One wonders where Technology mags find all these seemingly countless analysts who deride every iPhone (or at least are unimpressed)...
1. Many iPhone 3G/3GS users never upgraded to 4. This is their chance.
2. iOS5 has many compelling features. Us techies forget that the average joe doesn't really understand upgrades, versioning, etc. Phones are sold as both a hardware and software solution and so many of the iOS5 features are inherently see as being a feature of 4S and not just a feature of any iOS device.
Many of the tech blogs are looking at a technology aspect (RAM oh my!) and not towards how the common man thinks and acts.
Potential customers for iPhone 4 launch: 90 million (AT&T).
Potential customers for iPhone 4S launch: 240 million (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint).
> iPhone 4S is available today in the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK
Not too happy with myself for giving in to standing 2 hours in line though. I should have at least waited a day or two.
So everyone was queuing here unfortunately.
I was amazed at the lack of 3GS phones in the line. So many people with 4s upgrading. Also many people buying 2 each, perhaps because in Canada you can buy them unlocked.
I wonder what were other locations were like?
The same will be true of the Samsung Galaxy S2 - those users won't be queuing up to replace it after 12 months (or if they are it's a bad sign rather than a good one).
You're not wrong about it as a factor, just saying that analysts should get this and figure it in.
The 4S is looking mighty tempting though, and I was going to get it unlocked. (Because I hate being locked to three year contracts, stupid Canada.)
You won't be disappointed, the 4S is so much faster at everything. And Siri is amazing. The only downside is that I have started looking for the 'Siri button' on my iMac.
Glad to hear that the upgrade is worth it though!
However, iPhone 3GS users for the most part have had the phone 24 to 12 months, and if you are eligible for an upgrade with AT&T, it seems you pay the iphone subsidy each month (by my estimates, around $50 per month) regardless of whether you upgrade or not. So it makes sense to upgrade and sell the new phone on ebay if you want to keep your 3GS.
I was also basing this off of the Sprint iPhone costing roughly the same as the ATT iPhone, and Virgin Mobile supposedly using the Sprint network.
What disappointed a lot of people is they expected a new iphone lite to compete with android at the bottom of the market.
When you think about it though, they sell a $700 phone as their main product, they aren't going to cannibalize it with a $150 phone. It's also likely they can't make a better new phone then the 3GS cheaper then the 3GS due to the scale they've built. So they're going to ride the 3GS to 30 and 40 million units a quarter.
Exactly. Why spend design resources and marketing resources on building a "low-end" phone when they already have proven (and popular) models that satisfy that demand? Presumably, they've also optimized the production lines, etc for those units to minimize costs and waste.
The $0 (w/ contract) iPhone 3GS is still a great phone for people who don't care about adding apps. (And if you're not already on an iPhone or Android at this point, you probably don't.
The $99 (w/ contract) iPhone 4 is a great phone if you want iOS 5 but you're on a budget - and nobody will even know you're not using the latest design (at least for a year.)
Or, er, even for people who do. Almost all iPhone apps work fine in the 3GS.
> The $99 (w/ contract) iPhone 4 is a great phone if you want iOS 5 but you're on a budget
You get iOS 5 with the 3GS. You may be thinking of the 3G (from 2008).
My sense however has been that the performance of the iPhone 3GS does affect some apps.
as for the rumors, i think that they are real devices—i actually expected a 3G ipod touch with a bigger screen—but maybe it is a possible design for the iphone 5. because we don't see the lead times from apple like we see from other electronics companies doesn't mean they aren't there. the retina display ipad 2, the iphone 5, these things surely exist in some capacity as they figure out not just how to make them, but how to make enough of them to meet demand. i think apple is finding it much more difficult to keep new devices secret and because of the short time between announcement and delivery with increased production ramp-ups and internal lead times, apple seems to be experiencing and anti-osbourne effect—the rumors of the device after the next device surfacing and disappointing all of those who have come to expect so much from apple.
People who upgrade late, need to feel like they're upgrading to a phone that's competitive with other new releases .. the iPhone 4S provides that feeling. I don't think it's revolutionary by any stretch of the imagination.
To quote myself from another post on this page "The missed expectations were held by fanboy contributors to MacRumors and the equally witless anti-fanboys (fandroids for the most part) who chimed in with "Ha! No new case after 18 months? Lame! Fail!""
