A list of the top five best-selling phones in the U.S. during October contains one surprise

Counterpoint's list of the top five best-selling phone in the U.S. during October contains one major surprise. First, at the top of the list was the iPhone 15 Pro Max with a pretty nice 24% market share. With 16% of the stateside market in October was the iPhone 15 Pro followed by the iPhone 15 with 13% of the market. Now you might expect the iPhone 15 Plus to be next, but it was the iPhone 14 that finished fourth with a 4% slice of the U.S. smartphone pie for the month of October.

The absence of the iPhone 15 Plus on the list is not necessarily a surprise. Many of the consumers interested in an iPhone with a 6.7-inch display, the Dynamic Island, a 48MP primary rear camera, USB-C charging and spectacular battery life decided to spend the extra money on the iPhone 15 Pro Max. This way they could get the Tetrapixel periscope camera offering 5x optical zoom, the new "Titanium build," and the first 3nm application processor ever used on a smartphone, the A17 Pro.

The surprise is the phone that came in fifth. It is not one of the models in the 2023 flagship Galaxy S23 line (although by October the bloom had been off that rose for months already). The Pixel 8 Pro would be a good guess except it had been available for less than three weeks by the time October came to an end. 

You might have guessed that one of Sammy's foldable phones such as the Galaxy Z Flip 5 clamshell, or the Galaxy Z Fold 5 book-style foldable, came in fifth. But penetration of foldable phones in the marketplace remains quite low.

The fifth place phone on the list was one of Samsung's Galaxy A mid-rangers, the Galaxy A14 5G, which captured 3% of the U.S. smartphone market in October. Released earlier this year, the model carries a 6.6-inch LCD display with a 1080 x 2400 resolution and a 90Hz refresh rate. The MediaTek Dimensity 700 SoC is under the hood along with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. The phone supports addition storage of up to 1TB thanks to its microSD slot.

The Galaxy A14 5G offers a triple-camera setup that includes a 50MP primary camera, a 2MP macro camera for extreme close ups, and a 2MP depth sensor. The front-facing selfie snapper weighs in at 13MP. A hefty 5000mAh battery keeps the phone running and has support for 15W wired charging.

Priced in a range between $79.88 (offered together with StraightTalk wireless service at Walmart) and $199.99 from Samsung, the combination of specs and pricing explains how the device surprisingly cracked the list of the best-selling smartphones in the U.S. during October.