Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller has launched a blistering - but telling - attack on Samsung ahead of the launch of the South Korean giant's new Galaxy S4 flagship phone.
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Schiller blasted Google's Android operating system - which Samsung uses in its biggest devices - as "a free replacement for a feature phone".
Schiller said that according to Apple's research, four times as many iPhone users switched to Apple from Android than the other way around in the fourth quarter.
Android is often given as a free replacement for a feature phone and the experience isn't as good as an iPhone," Schiller said.
He added that Google did not yet offer a "seamless" OS experience.
"When you take an Android device out of the box, you have to sign up to nine accounts with different vendors to get the experience iOS comes with," he said. "They don't work seamlessly together."
Apple is having a - relatively - tough time, at least on the stock market. Its share price is currently hovering around $430, from a high of $702.10 last September.
Meanwhile its iPhone 5, while popular and well-reviewed, is widely seen as having lacked truly innovative new features.
Still, Schiller said that Apple is convinced it has the best device on the market.
"Given the iPhone 5 is so thin and light, the reason that people are making their devices bigger is to get up to the battery life the iPhone 5 offers," he said.