If Apple had indeed made a new form factor, would the sales have been 4 million or do you think they would be more than that? How much more?
They could sell 50 million phones and you'd still be able to write this comment. "How much more than 50MM phones would they have sold with a different form factor?"
These sales numbers do in fact make the analysts look stupid.
I said, "I don't think it's inconsistent that this is a somewhat disappointing rev, yet will likely be their best-selling phone to date."
Lets look at this quote (http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/print.php/3668131):
"In the first month of general availability, sales of Vista exceeded 20 million licenses, which is more than double the initial pace of sales for XP, which sold 17 million units in the first two months following its August 2001 release."
And Vista, unlike the 4s, isn't strictly superior to its predecessor.
The market is definitely bigger, not to mention Verizon and Sprint getting the iPhone, so the number aren't directly comparable.
>They could sell 50 million phones and you'd still be able to write this comment. "How much more than 50MM phones would they have sold with a different form factor?"
And that question would still be valid. I was basing my question on my personal experience that many of my friends with a 3GS immediately jumped on the iPhone 4 regardless of contracts, but aren't that interested into moving to the 4S. I know that's just an anecdote, maybe others can share theirs.
>These sales numbers do in fact make the analysts look stupid.
Maybe I missed some of the articles, but the ones I read stated that the release was somewhat disappointing but the phone will still sell a lot. Apple has built a reputation for suddenly unveiling groundbreaking design and hardware and this lead to people expecting(wrongly or rightly) them to repeat it.
Okay. Most people I know who had a 3GS still have a 3GS; some are thinking of getting a 4S to replace it. Very few replaced it with a 4.
I went from a 3G to a 4 myself.
But this sales boost will confirm to Apple that it's ok for them to just release the same phone for 2 years with some spec upgrades in the 2nd year.
No, I don't think everyone knows that. If we learned anything from the past few Apple product launches, it's that customers aren't shy about complaining even if they aren't completely sure what they're complaining about.
But this sales boost will confirm to Apple that it's ok for them to just release the same phone for 2 years with some spec upgrades in the 2nd year.
It is okay. The economics behind producing this many millions of a devices doesn't allow them to change the design every single year without jacking up the price. And for what?
A "tick tock" schedule, like the one Intel has adopted, makes tons of sense for Apple too. You just can't completely rethink a product design every year once it's matured.
And if you don't think they needed to change the design of the phone this time, just take a look at this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e...
No wonder nobody wanted to "copy" its design and build. It's so weak, even some plastic phones are more solid than it.
Similarly, you don't see other manufacturers producing phones that they intend to still thoroughly support in a couple years time, which is why there is so much fragmentation in the Android ecosystem.
I think this is a key thing in Apple's market strategy across the board - you're not just buying hardware that will be out of date in 6 months time, you're purchasing a utility which will be more or less current for a couple years to come (like what we've seen in Macs).
I think its a smart move. It builds trust with the user base.
See the Motorola Droid 2 and 3, and the HTC Wildfire S and Desire S. And Apple's own 3GS. Essentially the same physical design as their predecessors, but faster. Actually, Samsung is perhaps the only major phone manufacturer who _doesn't_ do this; most of their phones do change reasonably dramatically on every revision.
It really is kind of remarkable how subtle the changes have been with iOS and the iPhone. A front shot of an iPhone on its home screen would show nothing new to someone in 2007 using the first iPhone (aside from the resolution increase). But I'd argue that what seems like a liability to industry-watchers and tech enthusiasts is a profound strength for everyone else - consistency and familiarity trump novelty.
Edge/GPRS -> 3G data speeds is a massive improvement on it's own.
In a way, you could say the iPhone 4S is just an original iPhone with some spec upgrades.
Why change the design of a product if that design still works? After all, how many radically different washing machine models have you seen in the last ten or fifteen years?
You mean like the 3GS? Or, in Android-land, the Droid 2, Droid 3, Atrix 2, HTC Desire/Wildfire S etc.? It's hardly that strange a thing to do. Keep the design for a year, make the device enormously faster. This is par for the course in computers, and becoming increasingly common on the mobile market.
The 3GS was already persuasive evidence of this pattern, though.