I can't believe they're still selling so many of them. $220 billion yearly revenue is at least 220 million iPhones sold a year. Where are all these people buying new iPhones? I don't think they're really gaining market share in the US at least, so unless it's overseas market share growing people are just replacing their perfectly good phones from a few years ago for reasons I can't comprehend. I mean that's 3 out of every 100 people in the world buying an iPhone just in the last year.
1. It continues to be true that a new phone is noticeably faster and has a noticeably better camera than a 3-year-old phone (regardless of how gross the reasons are).
2. Phones break.
3. Phones are lost.
4. Phones are given away.
5. Some batteries in the batch lose capacity faster than they should.
6. New phones are given as gifts to people who might have gone longer before buying a new phone with their own money.
7. Features.
Even regardless of all that, three doesn't seem unreasonable if you have the money. I seem to be able to go about five years before the battery life and performance become too painful (though it's hard to get an average with data points that far apart), and my tolerance for those issues is probably higher than a normal person.
There are certainly reasons I can comprehend. I guess it's just hard to see how those reasons lead to 100-200 million people who already had an iPhone getting a new one. I'm sure if I added all the reasons up it would seem obvious but it really does feel mind boggling at first that they're still able to sell so many after all these years.
On the earnings call, Tim’s answer to a question noted that the iPhone active install base is over 1 billion (of the over 2 billion total active devices).
At a replacement rate of 200 million per year, that’s 5 years to turn over the iPhone active install base. Replacing a 5 year old phone sounds pretty reasonable.
> replacing their perfectly good phones from a few years ago
In many cases, they're not 'perfectly good'. Apple does backwards compatibility longer than most, but at some point, those old phones can't function as smart phones. Banking and health apps will require newer OS, and newer OS eventually means new device (for better or worse).
I just bought a 'new' iphone - used/refurb. Tru-depth camera broke. Replaced it ($170!). Whole phone broke a week after that anyway, out of warranty, and ... they offered to sell me a replacement for $399 (iphone 12 mini). I bought a refurb 13 mini from a 3rd party for $420, then got a $35 refund for minor cosmetic damage. That doesn't count in Apple's numbers, but I almost did. My 2.5 year old iphone mini wasn't "perfectly good" any more.
Also, for better or worse, people have multiple. Your employer may provide you with a work phone, and you'll have 2. It's not as prevalent as it used to be, but I still know a few folks who have a 'work' phone separate from personal.
It's still a lot of phones, no doubt. I don't plan to replace/upgrade mine for at least another 2 years, but my wife may need a new one should something happen to her iphone 11 in the next couple years.
> In many cases, they're not 'perfectly good'. Apple does backwards compatibility longer than most, but at some point, those old phones can't function as smart phones. Banking and health apps will require newer OS, and newer OS eventually means new device (for better or worse).
To add to this, each annual release of iOS does typically add a new feature or two that works only on the newest model(s). Sometimes, this is enough to generate an upgrade.
There's also a large amount of people that essentially "rent" their phone through a consistent upgrade pipeline via their carrier or Apple directly (basically never paying off the device directly).
Judging by iOS version market share [1] at least 95% of iOS devices were produced in the past 6 years (as the older ones don't support iOS 16). Given apple's 2 billion installed device base a 6-year replacement cycle yields 333 ("repeating, of course") million devices per year. Of course, some of those aren't iPhones, but also 6 years is probably longer than most people's replacement cycle.
I think you are on to something. Financial journalists should look in more detail.
I am in no way saying the results are not correct. But there are all kinds of smart ways to report revenue, like mandating your suppliers to stock your product and reporting those as sales.Same way car vendors report sales, when the cars in reality are still sitting at the dealers showrooms.
From my random data sample of 20 contacts, around 80% have Android phones and the other 20% with iPhones, nobody upgraded in the last two years...
I wonder if we swapped out "greatest" for "most successful", if that would/could be a true statement. Or, of course, what criteria we could even agree could substantiate the claim.
Soap is the greatest product in human history. Nothing else even comes close, and many great inventions can be considered only possible due to it.
It has saved more lives than any other invention.
Thousands of times more (not an exaggeration) than the Polio vaccine and Penicillin combined -- and is largely credited for the making cities less deadly and allowing Babylon to exist (and have so many other advances for humanity)
