“Apple’s iPhone SE hasn’t sold in the vast numbers that a new iPhone release typically does. Did anyone really expect it to?” Mark Hibben writes for Seeking Alpha. “Some have called iPhone SE sales weak. Yet it’s selling well enough to be back ordered in the Apple online store with a shipment delay of a week to 10 days in the U.S. The SE will probably outsell the iPhone 5s it replaces as Apple’s lowest cost iPhone.”
“At least that’s the take of RBC Capital Markets analyst Amit Daryanani, who predicts sales of 40 million units in 2016. I think that’s a pretty easy prediction to make,” Hibben writes. “As Apple made clear at the March Special Event, it sold over 30 million 4-inch screen iPhones in 2015. The SE offers much more value by virtue of the processor, camera and NFC/Apple Pay system from the latest generation iPhone 6s. So it should outsell its predecessor.”
“But it was never going to sell 10 million in a weekend, and for this to become the yardstick to measure of success of the phone is kind of silly,” Hibben writes. “Nevertheless, the ‘weak’ initial sales of the SE are being offered as more evidence of Apple’s imminent decline by SA Contributor Michael Blair.”
MacDailyNews Take: That’s only because Blair is a brain-dead hit-whore who cherry-picks and massages data to constantly predict the ever-imminent demise of the world’s most valuable company. Blair makes John Dvorak look like an Apple genius.
“The significance of the SE is that Apple is deliberately becoming more price competitive. As such, it represents something of an experiment. I doubt that anyone knows for sure what the demand elasticity for iPhone is. We’re about to find out,” Hibben writes. “I believe this is a long-term positive for the stock. Apple has the manufacturing and distribution scale to compete on price. The fact that Apple is even testing the waters with the SE should scare its competition.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As a high quality device with excellent specs all around, the iPhone SE is a vastly more interesting experiment for Apple than was iPhone 5c.
