“Last fall, Google’s Motorola group unveiled its Moto X and Apple released its middle-tier iPhone 5c,” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider. “Across the board, pundits and reporters portrayed the 5c as a grave mistake that got everything wrong while lavishing Google’s Moto X with praise. Why were they so incredibly wrong?”
“While we don’t have exact sales numbers for either model, it is now clear that iPhone 5c was a remarkable success, not just as 2013’s second most popular smartphone of the holiday season (after Apple’s top of the line iPhone 5s), but also in its intended strategic roles as both an mid-market smartphone and a compelling Android alternative,” Dilger writes. “Speaking to analysts during Apple’s Q2 earnings conference call, chief executive Tim Cook stated that 69 percent of iPhone 5c buyers were new to iPhone, while 60 percent had switched from an Android phone.”
“Apple managed to pull off something that had previously seemed completely impossible: it continued to sell premium, luxury class $650 iPhones at prices three times higher than the volume sales of the overall smartphone market, without making significant concessions on either margins and profitability or, more importantly, without giving up valuable market share,” Dilger writes. “Despite all the media pampering for Google, the reality in this case was that Motorola lost over $700 million for Google in just the last six months of Moto X sales.”
Much more in the full article here.
I wish Tim would have put some numbers behind the 5c as a slap in the face to the majority of incompetent analysts.
why? analysts NEVER own up to their bogus guesses/analysis. if anything, they will go “see, it’s a total flop, if it was a product people wanted, it should have sold 2x that number”
It wasn’t just the analysts or trolls that were calling the 5C a mistake. Plenty of fanatical members of this forum did the same.
Fanatical? In this sober forum, this Acropolis of technocracy? Surely a strongly worded exchange amongst devotees of reason and progress counts as intellectual passion, rather than zealotry.
Yeah, the “everyone” that was wrong often included MDN itself, which on more than one occasion used its “Take” to batter Apple leadership for the supposed mistake of the iPhone 5c. I notice no “Take” on this article. Retractions aren’t exactly this site’s forte.
——RM
Singing “Where are the trolls …; Where are they now …”
Trolls ignore Appleinsider and dismisses it as a fanboy rant site. Seriously. Bring up the facts or points from Ai on the major tech sites or media and you are quickly dismissed for using Ai as a source.
And the hyena laughed as he licked on google carrion.
Where is Mr. Mikey Blair with all his statistics and blather blah blah? Hey Mikey YOUR FIRED!
Mikey’s don’t do well at Apple prognostication !
Once again Analysts perpetrated the false equivlency of comparing a single manufacturer to a plethora of hardware makers using cheap parts to produce low margin phones and grabbing an OS because it was free please tell me which phone maker precisely is “android” so i might check his sales figures and invest in his company .Google can’t count because its giving android away. the Smith that you make a fortune by loosing money to gain market share assumes there is one entity gobbling up the market not 200 minuscule players scrambling for the 25% of market profit apple leaves on the table . kudos to the android switchers welcome to the apple community ,get busy hallowing into the rest of your hardware needs and don’t look back your safe now .
the smith is actually this myth (sorry )
I’m really starting to hate auto spell check hallowing is really haloing
System Preferences/Language & Text/Text/Correct Spelling Automatically <– UN-√
Hurray. I use Spell Catcher, which still works with Mavericks.
I guess that if you have loose money you may lose it.
Taojones2013
For your consideration:
Aside from a couple of typos, which we are subject to error at times, could you please break up your comments into easier-to-read paragraphs?
Sorry, I get excited and forget to edit.
Glad you liked the content enough to tough it out. The tab key does not work in dialog boxes so it throws me off.
Face it. The American média SUCKS!!! Not the worst in the world but in a word: CRAP! Suburbanites for the most part is my guess.
Great article, click through, well worth the read.
I was also wrong. I bought into the meme that the 5C was a flop. I shouldn’t have doubted the dynamic duo of Cook & Ive.
I was holding out hope that it wasn’t.
We all expected a myriad of colors for the iPhone at some point, those watching Apple could easily observe the trend.
In retrospect it is seeming even more absurd to me than it did then to think Apple would give iPhone 5C away with contracts. $100 was easily a fine price. Even a low price to match that market.
Next…iPads ? iPad mini in colors? Fairly obvious? And obvious that they would sell like crazy.
Nothing can beat iPhone, even the inexpensive ones. Everyone wants the best of the best.
Bottom line : All you idiot pundits, tech journalists and analists don’t have a clue, or a brain that’s capable of understanding Apple.
That’s not new it only gotten much worse.
Apple is and will continue to kick ass and GROWTH, is written all over the Apple story, you just can’t see or understand that giants can still expand and therefore grow.
Breeze ,
what they can’t seem to get is that Apple produces a desirable product and not a commodity like bologna or drywall screws.
