Wednesday, April 13, 2011

The iPhone 5 News Blog News Feed

The iPhone 5 News Blog News Feed

Late iPhone 5 Release Rumors Leave Eager Customers Frustrated

Posted: 13 Apr 2011 03:00 AM PDT


late iphone 5 rumors frustrating iphone users

Persistent rumors of a late-released iPhone 5 is frustrating iPhone users.

The persistent rumors of a delayed release of the iPhone 5 is beginning to take its toll on perspective customers. Will a late release from Apple prompt iPhone devoteés to lose patience and defect to Droid?

As it stands right now, the big discussion in the tech world is whether the iPhone 5 will make its debut in June — as iPhones normally do — late summer/early fall, or even in 2012. But once we approach (and eventually pass) June and the WWDC, if the iPhone 5 is still AWOL, the discussion is bound to change: the question will be why the iPhone 5 was delayed, and was it in fact a “delay” or a “business decision?”

And of course, we’ll never know. It isn’t as if Steve Jobs is ever going to reveal to us the motivating factors behind a late iPhone 5 release, should that unfortunate circumstance indeed come to pass.

In the meantime, iPhone users are stressing over the prospect of a later-than-usual release of the iPhone 5.

Anecdotally, I can tell you that an impressive number of very eloquent, passionate commenters here on the iPhone 5 News Blog have told their stories about how inconvenient this possible iPhone 5 delay truly is. Sift through the comments and you’ll find their stories: many of them chose to skip the iPhone 4 and are limping in to the finish line with an old, outdated, and slow 3Gs, 3G, or other smartphone. It is clear from these comments that their intention was to purchase the iPhone 4, but the mixed reviews surrounding the antenna issue and the reliable pattern of a new iPhone being released religiously every June prompted many smartphone users to pledge to wait one more year and squeeze the last bit of life out of their legacy iPhone. It’s just twelve more months, they told themselves.

These unsuspecting folks never banked on the possibility of the iPhone 5 being delayed for months, even pushing into 2012!

iphone 5 sales

A graph of iPhone sales since 2007.

To get more of a quantitative sense of these stories, I decided to do my best to crunch some numbers about iPhone sales, to see if I could come up with an idea of how many people out there may have “skipped” the iPhone 4 in order to wait for the iPhone 5.

Wikipedia has a few nice graphs that synthesizes all of Apple’s iPhone sales dating back to 2007. Of the 73,734,000 iPhones sold since the launch of the original, 2010 — the year of the iPhone 4 — is clearly the biggest year for Apple iPhone sales, reaching almost 40 million units sold (this number also includes sales of the 3Gs as well). However, of those 40 million units sold, how many of them were purchased by previous iPhone users, and how many were purchased by brand-new iPhone users who had never owned a previous iPhone?

Thanks to the brilliance of a quick Google search, it was extremely easy to find a possible answer to that question.

A curious article from Fortune states that, of the iPhone 4 sales from 2012, 77% were reportedly upgrades from older iPhone models. While that is an impressive number — and up from the 3Gs’s stats from 2009, which showed that 56% of sales were upgrades — it still leaves one to wonder: if we combine the Fortune article with Wikipedia’s numbers, one can argue that virtually every iPhone user upgraded to the iPhone 4 in 2010. Even if that were the case — which seems unlikely — it is doubtful that the number of upgrade sales will be that high for the iPhone 5 if customers are kept in the lurch.

Because of the prospect of possibly having to wait another 4 to 8 months for the iPhone 5, many of these folks are beginning to lose their patience.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be as much of an issue for Apple in years past, since no other smartphone manufacturer had a product that could match the magic and buzz of the iPhone. But now that the Droid phones have begun to match iPhone as a sector-defining style of smartphone, more and more iPhone 5 holdouts are bailing on the next iPhone for an advanced Droid phone now.

My perspective from the beginning is that the “delay” of the iPhone 5, should it come to pass, is less of a “delay” and more of a “decision,” with Verizon’s late release of the iPhone 4 as the motivating factor behind a delayed release of the iPhone 5. Finally, my theory has begun to gain traction elsewhere in the tech community, with reports that this delay is contributing to Verizon racking up impressive sales for its iPhone 4. Even the International Business Times cites the Verizon deal as a plausible reason for the delay.

But whether the reason for a late release is “damage control” or a “tactical maneuver,” iPhone users aren’t going to care either way. Although very little is known about the next iPhone, one thing is clear: prospective iPhone 5 customers want their new iPhone sooner rather than later, and if they don’t get it soon, many will jump ship to Droid.