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Apple 'Blown Away' by iPhone 5 Pre-Orders
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With great marketing, you can sell anything. And Apple has great marketing. I have seen so many free advertisement for Apple its ridiculous. News program advertising for Apple pretending that its news. Lots of popular shows doing product placements. And don't forget all the A list celebrity endorsements. Its going to be a record number of sales, and for a phone that's anything but magical.
People don't seem to understand that manufacturing a product in volume like this takes a lot of time, and there's not that much time before launch to actually manufacture all that many. Apple's rollouts are some of the largest and fastest of any product, but they are restricted to the same laws of physics and economic realities as everyone else.
A product needs to be designed, prototyped, tested, and then manufactured in bulk. You can spend a lot of money on designing and prototyping, since those are costs you only have to pay once, but a production model has to be made sufficiently cheap, and that means economies of scale have to catch up with what you want to do, on every component of the product. If you only get one usable chip on a wafer for a new process, you can't make millions of iPhones with that chip. You have to keep working at it, until the chip yields are acceptable. This takes a lot of time, so production model products can't be made in bulk and at the right price point until close to when you actually want to start selling the thing. If you wait too long, somebody will make a similar product for much cheaper, or a better product at the same cost.
It's just not realistic for Apple or any company to ramp up production on a new product for a long period of time before they start selling it. There's no reason to keep them in warehouses, no reason at all. You have to pay for the warehouses, and you lose demand by selling an obsolete product when you finally go to sell. You try to build up just enough supply to meet initial demand, then as it becomes cheaper and cheaper to make and demand drops off, you can safely reduce the scale of your manufacturing.
These things have a definite window. If Apple were to spend more time manufacturing ahead of release, people would complain about obsolete technology and not buy it. If Apple manufactures in lower amounts, nobody can buy the product and they spend their money elsewhere, plus Apple can't take advantage of the economies of scale. Apple has to figure out where the window is, predicting variables that are far from being easy to predict. Apple gets it mostly right because clearly Apple is very profitable, but they're not perfect. Perhaps they could have made more iPhones available in this release cycle than they have, and they would have all sold. But Apple would have to spend more money to do so. This is one of those areas where it's not such a bad idea to be a little bit conservative in your sales estimates. This time, I would argue Apple was too conservative since they sold out so quickly, but it's difficult to say since we don't know how insanely high the demand has really been. What might have seemed perfectly reasonable at the time was clearly not enough. For all we know a hundred million people want to buy the iPhone in the first week. I doubt that, but we just don't know yet. All this is pointless speculation until we get hard figures maybe on Monday.
I don't blame Apple for not being able to accurately predict how successful they've become. Their rise since the 90s has been nothing short of astounding. Could anyone have really expected Apple would be doing as well as they're doing?
You don't need marketing when you establish yourself and make great products. It's just an excuse the haters like yourself make to explain why Apple is so successful.
If you really feel that way, why didn't you look into the windows phone? They are far better than any android IMHO
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Are you for real buddy?
Anyone who has been following Apple knows exactly what to expect, & year after year they have been bettering their sales from the iPhone.
saying that the 5 is not surpassing the 4s is plain stupid. Wait until Monday when they announce the over the weekend sales.
All the posts I saw about how people hated the iPhone 5. And if all the leaks were true then nobody would buy this phone. This article proves otherwise, and all those people are truly Apple fan boys/girls no matter what product Apple releases. Slaves I tell you....Slaves! This also goes along with all the people who threatened to leave AT&T when the phone was released. Again...people are so fake sometimes.
Don't take this as me trolling. I would buy the phone too if I could afford the $450 early upgrade fee. However I never claimed to hate the leaked iPhone 5, or to leave AT&T because they are evil bastards.
Don't take this as me trolling. I would buy the phone too if I could afford the $450 early upgrade fee. However I never claimed to hate the leaked iPhone 5, or to leave AT&T because they are evil bastards.
I don't want to live on this planet anymore....
I'm blown away by how much people obsess over a freakin phone.