The size of the bank deposits are bigger than most companies yearly gross revenue and thats the one topic that gets buried over and over. I really wonder who encourages this bunch to publish this drivel about market share ? Could it be our schools are turning out “journalists” who are only capable of regurgitating each other? Bring back thoughtful commentary for gods sake ! (why can’t Rachel Maddow be a tech writer)
I think the problem is that the people that hire these journalists don’t require any credentials. Whoever will work for peanuts can try out. He who gets the clicks keeps the job.
Motorola lost over $700 million for Google in just the last six months of Moto X sales.
WooHoo! iPhone KILLER!
For all the FUD on the 5C, I see quite a number of them around the office…
Dan Dilger is too kewl. 😀
Yes, DED is truly a treasure. Nobody else comes close to what he does.
I would love to see him wrote for NYT, WSJ and other major rags. I bet they will get super frustrated and fire him for not bending over and allowing the overlords to control his writing.
Argh! Work!
Dan, like me, doesn’t put up with glossy political correctness. He goes for the jugular with every fact blade at his disposal. The news rags you mentioned are either spewing highly filtered propaganda or have specific spin dictated upon their writers. Dan would not put up with that garbage unless under duress.
So no more major medical bills, OK Dan? 😉
because analyst are trying to manipulate the market!!!
Sniff, poor MoMo and GooGoo! Apple innovates, the rest salivate. Can’t wait for the WWDC in June. Perhaps the rabbit will finally be coming out of the hat.
There’s gonna be a surfeit of rabbits, me thinks. Bring nets.
The pundits will condemn Apple for pulling out the poor rabbit by its ears.
Google’s $12.5 billion attempt to enter the hardware business resulted in catastrophic disaster worse than the Old Apple under Michael Spindler
To be specific: Apple blew $1 billion on worthless crap that nobody wanted in 1996. ‘Apple’s Gonna DIE!’
Google blew $12.5 billion on Motorola. Google’s Gonna Die.
Which death knell holds more weight? Yeah. Google’s royal cock-up. Stupid, lost, clueless Google blew $12.5 billion on worthless crap that nobody wanted called Motorola Mobility.
Thanks, TechTard journalists, for noticing. /s 😯
AMZN is in a huge downward spiral as investors finally realized that they cannot make any money from a company with minuscule profits.
I’m also afraid of Amazon Getting into the supermarket arena. Another market they want to monopolize. I’m sure the DOJ will give their blessings to Bezos.
Wasn’t there once an online grocery company? Whatever happened to them? Oh, yeah! The term “belly up” comes to mind, as in “dead”, “squashed”, “annihilated”.
Amazing. What insight. (o_0)
Maybe now they’ll get out of the business of buying market share with cheaper-than-cost products.
This is important. Start with the high end market, secure the margins and then suck the life of of the competition by releasing successful cheeper models.
Remember how Apple destroyed the MP3 player market with the mini and the nano. Then they stuck the knife in with the shuffle.
The iPhone is following the same trajectory. The 5C whilst being universally slammed is giving customers an opportunity to buy a low end iPhone that is not last year’s model. Rather than cannibalizing 5S sales it is killing the competitors top end revenue.
Totally agree its reasoning is spot on, I just found the execution a little conflicting. But good to see that despite that it has succeeded so well because it’s an area the Apple needs to be in to protect its business. Let’s just make the next one a bit more dynamic and self assured like the lesser iPods did when they were launched.
Sorry to be such a blether hound, but I have to point out this hard core paragraph by Dan:
Even when Apple does the most phenomenal job imaginable and all the planets align into massive profitability, increased market share and fatter cash flows, Apple will forever be a miserable failure because the media desperately wants it to be. Members of the media are still convinced that iPhone 5c is a failure but they are still not sure about Google ever having made even the slightest of missteps because those are not the facts they are looking to report.
TechTardiness is rampant, in journalism. You’d think they were all on hallucinogens, or crack. Maybe they are.
My guess is most of them are advocates, not reporters or unbiased commentators. They earn a living promoting and Apple doesn’t pay them so they promote whoever is willing to pay them.
I would NOT be surprised.
We need a new name for that, *cough*, profession. The terms ‘shill’ and ‘prostitute’ don’t quite cover it.
Tech Slut. Journalistic Whoreness. Media Bitches. Plenty more I’m sure. lol
Most of them are men, Jubei. Please try again.
After checking with my brother, I am certain that most men who are a little light in the loafers, would not be upset if called any of those graphic names.
I also wonder about who’s upstairs of these crap writers. I know full well that we don’t see a variety of points of view or hear specific news because of the dictates of the people upstairs. Today’s news is VERY tightly controlled by our Neo-Feudal overlords. That metaphor is the closest I can come to describing what’s going on. I could rant on about what such people have done to my country for hours, the self-destructive dullards.
Blether on DC, there’s only one way to stop the techtards and that’s to shame them into submission and ridicule. TC made a real fool out of them in the conference call especially tardleader Tony Sagonachi who was one of only a few who didn’t congratulate Apple for the blowout, while he blabbered blindly, exteeding his two question allowance, fishing aimlessly for something to point at that would invalidate the sales blowout which he predicted would fall short etc…
The blether the better.
