Apple was the top smartphone vendor over the holidays
Smartphone sales were so slow during the holiday season of 2017, that Apple overtook Samsung to capture the first place in the market, according to IDC and Strategy Analytics . This, despite the fact that iPhone sales dropped during the holidays -- down 1.3 percent from the same period the year before -- and that the iPhone X hasn't been doing as well as Cupertino hoped for. Smartphone manufacturers apparently only shipped 403.5 million units during the holidays last year compared to 430.7 million units in 2016. Samsung, which usually sits at the top of the list, shipped 74.1 million phones in the last few months of 2017, down 4.4 percent from the year before. IDC's findings aren't really surprising: in its fourth quarter report, Samsung revealed that its operating profit also fell during the period. Anthony Scarsella, mobile phone research manager at IDC, explained that people might have seen the Galaxy S8, the Note 8 and the iPhone X more "as a luxury than a n...