Big opportunity for phone makers.
I feel bad for Samsung and wow, they will pay. They rushed out a design that wasn’t fully tested. A good lesson for the others.
The financial news yesterday was estimating that this Galaxy Note 7 fiasco was going to cost Samsung between $5 and $6 billion, which would have essentially been their entire profits this year from their cellular phone business. The majority of the profits come from that source, despite having many other divisions including household appliances, ship building, Consumer Electronics division, and an IC foundry. That is disaster.
As for your comments about Tim Cook and his homosexuality, he fails to pay attention to what Steve Jobs taught. . . which was to keep Apple out of politics. Jobs was once asked by a Democrat Party activist why Apple did not make contributions to the Democrat party and candidates. Steve said essentially that half of Apple's customers were Republicans, perhaps a bit less, but he was not going to piss of half of Apple's customer base by making any contributions they wouldn't like, so Apple would stay out of it. Apple did not even have a lobbying presence in Washington!
I agree that Tim Cook is being stupid about that. . . and yes, Apple is probably losing some business due to that. LGBQTQWERTYUIOP group are a minority of the population that is probably less than 1% and the sympathizers are less than 10%, so the market that Apple may gain is illusory, and they are offending a much larger demographic. How much has it affected Apple's bottom line? That is hard to tell.