They don’t seem to register shame, for some reason. That’s another clue that they are either nonhuman, or are thoroughgoing scoundrels.
If even one of them would only own up, I might stop worrying about an invasion of the bodysnatchers or a vast conspiracy to destroy excellence.
Ha! I didn’t listen to this conference call. I’ll have to go dig it up off the net. Sounds highly amusing. 😀
How did this happen?! Who was laughing at the 5c, and then went out and bought one… to save $100 off the iPhone 5S? It makes no sense >.<
“I don’t care, got my shillin’ money”
Said every droid “fan” everywhere.
Here’s the question watchers of the main stream media should be asking when the press gushes all over Google and dumps all over Apple: Which company drives page hits for their news sites? Answer: Google search results. Ergo, do not slap the hand that feeds you!
5C is my first iPhone, and it is terrific.
There’s no shame in being the 2nd best smartphone on the planet.
expected. predictable!
journalism / media / government: they’re all f’ liars.
in the Era of Political Correctness, there sure is no more truth, no justice, no fair reporting, only irresponsible greedy journalism. democracy means freedom to cheat as it defends scams, deceit, spying, every bit of crime, but not objectivity, truth, responsibility, consequence, reliability, honesty, proper productivity etc.
at the dawn of the PC era in 1984 they used to say “to err is human, to really screw things up you need a pc” but in the Post PC era of internet, the lies multiply exponentially. photoshopped truth is all there is. news is no longer news but hit whoring & inventions, never objective truth.
• Microsofts beat Apple through shipped, not sold, numbers!
• Google dreams up 1000s of lab experiments that never hit the market viably, yet is considered inventive as opposed to Apple which takes its time to mature inventions or revolutions before it markets them! whose responsible – only Apple?!
• Samsung, well, it’s a joke, how can our justices system and supreme justices or judges judge Apple to be the copier?! in a serious court, you’d realize in 1 second who the scam artist and culprit is! come on! Life is not Disneyland! a system rigged with interest groups, is never democratic or just.
all competitors and market anal-ysts mock Apple for not innovating because of Stockholm Syndrome! Because they await Apple leading the way so they can copy again. It’s so easy to blame and mock when you’re lazy idiots. Apple replaced innovating with suing?! haha, rira bien qui rira le dernier! WFT!
just wait for 2014’s NeXT Apple revolution!
Apple power: 800 million credit card accounts!!!
FB has 900M but who gives a F – it’s all zero $ accounts, except for ads, but that’s not direct!
Amazon has 237M accounts.
PayPal 146M.
count whose the Big Daddy!
Apple will flummox competitors for much longer!
Think Different!
Lead. Don’t Follow!
Apple is not a hit whore.
Apple is not into money or greed, but its care for all details and environment efforts keep loyalty and success or money is a natural consequence, not a forced one based on marketing lies.
Apple is not into market share but quality share.
Apple is not only the sol co. to be a phoenix, but keeps rising and influenced not just 1 but 7 industries already!
who else is that much in the black & influence on culture?
why do we enjoy Schadenfreude on the only black firm we have in the US?! are we that envious and self-destructive?! we’re sick. we’ll never be big again as a country like this!
we spend 27% on military, 2% on education!!! 1% of every tax $ on science!! but we’re 90% Schadenfreude!! that’s the way to do it!!???
if you don’t support Apple, and repeat views like a drone, you’re an idiot without vision or soul and people who do not support real democracy, don’t deserve it.
I like the way you think, rolf
“if you don’t support Apple, and repeat views like a drone, you’re an idiot without vision or soul and people who do not support real democracy, don’t deserve it.”
Who are the biggest repetitive drones of all …… Apple fanatics (I use the word fanatic to differentiate from normal Apple fans that have a brain and can write and debate properly)! If you read this statement it is pretty clear who is the idiot.
Rolf’s rant is a counterweight to the avalanche of blanket condemnation of Apple’s performance, culture, and values. It’s just plain stiff to demand objectivity from someone appreciative of Apple’s magnificent contributions when objectivity is blatantly absent from the multitude of articles bullying Apple and its fans.
Sure Apple gets some bad press, a lot of which is not correct. There are also many Apple hater fanatics out there that make stupid comments, as there are Apple ones. However, coming down to the level people he is having a go at puts him in the same category. His last statement is idiotic despite his frustration at criticism of Apple. On reading comments from the likes of Android, Windows and Apple fans, Apple fanatics seem to make the most stupid, imbecilic comments and far more of them. For me they embarrassing to those who love their Apple products and can express this in a mature and intelligent manner. The same applies to Fandroids ect. or whatever their favorite is.
Well, I am surely not the only one that remembers our very own MDN take that the 5c was a huge mistake, no one would buy one, etc.
“Why were they so incredibly wrong?”
Easy – Force of habit.