Samsung is to release its Galaxy S4 smartphone at an event in New York this week, a move that could see it beat Apple's iPhone 5 in terms of both sales and technology.
The once dazzling Apple brand has been tarnished in recent months by a series of gaffes and poor strategic decisions.
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The Maps fiasco of September 2012 directly contradicted CEO Tim Cook's statement last month: "The only thing we'll never do is make a crappy product."
The brand has been perceived as a bully for its handling of the patent trials against Samsung, and it has been similarly insensitive in handling recent shareholder rows over the lack of dividends and its huge cash stockpile.
Richard Holway, chairman of analyst firm TechMarketView, pointed out that consumers are also less positive about Apple than they used to be.
"The Apple iPhone used to be ‘cool'. Now the ‘cool' smartphone is the Samsung Galaxy. Indeed there is more anticipation about the imminent release of the S4 than about any new Apple product. Today I heard the iPhone described as ‘Grandad's phone'. Insults don't come more hurtful than that!" he wrote on his blog.
The S4 is rumoured to include technology to enable users to pause video and scroll the screen simply by moving their eyes, using motion-tracking technology in the user-facing camera. These rumours are corroborated by the fact that Samsung registered 'Eye Scroll' and 'Eye Pause' as Trademarks in Europe earlier this year.
Whereas the iPhone 5 has an 8 magapixel rear-facing and 1.5 megapixel front-facing cameras, the Galaxy S4 cameras are 13 megapixel and 2 megapixel respectively.
And pictures taken by these cameras will be viewable at a higher resolution on Samsung's device - the S4's screen has 440 pixels per inch compared to the iPhone 5's 326.
There is more grunt powering the S4 too, with its eight core Exynos 5 processor running at 1.8GHz, compared to the iPhone 5's dual-core 1.3GHz A6 processor.
Both phones will compete not just for market position, but also for raw materials such as rare earth metals, and components for the latest generation touch screens, which are swallowed up by demand as soon as they are manufactured.
Some industry insiders say that many suppliers may start switching allegiance from Apple to Samsung, and give them more resource.
However, the situation could be further complicated if Apple brings forward the release of its latest smartphone, the iPhone 5S. If Apple is able to provide something genuinely innovative rather than a minor iteration on an existing design, it could reignite consumer demand and cement its position at the top of the tree.
