I brought up this topic on The Talk Show a couple of weeks ago but now Politico’s Steve Friess interviews a brave Washington consultant who declines to be identified when saying Apple needs to pay people like him to garner influence.

“It’s inevitable,” said a top Washington consultant who works with major tech brands. “Everybody gets a shot at being a fair-haired boy and that can keep the regulators away for a while. But nobody stays favored forever. That’s why you need friends.”

In other words, nice business you got here, it would be a shame if something were to happen to it.

Horace Dediu:

Except that it’s been reported that in the last quarter Samsung managed to “dethrone” Apple from the phone operating profit crown. This is a matter of estimates and for that we need to understand clearly the assumptions.

I estimate that this is not the case. That indeed Apple remains most profitable phone maker by a wide margin.

It’s like a “nope” but with numbers.

The Verge’s Aaron Souppouris reporting on a study by OpenSignal on what the Android market looks like now.

There can be few charts that better demonstrate how Samsung has come to completely dominate the Android smartphone market: saturation. According to OS’s data, Samsung now has a 47.5 percent share of the market, distributed across more than one hundred different models.

One hundred different models. To date there have been six models of the iPhone, in case you lost track.

Slate:

They’re the two titans of the tech industry,

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Bubonic plague has been found in a squirrel in Los Angeles county and two dogs in New Mexico. Yay! Don’t start burning any witches yet, though.

Despite the resilience of the bacillus, the vast improvements in public health have made it near impossible for the plague to spread the way it did in the Middle Ages.

No doubt Jenny McCarthy will soon be on The View speaking out against city sewer systems, septic tanks and washing your hands.

Writing for iMore, Peter Cohen covers the problems with iTunes. While the iPod, iPad and iPhone are all great ambassadors for Apple to Windows-using customers, iTunes is sadly not. Whenever I talk to Windows diehards about Apple, it’s always their case for why switching is out of the question.

John Gruber:

Either the usage share numbers are wrong, or people just don’t use the Android tablets they buy.

I wonder if they include non-Google versions of “Android” in these numbers. But in answer to John’s query, if you were not entirely committed to tablet computing, wouldn’t you be likely to buy the cheapest tablet available? And when the user experience doesn’t wow you, you tend not to use it. It’s obviously not like that for everyone but I wonder if that doesn’t explain some of this.

$32 million is a big number. And it’s not like we’re talking about something most people are going to want, like a Veronica Mars movie.

Not great, but Apple narrowly beat the average estimate. Revenue was flat and profit was down. Lots of iPhones sold but at a significantly lower average selling price. iPad and Mac sales were down slightly from the previous year (the iPad due to changes in seasonality). Still, it wasn’t a very good quarter for any of Apple’s competitors, either.