“The diverging fates of Apple’s iPhone 5s and 5c have been widely reported, and our latest channel checks confirm that Apple indeed has cut back 5c production by 35% and increased 5s production by 75%,” Tina Teng and Shawn Lee report for DisplaySearch.
“The disappointing performance of the 5c can be attributed to two factors. First, Apple is a profit-driven company, and decided to raise their price in order to hit its profit target when Chinese carriers cut their subsidies on the iPhone 5c,” Teng and Lee write. “Second, the market’s expectation of what the iPhone 5c would be was very different from how Apple wants to position itself. It was not Apple’s intention to develop a product targeting the “low-cost” smartphone segment. However, rumors about iPhone 5c being ‘cheap’ were circulating as early as Q3 2012. The fact that the iPhone 5c is nearly identical to the iPhone 5 – and is not cheap – disappointed some consumers.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Anyone, other than Tim Cook, Phil Schiller or Peter Oppenheimer, who calls iPhone 5c “disappointing” is an idiot. Nobody outside of those three has the data to make such a determination.
We’re going to make this so simple that even a Droid settler might be be able to understand:
Without knowing how many units Apple made prior to launch, you cannot infer anything – good or bad – based on limited “channel checks” of production orders at this point. You simply do not have enough data to gauge the success of iPhone 5c – or iPhone 5s for that matter.
The following numbers are made up. The actual numbers do not matter. They are for illustrative purposes only:
If Apple made 8 million 5c units upfront, sold 6 million in the first week, then adjusted future production based on that data and Apple also made 3 million 5s units upfront, but sold 3 million in stores and received 3 million online orders in the first week, then adjusted future production based on that data, which iPhone model sold the most units?
I would suggest it’s good to question the accuracy of any kind of rumor about build plans and also stress that even if a particular data point were factual it would be impossible to accurately interpret the data point as to what it meant for our overall business because the supply chain is very complex and we obviously have multiple sources for things, yields might vary, supply performance can vary. The beginning inventory positions can vary, I mean there is just an inordinate long list of things that would make any single data point not a great proxy for what’s going on. – Apple CEO Tim Cook, Q113 conference call with analysts, January 23, 2013
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
