“As many members of the media try real hard to find failure with Apple even when success is at hand, it’s often forgotten that the company has actually released products that haven’t done so well over the years,” Gene Steinberg writes for The Tech Night Owl. “Of course, most of these products are forgotten among thousands and thousands of other products that have failed to deliver acceptable sales, but it’s Apple after all.”
“But before you consider the bad stuff, today’s Apple can’t afford any failure. The world is watching carefully,” Steinberg writes. “Even the iPhone 5c, which basically allowed Apple to sell a new model rather than last year’s iPhone 5, is perceived as a huge fail. Is it? If sales are less the iPhone 5, perhaps. If sales are equal or better, the answer is no. By using plastic rather than metal, Apple has managed to build them cheaper. But since Apple isn’t breaking out sales of individual models, the best that can be done is to examine the top listings at a third-party dealer or a wireless carrier that reveal such figures.”
Steinberg writes, “The real failure is the product that goes nowhere, and certainly the Power Mac G4 Cube is first among many.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote back in mid-October:
According to CIRP, the iPhone 5c accounts for 27% of iPhone sales vs. 64% for iPhone 5s. Last year, also according to CIRP, the iPhone 4s captured 23% vs. 68% for iPhone 5.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Judge Bork” for the heads up.]
If Apple would start pushing the uniqueness of the 64-bit A7 iPhone 5s, they would sell even more of them. They protect the 32-biit iPhone 5c with it’s A6 chip while not calling out the rest of the old school smart phone in the market sold by Samsung, Google, … . This is a marketing error Tim!
wait,
there will be new apps that make 64bit a compelling foundation, then all will jump onboard
even the newest 5c adaptor
Gene Steinberg is a marked man……
I don’t think the 5C being plastic is so much about being cheaper to make, but about creating product differentiation and not cannibalizing the flagship model.
We’ll find out how successful this strategy was next year. If the next iPhone has a new design and a bigger screen I’m kind of hoping Aplple produces two phones just different sizes. There are people who prefer the 4″ screen and it would be nice for those coming off 2 year contracts to be able to chose whether they want to keep the 4″ screen or go bigger.
So let me get this right: Apple creates the iPhone 5C with a plastic case, and it’s deemed a failure. Samsung creates crapola phones adorned in plastic, and the media fawns all over them. Am I missing something here?
Also, have we ever seen specific sales counts from Apple for the 5C? I never recall seeing any. But that never stopped the drive-by media from dubbing it a failure, even while lacking hard numbers to back their assertions.
I am willing to bet that the 5C is doing what it was designed to do: be profitable. By taking the design of the iPhone 5, using fewer chips to build it, employing a lower cost plastic case and making the 5’s technology less expensive to manufacture, I have a hunch that Apple makes more profit per phone (I discount anything that iSuppli has to say about this – they’re worthless), which is exactly what the company planned to do.
To sum up: pundits assume a sales target for the 5C, run with assumptions, not facts, on how many 5Cs have actually sold, and assume that market share is all that matters. But I will assert that the 5C was built for a greater profit margin, and in fact may be selling far better than the pundits will assume.
Of course, none of this is reported. Meanwhile, the Samsung Galaxy S4 has a security hole as big as the Grand Canyon, and it gets a pass from guess who – the drive-by news media.
Go figure.
The most important thing would be if Apple did not LEARN from its failed products. Otherwise unsuccessful products are a stepping stone to progress. If anything, this article illustrates how unfairly Apple is judged compared w/ other tech companies.
“But before you consider the bad stuff, today’s Apple can’t afford any failure.”
Wrong. A company that can’t afford failure is already doomed. A successful one can make one or several and still keep going.
Just ask Ballmer.
Every 5C sale is a lost 5S sale. Therefore 5C success is terrible for Apple.
Y’all’s statement may or, more likely, may not be valid as
one first has to be able to quantify the theory for comparison prior to the assertion and without y’all first providing profit margin for each to be used for logical comparison, then there is no basis for your statement. If in fact the margin is greater for 5C, your statement would be completely inaccurate and invalid
Happy trails and Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
“But before you consider the bad stuff, today’s Apple can’t afford any failure. The world is watching carefully,” Steinberg writes. “Even the iPhone 5c, which basically allowed Apple to sell a new model rather than last year’s iPhone 5, is perceived as a huge fail. Is it? If sales are less the iPhone 5, perhaps. If sales are equal or better, the answer is no. By using plastic rather than metal, Apple has managed to build them cheaper. But since Apple isn’t breaking out sales of individual models, the best that can be done is to examine the top listings at a third-party dealer or a wireless carrier that reveal such figures.”