphone maker with 21% market share and 5% year-over-year growth. According to IDC’s Q1 2026 data, Samsung is the world’s top smartphone maker with 21.7% market share and 3.6% growth.
Both firms looked at the same global market, the same three-month period, using overlapping supply chain and sell-through data. They disagree on who’s number one, how fast the market is growing or shrinking, and by how much each company grew or declined.
The lesson isn’t really about Apple or Samsung. It’s about how hard it is to actually measure a complex global market, and how two credible firms with serious methodology can reach fundamentally different conclusions. Numbers tell a story, but they don’t tell themselves. Always worth knowing who’s counting, and how.