After reading the earnings statement, I'm not sure where "dire" comes into play.
Slowing growth of the smartphone market is hardly news. It's a natural outcome. You can only convert feature phones to smart phones for so long before you run out of feature phones to replace. Projecting the rate at which maturation occurs (which affects inventory decisions) is an area that leaves room for surprises, both up and down. But sooner or later, puberty ends and the focus shifts from growth to retention. If Samsung or Apple stay right where they are, they'd still be huge, very profitable companies. It's the investors looking for rapid capital appreciation who go elsewhere.
Every major publicly-traded company is expected to issue periodic earnings reports. All you can do is look at what each company reports, for its own situation. You certainly can't say Samsung's excess inventory of low- and mid-priced devices (a forecasting error within Samsung itself), currency exchange issues, or OEM display business have direct correlation to Apple's earnings. Conversely, the performance and prospects of the iTunes business have no correlation at Samsung.
So, other than a well-known market trend that is addressed in both Samsung's and Apple's earnings reports, it's best to compare Apple to Apple.
