“Apple today announced it has sold over five million of its new iPhone 5, just three days after its launch on September 21, and more than 100 million iOS devices have been updated with iOS 6, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system.” The last claim is debatable, but the figures are not – very impressive. Of course, do note that the iPhone 5 was available in more countries than the 4S in its first weekend, and if you take that into account, the iPhone 5 didn’t do any better than the 4S at all (which doesn’t negate the incredible sales – it just highlights the smartphone market’s growth might be slowing). It’s also lower than what analysts expected, but they’re just monkeys throwing darts at figures anyway.
I guess what is most interesting is if they are new iPhone users or upgrading from an older model.
A number of iPhone 3GS owners I know are still happy with their device. The iPhone 4 and 4S are obviously still fine phones. I can’t imagine large numbers of 4S users buying a 5.
My tactic would be to hold out as long as possible and then go for the latest edition.
“50% Of iPhone 5 Buyers In New York Upgrading From iPhone 4S”
http://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-5-buyers-upgrading-from-iphon…
In other words, about 50% of iPhone 5 users would buy just about anything as long as it has a picture of a fruit on it.
No, 50% of the early iphone 5 buyers in new york would buy any new high end apple phone. It kind of makes sense that the most ardent of fans woudl buy the phone as soon as it was available regardless of the existing phone they have.
[quote]In other words, about 50% of iPhone 5 users would buy just about anything as long as it has a picture of a fruit on it.[/quote]
If I were an iPhone user, I probably would’ve bought one too, since it has LTE. That is a pretty significant jump in speed over HSPA (depending on where you are, of course). On Verizon LTE, I can get 15-20 mbps. On AT&T HSPA, 4mbps if I’m lucky.
And you care about 4 vs 20 mbps on your phone… why?
LTE is not used for voice, BTW, only data.
Except for in the case of VoLTE, though I’m not sure if Apple is using that and/or being interoperable with the other HDVoice phones on the market †ie, Android
Which has to be the stupidest idea to come out of the mobile world this year. Does no one give a damn about battery life anymore? No matter which smartphone one uses these days, it seems the battery won’t even last a day if you actually use the device. LTE drains a lot of power and, since many manufacturers (Apple included) seem to go for thin form over actual function, sending voice over that power hog of a network is the very last thing I want done given that the phones don’t have the large battery needed to actually sustain a decent operating time when using LTE.
There are no wide VoLTE deployments. EU will not have them util fallback(LTE>UMTS>GSM) is available.
If you have a tethering plan (or you’re jailbroken), it’s a lot faster.
I suppose it depends on where you’re located and what your carrier options are. Here in the US it’s getting quite hard to find any carrier that’ll give you unlimited data, and their caps are quite low (usually 3 to 5 gb). It strikes me that, in that situation, the last thing I’d want is a super-fast mobile internet as that would make it far easier to go over a cap. Of course, that’s probably exactly what most carriers have planned. The only one I know of to actually offer what they claim is an unlimited LTE plan is Sprint, and their coverage is terrible where I am so they’re not an option. I have AT&T’s so-called unlimited right now, though even that is limited in that they’ll speed-throttle you. If I ever get an LTE phone, no doubt I’ll have to give that up if I actually want to use LTE and get hard-capped all over again. I don’t really see the point of LTE until the carrier situation gets better which, in this country, it never will given how the carriers and FCC have everything locked out to the point that only the major carriers can even exist. Even the regional carriers have to license their network time from the big boys.
It depends. I work from home, and every once in awhile, my internet access goes down. When that happens, it’s very convenient to be able to tether off the phone until my cable internet connection comes back up. And it’s a lot better having a 15mpbs connection to tether off of, vs 4mpbs.
Having an LTE connection doesn’t suddenly make you start consuming MORE data – it just makes whatever you’re consuming come down the pipe faster. So as long as you’re not stupid and streaming HD videos (or whatever), it’s fine.
It has sense if you are planning to sell your 4S. Its price will decrease in the next months.
Would there be something like a ‘switch matrix’? Just like with elections: “x% of persons who voted for party X last time, have now voted for party Y”
So that we know what current say Android users upgrade to (Android, iOS, WP, RIM, Other, Dumbphone) and what clients that buy an iPhone5 used before (older iPhone; Android, WP, RIM, Other, Dumbphone, none – that is, new in the phone market).
