“Apple’s latest iPhones cement its position as the premium smartphone brand. Apple bears never seem to understand why Apple is earning 92% of the profits of the smartphone industry,” Mark Hibben writes for Seeking Alpha. “There’s a good reason for this, and it’s not savvy marketing fueling the ‘next iFad.’ That explanation is so worn out.”
“The simplest explanation, the one that doesn’t require the convoluted rationalizations of the Apple bears, is that iPhones command a higher price because they’re better,” Hibben writes. “Benchmarks substantiate the superiority (in terms of processing speed) of Apple’s custom SOCs. The high adoption rate of iOS 9, now over 50% of all iOS users, substantiates the superiority of iOS compared to Android, in which the latest 5.0 release has a very low adoption rate of 15.9%.”
“Based on what I see in the quality of the iPhone 6s/6s Plus hardware and software, I’m very bullish for the December quarter. I expect that as consumers realize how strong the product is this year, demand will build,” Hibben writes. “I still expect iPhone sales to top last year’s very impressive December record, for y/y unit sales growth in the mid teens. The first weekend sales, if anything, are encouraging, not frightening, since they indicate that demand in China remains strong.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: With iPhone 6s/Plus currently pegged with 2-3 week shipping times, it seems obvious that demand is outstripping supply and quite possible that supply shortages hindered launch weekend unit sales which were record-setting regardless.