Apple and Samsung have long had a relationship of two elderly husband and wife, who quarrel with each other all the time but have to live together too. Samsung has been Apple’s key parts supplier from quite some time now, and although both these companies are fierce competitors to each other in both smartphone and tablet space, Samsung has been selling key components for both iPhone and iPad to Apple.
In the past months both companies have been in a legal battle related to hardware design, UI design, icon design, and what not. This legal and product battle appeared not to have an immediate impact on the business relations of these two tech giants, but now things are changing. According to several reports including the recent one by the KoreaTimes, Samsung is planning (via AndroidAuthority) to stop selling displays and possibly other components to Apple. A Samsung representative in a statement said that his company cannot ‘afford’ Apple’s business.
The official told KoreaTimes that ”we are unable to supply our flat-screens to Apple with huge price discounts. Samsung has already cut our portion of shipments to Apple and next year we will stop shipping displays.”
So who is going to replace Apple, which is one of the biggest buyer of Samsung displays? Well reports suggest that Samsung has found a new buyer, which is Amazon. It is reported that Amazon has increased orders for displays and Samsung is happy to oblige.
It is unclear what the actual reason behind Samsung’s bold decision is, as affordability doesn’t seem to be the only problem here. Samsung has a big line up of Android and Windows Phone 8 smartphones, and most of them compete with Apple’s iPhone 5 directly. Not to mention the impact of iPad on Samsung’s tablet business. To make matters even worse, Samsung is also rumored to be announcing the first major iPad 3 competitor dubbed as Nexus 10 with a screen resolution of 2560×1600 in an event on October 29th.
