Horace Dediu, tweeting yesterday on Apple’s results:
iPhone grew at 17% sales which is amazing considering they did not
launch the 18 or the Duo or the new Air in the quarter.
The Duo didn’t launch until October, which is Q1 (in Apple’s financial calendar). And the Air, last year, was not a big seller (putting it lightly). The big bet Apple made this year was postponing the regular iPhone 18 until the end of winter early next year. The pro models — Pro and Pro Max — combined sell more than the regular non-pro no-adjective iPhone each year, but the regular non-pro iPhone is Apple’s single best-selling iPhone model. The bet that Apple made is that those mainstream buyers don’t care if the regular iPhone 18 ships five or six months after the 18 Pros — and won’t care next year, or the year after that, or the year after that about this same schedule being followed by the iPhones 19, 20, 21, etc.
The other factor at play is that the just-reported quarter started in July, just after Apple raised prices on just about every major product it sells other than the iPhone. So it’s theoretically possible that this quarter’s sales were boosted by people buying year-old iPhone 17-generation models in anticipation of Apple raising prices with the new models in September (which is exactly what happened). But I don’t see how that can explain 17 percent growth in sales year-over-year. Some savvy enthusiasts definitely did this. I have heard from a few people who bought iPhone 17 Pros in August, concluding that they’d be better off saving money than spending more for an only incrementally better 18 Pro (which would no longer come in the all-time-great cosmic orange colorway). But general consumers don’t follow Apple that closely. There are over a billion iPhone users in the world and at least one billion of them don’t even know that Apple always holds an iPhone introduction event in early September.
We can’t call this new launch schedule a win until we see what happens in late February or early March when Apple launches the iPhone 18, 18e, and Air 2, but so far it sure looks like a win.