I'm blown away by how much people obsess over a freakin phone.
Exactly. Yeah, because apple is going to lie about it now when they're going to release sales figures later. They're a publically traded company!
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Said the person who spends his Friday nights on a Mac forum. People obsess over guns, too. A gun forum would solve your problem.
Possible, but I doubt it
Considering they will likely report #s at the rumored iPad mini Launch next month. They will want to report big #s and that wouldn't be possible if they lowballed the stockpile at launch.
The fact that it was sold out in an hour just means supply was less than demand. If they had 2 and got orders for 3, it would be sold out. It has nothing to do with record-breaking sales figures, yet at least. The initial supply just might have mean a lot less this year. This is no information until they quote actual pre-order unit sales.
For all we know, Apple might have just held back supply to purposely say they were sold out in hour for publicity. I'm not saying that's the case, but it's possible.
Considering they will likely report #s at the rumored iPad mini Launch next month. They will want to report big #s and that wouldn't be possible if they lowballed the stockpile at launch.
Haha good one!!! But I'm sick at home and looking up information on the iMac cuz I NEEED to have one for my job. So it's not quite like that sorry...
I ordered from apple.com and my card has been charged, and my order is preparing for shipment
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I ordered the iphone through Apple's website at 12:04 am, and it is processing my order. The phone has been charged to my visa account which means the order went through and hopefully will be shipped in time to arrive on September 21.
I ordered at 12:02 AM and my order changed to preparing for shipment
Well stated. At the rate in which technology is moving forward at this pace, most of the phone improvements will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. There is so much you could improve upon the existing technology. Larger screen? Well, too larger and it turns into an ipad. Thinner Phone? Well, there is a limit to that as well unless you want to wear your phone on your wrist or around your neck, which may not be a far-fetched idea in the future. Faster microprocessors and higher resolution screens? Yes, for now, that will be the trend. One thing many seem to miss is that as long as there is profits to be made with the existing technology, Apple or any other company for that matter, will not introduce new technologies even though they may already exist. This explains why Apple's approach to innovative technology is incremental.
Not hard to be blown away there at apple, seems they're really over thrilled with themselves as of late. Believe me love the products, ordered the 5 last night blah blah but man that keynote. Lets say Steve is very missed. Cook seems like a good guy but oh boy all the overemphasis on the talk pattern and the rest just acting like every little thing was like introducing the second coming is over the ****ing top now. I can see how android fanboys think we are douchy at times however IMO they do make the best products in the world still
I think having 2 earnings "misses" is actually helping the process. If you had bought after July's earnings release, you'd be sitting on a 20% return in 2 months. Some more "misses" like that and maybe Tim Cook and Peter Oppenheimer will convince analysts that their estimates are realistic now.
All the posts I saw about how people hated the iPhone 5. And if all the leaks were true then nobody would buy this phone. This article proves otherwise, and all those people are truly Apple fan boys/girls no matter what product Apple releases. Slaves I tell you....Slaves! This also goes along with all the people who threatened to leave AT&T when the phone was released. Again...people are so fake sometimes.
Don't take this as me trolling. I would buy the phone too if I could afford the $450 early upgrade fee. However I never claimed to hate the leaked iPhone 5, or to leave AT&T because they are evil bastards.
FYI nobody cares
Turn your sarcasm meter on. After all, his screen name is Cristobal Huet, not Wayne Gretzky.
I know I'm blown away. It remains to be seen if I'm blown away by the iPhone 6th gen's sales numbers, but I'm certainly blown away by the speed they sold out the first batch.
It likely won't be this weekend since they can't technically count them as "sales" until they deliver the product, but it's almost certain they will have a press release a week from Monday.
Well it matters quite a bit when you want to consider growth. Without growth a company becomes stagnant and that leads to failure. Isn't the whole point to capture more of the market??? Try to look at the larger picture here instead of the hyped up immediate numbers (which can easily be skewed with little effort) that simply do not mean anything by themselves. I never even said it was a failure to begin with.