That's a silly comparison: by that metric, Apple "won" against Saudi Aramco and Berkshire Hathaway, and Microsoft also "won" against them.

Except that they aren't in the same business.

On the desktop, Microsoft is still kicking Apple's ass. Even moreso for servers. The only place Apple "won" is on mobile, where Microsoft lost to _everybody_.

I can't find the exact stat right now with some light google, but I recall there was a stat that while Apple doesn't have majority of user base, they essentially have an outsized share of the profit due to the average sales price & associated profit margins.

In Windows space, MSFT gets their license money, and then its a commodity race to the bottom by the hardware makers who need to pay AMD/Intel for chips, MSFT for a license, and compete with 100 no-names OEMs for every penny.

>On the desktop, Microsoft is still kicking Apple's ass.

Microsoft won in the enterprise. They are steadily loosing market share outside of it.

Arguably in the long run, Amazon is winning enterprise in ways Google never did. MSFT owns enterprise desktop / desktop collab use cases (and any virtualization / server side stuff to support it) only.

> The only place Apple "won" is on mobile

They won on MP3 players.

They won on music stores.

They won on mobile.

They won on laptops.

They won on headphones.

Etc.

I'm not an Apple fanboy by any stretch of the imagination but it's immediately obvious that they've "won" more than just the mobile market.

>They won on MP3 players.

Sure I guess if you're still living in 2010. Nobody uses an "mp3 player" anymore. Get with the times grampa. Everyone has a cellphone that plays MP3s today.

> They won on music stores.

Spotify is at 36% market share compared to Apple's 30% of the music streaming market.

>They won on mobile.

And Apple did not "win on mobile" - only in the US are they popular, but globally Android has 72% market share. Apple lost the mobile market to Android a long time ago.

>They won on laptops.

No, Apple did not "win on laptops", they are still at about 9% market share.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...

"As of the third quarter of 2020, HP was cited as the leading vendor for notebook computers closely followed by Lenovo, both with a share of 23.6% each. They were followed by Dell (13.7%), Apple (9.7%) and Acer (7.9%)."

Nothing has really changed since 2020. Apple will always be a tiny portion of the personal computer and laptop market.

>They won on headphones.

huh? There are far better headphones than anything Apple makes. Are you talking about earbuds? There's a difference.

No, Apple has not "won" on anything but having overpriced hardware. $3600 for a VR headset? Yeah, I guess they "won" most ridiculously overpriced hardware ever.