“The new iPhone 6s and 6s Plus hit stores on Friday, with dozens of people – and a robot – queueing in Sydney to kick off a global sales cycle that will be scrutinized for signs of how much juice Apple Inc’s marquee product has left,” Pauline Askin and Julia Love report for Reuters.
“Analysts expect 12 million to 13 million phones to fly off the shelves in the first weekend, up from more than 10 million last year when the hugely successful iPhone 6’s launch was delayed in China, the world’s biggest smartphone market,” Askin and Love report. “Among the first to pick up the new iPhone 6s in a cold, rainy Sydney was a telepresence robot named Lucy, operated by marketing executive Lucy Kelly. ‘I obviously have my work and other things to attend to and can’t spend two days lining up so my boss at work suggested I take one of the robots down and use it to stand in my place,’ she said via an iPad mounted on top of the wheeled robot.”
“Fans from San Francisco to London to Sydney have camped out for days prior to the release, and Apple said earlier this month that pre-orders suggested sales were on pace to beat last year’s first-weekend performance,” Askin and Love report. “After a dramatic redesign last year in which Apple enlarged the iPhone’s screen and added mobile payments, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus boast more modest improvements.”
MacDailyNews Take: Wrong, actually, but Apple brings this upon themselves by naming the product as if it’s a mere iteration. 3D Touch is not a “modest improvement.” It can be argued that 3D Touch is the biggest leap to come to iPhones since the iPhone was launched. All other iPhones are immediately rendered antiquated by the launch 3D Touch iPhone 6s/Plus.
“The only thing that’s changed is everything (so let’s not name it to reflect that fact; let’s instead handicap it and our marketing efforts by misnaming it as if pretty much nothing has changed. That way we can ‘bristle’ when we repeatedly read and hear misinformation like ‘the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus boast more modest improvements.'”
“Lackluster offerings this year from rival smartphone manufacturer Samsung Electronics Co Ltd also will help Apple stand out in the marketplace, analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy wrote in an email,” Askin and Love report. “‘Over the long haul, the 6s will eclipse the 6 as Apple is even more competitive versus Samsung in emerging regions and is gaining share in traditional regions,’ Moorhead wrote in an email. ‘Samsung didn’t bring a whole lot of compelling features to consumers with their new lines of phones.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Did you get yours, yet?
SEE ALSO:
The Pixar iPhone: It is time to start questioning the iPhone ‘S’ cycle – September 21, 2015
Apple, enough with the stupid iPhone ‘S’ naming already – September 16, 2015
UPS website says “Out for Delivery” whoo-hoo!
Me, too
you lucky 2 – I went and checked out the 3D touch and it’s a GAME CHANGER!
waiting for the UPS hub to open at 9am!!
The MacStore at Chadstone Melbourne was packed to the rafters today handing out lovely shiny new iPhones to Hundreds of shiny happy people. 🙂
Only time I agree with this argument. 3D Touch is flat out game changing. This should have skipped to 7 same casing or not.
None of the 64GB Rose Gold or very very few are reported shipped. There seems to be an imbalance in the production of the various models. Very few 16GB of any color reported shipped as well. Most commonly shipped are 128GB of all colors.
iTouch, 64bit, Siri, 3D Touch are all “XS” models. Whereas screen changes alway occur on the “X” models.
You could say the real game changes happen on the second editions, for very good reason.
Delivered at 10am this morning. Repairing Apple Watch was a bit of a chore, plus setting up Touch ID, and Apple Pay again. But, it’s pretty cool so far. 3D Touch works as described – seems fluid and intuitive. The live photos are really really neat. They will revolutionize how we take/share photos. Hope Apple has some strong patents on this technology.
I disagree with MDN, as Apple also seems to. If the body stays the same for two years — if every visual cue is exactly the same then you can’t put the next number on it, IF you will dramatically change the design after the two years.
So the model years will become sequential when the design either changes every year, or much more likely when the design settles on its ideal form, as MBP have, and iPads.
My wife went to AT&T and got me my space grey 6S 128! Happy Friday everyone!