MWC 2026: Apple, Google, Samsung and Other Contending Contestants

Ever imagine that memory supply (translating to system capacity and price) concerns would ever dominate multiple companies’ announcements? “And so it goes”, to quote Kurt Vonnegut.

The Mobile World Congress (MWC) show, held each year in Barcelona, Spain (one of my favorite cities in the world) and in progress as I write these words, doesn’t have quite the same cachet as previously. Two primary reasons rationalize this impermanence: the cellphone market has subsequently (and notably so) consolidated, and it’s increasingly common for the market participants that remain to announce new products at their own events.

That said, these go-it-alone suppliers still often chronologically cluster their announcements at or near the MWC timeframe. Plus, the conference organizers have broadened the scope of the show beyond just cellphones (nowadays: smartphones) to also encompass other mobile devices such as tablets and laptop computers…although classifying a static desktop-based, AC-powered robot as “mobile” is a stretch, no matter how dynamic its joints and display may be:

Apple, Google, and Samsung were among the companies who made notable(-ish) news over the past week. I’ll cover them chronologically in the following sections.

Mountain View gets the jump on Cupertino (once again)

Last spring, Google unveiled its then-latest cost-focused phone, the Pixel 9a, a few weeks after Apple had rolled out its initial (albeit iPhone 16-numbered) “e” rebrand of prior “SE” multi-gen economical-tuned offerings. I subsequently bought a Pixel 9a for myself, replacing (and leveraging a then-lucrative trade-in value promotion for) my prior backup handset, a Pixel 6a.

That said, Google had already flip-flopped prior longstanding fast-follower precedence with the late summer 2024 launch of the mainstream Pixel 9 and high-end Pixel 9 Pro, which predated their iPhone 16 competitors by a month (versus the historical cadence of being a month belated). The same thing happened last year. And now, Google has extended its “eager beaver” behavior to the entry-level end of its smartphone product suite with the Pixel 10a, which the company sneak-peeked in early February, with a full unveil two weeks later complete with a pre-order opportunity, and shipments starting later this week.

Good news: skyrocketing DRAM and NAND flash memory prices haven’t led to handset price increases (or, alternatively, either integrated memory capacity decreases or the culling of lower-capacity product variants); the Pixel 10a price ($499) is unchanged from its Pixel 9a predecessor. Bad news (albeit good news for me, no longer FOMO-fraught): unless you’re insistent on a completely flat backside absent any camera “bumps”, the design is largely unchanged as well. Same chipset. Same memory generations and speed bins. The display is modestly enhanced—peak brightness, bezel thickness, and cover glass shock resistance—as are the wired and wireless charging power, therefore speeds, but that’s basically it. Oh…and still no Qi magnet inclusion. Hold that thought.

A higher-end attack

A week later, and a week ago, Samsung rolled out its Galaxy S26 product line, which competes against Apple’s iPhone 17 series launched last September, along with new-generation earbuds (but no new smart ring; was Oura’s legal-pressure campaign effective?):

Here again, not much has changed from the year-prior Galaxy S25 predecessors. The “adder” that seemingly got all the media attention, Privacy Display, derives from an OLED display tweak and is only available on the high-end Ultra variant. Unlike Google, Samsung is generationally raising prices, predominantly blaming memory cost increases as the root cause, and is also not offering comparable low-end storage capacity options as with S25-series predecessors. The memory blame assignment is particularly ironic in this case because the Samsung parent company also has a semiconductor (memory, specifically) division under its corporate umbrella.

That said, as my colleague Majeed recently wrote about at length and I’d also noted in my earlier 2026-forecast coverage, HBM memory is AI-cultivating the lion’s share of customer demand (therefore also supplier attention) right now, versus the DDR4- and DDR5-generation DRAM technologies found in computers, smartphones, tablets, and the like. Speaking of AI, Samsung Mobile (like Google, and in partnership with Google, along with Perplexity) is betting on it as a trend-setting differentiator from Apple’s underperforming alternative, no matter that it ended up not being a broadly effective sales pitch motivator last year. That Apple has now partnered with Google, too, must have been a hard pill for Cupertino to swallow. Oh, and by the way, once again, no Qi magnets, although the argument is pretty pervasive, at least to me. Paraphrasing: “Why bother doing so, bumping up the bill-of-materials cost in the process, since most everybody also uses phone cases anyway, and they already come with magnets?”

