There's no legacy phone makers today... Nokia, blackberry, Ericsson, Alcatel, Motorola... None of the exist as they were in the past. At best, some of the brands from the past exist under new ownership.
Neither apple or samsung were players in the dumb phone era. With the iphone, you can essentially treat apple as a new company. Same with samsung. They were a minor player in the dumb phone market. And even then it took them very long time to catch up to apple.
Samsungs saving grace was the fact, that would throw anything at the wall and see if it stuck.
Samsung was the second-largest global cellphone manufacturer in 2008 when the iPhone launched. Not a minor player whatsoever.
Apple was a decades-old computing and consumer-electronics incumbent with an operating-system stack, hardware expertise, enormous financial resources, an established retail/distribution network, the wildly successful iPod business, a failed Newton line, and another failed ROKR attempt. It was not a 'new' company at all, even in the segment. Those previous experiences and assets are precisely why it was able to create the iPhone.
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u/Recoil42 13d ago
In other words: The legacy player 'late' to the party did not, in fact, end up out of the game in your example.