Apple baru-baru ini telah dilaporkan berjaya mencapai jumlah jualan iPhone melepasi paras 2 billion unit. Angka ini mengambil kira sejak iPhone generasi pertama diperkenalkan pada 9 Januari 2007.
Siri iPhone terkini lebih kepelbagaian dengan memperkenalkan pelbagai peringkat harga mengikut keperluan pengguna. Tidak berapa lama selepas siri iPhone 13 diumumkan, Apple telah menurunkan harga bagi sesetengah model terdahulu disamping menghentikan selebihnya.
Pada tahun lalu, Apple telah memperkenalkan iPhone SE, model pada harga terendah dikalangan iPhone keluaran semasa tahun itu. Dijangkakan, pada tahun 2022 kelak iPhone SE baharu akan diperkenalkan dengan sokonga 5G.
Bagaimanapun, pencapaian jumlah jualan iPhone melebihi 2 billion ini agak menghairankan buat sesetengah dari kita. Ini disebabkan ketiadaan pengumuman besar-besar dari pihak Apple mengenai pencapaian besar ini. Pun begitu, Horace Dediu dari Asymco mempunyai pandangannya sendiri:
“Just recently, the 2 billionth iPhone was sold. Unlike the 1 billionth, there was no announcement, no celebration. Partly this is because Apple stopped reporting unit shipments, but partly it’s because it’s not as interesting to talk about 2 billion as it is about 1 billion. There is a desensitizing when numbers get that big. What happens after you achieve the status of the most popular and valuable product of all time? How much more better can the world absorb?
Before we answer, let’s reflect on how it’s going. The iPhone is doing better than ever.
There are more than 1 billion iPhone users. The total number of users has been rising steadily. iPhone users make up about 26% of all smartphone users (3.8 billion is the current estimate). The share of users in the US is about 60% (or soon will be.) The share in UK is close to 50%. All these share numbers are higher than ever. Over 14% of US and 10% of UK survey respondents have switched to an iPhone in the past two years. The following graph shows how churn is boosting iPhone market share in terms of users.”
iPhone 13 akan wujudkan permintaan yang masih belum wujud
Beliau turut percaya iPhone 13 akan mewujudkan permintaan yang masih belum wujud lagi. Hal ini kerana Apple sentiasa menyediakan pengguna dengan fungsi yang kebanyakan mereka tidak tahu akan memerlukannya.
“The latest iPhone 13 is, in my opinion, the most important iPhone ever. It creates the perception of what a phone should be and it sets up the trajectory for demand that did not yet exist. It’s facile to think that the utility of an ok older phone is good enough. That assumes that we are satisfied with ok messaging and ok apps. With ok photos and ok video. With no wide angles, no nightmode and no macro photos. What the iPhone has shown however is that the demand for performance can be nudged up.
We did not ask for rack focus, post-production focus (!), night mode, macro photography and portrait bokeh. But once we have these features we begin, ever so slowly, to use them and then we start demanding them. Conversely it seems that what people mostly ask for—that is what the critics ask for—are extrapolations of existing features. The “faster horse” dilemma.
What makes the iPhone and perhaps Apple special is that it seems to deliver things that nobody asks for but then everybody wants while eschewing overshooting a performance dimension that a few demand but most won’t use.”