Not a one-trick pony

All of which leads us to Apple itself, which yesterday (as I’m writing these words on Tuesday afternoon, March 3) released its latest entry-level smartphone, the iPhone 17e:

Minutia first: a year ago, I gave the company grief for busting through the $500 price barrier while, as the original MagSafe innovator, bafflingly leaving magnets off its wireless charging implementation. First World problem solved: unlike with Google and Samsung, as earlier mentioned, they’re there in the iPhone 17e. We can all now once again sleep soundly.

Now, for memory, specifically (in this case) flash memory. Like Samsung but unlike Google, Apple lopped the prior-generation 128 GByte storage capacity option off the low end of the product suite. But unlike both Samsung and Google, the capacity increase comes with no associated price increase; Apple has stuck with $599 for the now-256 GByte variant this time. The SoC is also upgraded, from the A18 to A19 (the same generation as in the iPhone 17), albeit with only 4 GPU cores (versus 5 with the iPhone 17), as is the cellular modem (the newer C1X). And a few other tweaks: a third color option (pink) and updated Ceramic Shield 2 front glass protection.

Since, as I mentioned at the beginning, MWC has expanded beyond phones into tablets (among other things), I’ll also lump into today’s coverage the latest M4 SoC-based generation of the iPad Air, which Apple also announced yesterday.

As before, it comes in both 11” and 13” variants; the N1 networking and C1X cellular chips are also on board for the ride this time. Echoing back to my earlier highlight of the iPhone 17-vs-17e A19 SoC core-count discrepancy, the version of the M4 SoC in the new iPad Air is also downbinned from the ones in the various versions of the M4 iPad Pro, albeit this time from both CPU (both performance and efficiency, in fact) and GPU core-count standpoints, with requisite benchmarking-results impacts. And once again, memory is the most notable news (IMHO, at least) with these devices. But this time, DRAM is in the spotlight. Likely with locally stored AI model sizes in mind, the low-end M4 iPad Air variants deliver a 50% capacity increase (from 8 GBytes to 12 GBytes), still with no corresponding price increase…

…which circles us back to my memory-related comments that kicked off this piece. If volatile (DRAM) and nonvolatile (flash memory) supplies are constrained, and prices are therefore skyrocketing, why is Google able to hold steady on its device pricing, and Apple to go even further, holding prices while simultaneously boosting on-device capacities? Right now, I suspect, both companies’ sizes have enabled them to negotiate favorable pricing and volume contracts with memory suppliers. And further to the “sizes” point, even after those contracts time out, I suspect that both companies will be willing (albeit not necessarily delighted) to endure short-term profit margin pain in order to squeeze smaller, less profitable competitors out of the long-term market.

More to come

When I saw yesterday that Apple had released new public beta versions of its next operating system updates for phones and tablets, but not for computers, I suspected that this delay was only temporary and related to new computers planned for announcement today. And right on schedule, they (therefore it) came this morning; updated versions of the 14” and 16” MacBook Pro, based on the new Pro and Max variants of last fall’s M5 SoC (now also inside the MacBook Air), along with a duet of new displays.

I doubt we’re done; a new low-end MacBook (likely named the Neo) based on the iPhone 16 Pro’s A18 Pro SoC is rumored to still be on queue for Apple’s “big week ahead”, for example, and I can’t help but wonder if we’ll also get a M5-based Mac mini (last updated in November 2024). Stay tuned for more coverage to come from yours truly, hopefully later this week. And until then, let me know your so-far thoughts in the comments!

p.s…Two more MWC-related tidbits. Qualcomm has a promising next-generation SoC for smart watches and other wearables on the way. And speaking of Qualcomm, ready or not, 6G is coming…

—Brian Dipert is the Principal at Sierra Media and a former technical editor at EDN Magazine, where he still regularly contributes as a freelancer.

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