iPhone 4S sales as great as ever despite disappointing new features

Monday, October 17th, 2011 at 10:13 AM

Apple’s latest iPhone 4S went on sale last Friday to an eager crowd many of whom queued overnight around city blocks to purchase the last iPhone device that are unveiled during Steve Jobs’ life. This news is enough to send the Shares of Apple, AAPL to skyrocket to $422 last Friday. Up $13.57 or 3.32% last Friday. Some fans that were interviewed last Friday have quoted that they wanted something to remember Steve Jobs. This is truly a legendary remark and achievement for the late Steve Jobs. Even after he has passed on, his Product sensation has lived on!

After we have done some analyzing, we found that the launch of the iPhone 4S is indeed the right move for Apple for the below reasons:-

1. The iPhone 4S is not meant to replace the iPhone 4. The reason for this is because there is not much enhancement of the the iPhone 4S compared to the iPhone 4 model except for the faster speed. In addition to that, the users of the iPhone 4 will likely still be under contract if they have purchased the iPhone last year. With a 2 year contract period, it is not easy for these users to upgrade to the iPhone 4S. Hence, for users who are having the iPhone 4, they will probably not dump their iPhone 4 to upgrade their unit to the iPhone 4S for the little added benefits of the latest device. iPhoneMalaysiaBloggers believe that the iPhone 5 will likely only be released sometime Summer of 2012 which is in June 2012. The reason why we predict this date is because this is about 2 years after the the initial launch of the iPhone 4 which means that all iPhone 4 users will be off contract by then and it would be a great group to target for the upgrades.

2. The real target for the iPhone 4S device is actually for the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, current Android users and new smartphone users. For the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS users, their contract when the purchased the device would probably be over by now and it is definitely a great time to upgrade their current device instead of waiting until maybe mid of next year for the iPhone 5 to be released. This group is big enough to make the iPhone 4S launch a big success as what we have seen last Friday. In addition to that, the iPhone 4S will also likely attract a lot of converts from the Android loyal camp to the iPhone camp. This is the key group that Apple would be very interested and happy to acquire as this is an acquisition from their main competitor. Last but not least, another group that is an easy target is the new smartphone users. New reports have shown that this group is huge and with more and more people moving from a traditional phone to a smart phone, the ability to capture this group of subscribers is key to the success in this competitive landscape.

Another fact that you should know is that The iPhone product range which is the gold standard for smartphones is actually Apple’s highest margin product and accounts for 40 percent of its annual revenue. If Apple were to launch the iPhone 5 last week, they would probably have done much better compared to the iPhone 4S but they would have missed out on a huge opportunity in the future to launch another successful iPhone 5.