(ps, yes I know I mixed up OSes and phones)
Considering at 8-10 million units were expected to be sold 5 million is an unmitigated disater.
I also saw a few very frustrated and angry iPhone 5 buyers lined up at an inner city Optus shop last night.
By the reckoning of who? If it was an “analyst” you lose.
Doing a little digging to back myself up, it sounds like the bullshit Gene Munster was spinning. He then backtracked and started saying his figures included pre-sales (which are not included in the released figures, as only “delivered” units are counted.)
As I said – analysts are full of crap. Don’t misrepresent this as being anything more than one “insider’s” best (aka. fantasy) guess. Speculation is speculation, no matter how you dress it up.
i have an iphone 3g, an htc desire hd and a blackberry bold 9700. I prefer the blackberry for chatting and phone and use that every day. I use the htc desire hd for browsing in bed and some of it’s useful utilities and the iphone 3g for the odd game. After having used an iphone 3g and played my girlfriends iphone 4 and ipad 2 – there is no way i’d want to buy an iphone 5. Why so few files in a folder? Why do i have to do every file operation 1 file at a time? Why does the facebook and ebay apps suck? Why cant I use google maps on iphone 5? Apple lost me.
I’ve never seen such an effort at making a simple statistical announcement seem to be evil or incorrect, but that’s just what people do when a product they don’t like is successful. Whatever.
The whole Google Maps subject is getting tired, though. Microsoft has cut a deal to use Nokia maps on all future Windows Phone 8 devices, where is the outrage about that?
Apple’s Maps app is not perfect, granted, but it is an initial effort and there are plenty of other apps that provide the same service, so it’s not like users are completely out of luck.
It is wise to remember some of the reasoning behind Apple’s decision to ditch the Google Maps app. This is a good read about the major decision:
http://www.padgadget.com/2012/06/23/google-cuts-mapping-api-prices-…
When faceed with a huge increase in the Google mapping api cost, Apple made the decision to dump Google in favor of their own app that uses open sourced mapping data along with many other sources, something you would think would be lauded by all the open-source geeks on OS News, but no, they are all up in arms about it, moaning about proprietary software being so much better. Very interesting.
Edited 2012-09-25 07:45 UTC
Nokia maps work exceptionally well.
Apple Maps are barely beta quality.
Apple wants to use the numbers to show that the iPhone is the biggest thing in smartphones. Most people on OSnews see through this and mention it.
The outrage is that Apple replaced a perfectly working map service with its own alpha version before it was ready for consumers.
The richest company in the world didn’t want to pay Google for their map service. Instead of developing their own version and releasing it when it is ready(which is what you would expect from Apple). They removed functionality and replaced with it an inferior one because it is cheaper for them.
From what I understand, this figure does not include those phones which have not been shipped yet even though those were pre-ordered within the relevant time-period.
It also doesn’t consider the iPhones returned by pissed off buyers. The phone shops here in Brisbane Australia seem to have pleny of annoyed iPhone owners waiting in line to have problems fixed.
On one hand you have people making excuses for the enormous sales figures – 5 million units in 3 days, at least half being sheep who mindlessly buy anything new from Apple.
Then on the other hand you have people claiming how much of a complete disaster selling 5 million units in 3 days is because somebody expected a bigger number.
So what’s it going to be… Are the iphone 5 sales great, horrible, or do “you” think it’s time to outgrow the `I hate anything Apple *pout pout*` attitude?
The figures were made up by an “professional” analysts (aka. Apple stock ambulance chasers), they were bullshit before the ink dried on the press release. Put it another way, if I had said Apple would sell 10million iPhones, I would have been called in to question. Why does working for a large analyst firm like Piper Jaffray make it any less speculative?
See the above. The problem is, some people like to chase ambulances for the opposite reason, “hey, look, the Apple is failing, up the <pet-technology>.”
I think, if I was Apple, I’d be quite happy with the sales. FFS, they made a packet and enough people cared (either way) to make it big news. Could have been much worse, especially post Samsung.