Apple may have missed its expectations for iPhone X sales during the 2017 holiday season but that doesn’t mean the Cupertino Company isn’t still king in the United States. An analytics firm owned by Yahoo, 44 percent of new smartphone and tablet activations were for Apple products.

Samsung came in second with new device activations with 26 percent and then it falls off from there. Other smartphone companies, like Huawei, Xiaomi, Motorola and LG, did not see more than 5 percent of activations. Google, despite its well-reviewed Google Pixel 2, did not receive enough activations to chart.

amsung rebounded in 2017 after an awful 2016 that included the disastrous Note 7 recall (twice!) but that wasn’t enough to surpass Apple. Samsung's activation percentage increased 5 percent from 2016 to 2017. 

In the week preceding Christmas, Apple's top seller (new activation) was not any one of the three phones it released in 2017. In fact, the top sellers for Apple in 2017 were released in 2016 and 2014. The top new activation in 2017 for Apple was the iPhone 7 followed by the iPhone 6. This makes sense for two reasons: one, the iPhone 7 was available for purchase for all 12 months this year. Secondly the iPhone 8, 8 Plus and iPhone X did not become available until Q4 and once they did last year's model saw a price drop at most retailers making the iPhone 7 more affordable with most of the same features available on the new phones.

Apple Device Activations 2017:

* iPhone 7 - 15.1 percent

* iPhone 6 - 14.9 percent

* iPhone X - 14.7 percent 

* iPhone 6s - 12.6 percent

* Phone 7 Plus - 10.4 percent

* iPhone 8 Plus - 8.7 percent

* iPhone 8 - 8.1 percent

Source: ibitimes