Not many people can afford a $1200.00 phone every year. As the price goes up, customer pool goes down.
Maybe so or Maybe no.
The customer pool can still grow and grow.
Apple is selling a lot of iPhones. Lots! Every second of every minute.
Having said that - even if new phones are not being purchased by everyone, there is another level of the iPhone market that can grow. Just look at how many people on the Macrumours site are claiming to be using an iPhone 6 or whatever because they are waiting for the next iPhone models. Instead of being recycled, these older iPhones are still being used! And why not. They are still pretty good - just not as good as the latest iPhone models. There is room for everything.
Instead of releasing an "iPhone SE" - you can just go and buy a used iPhone X or iPhone 8. No shame in buying a used phone. For some people it's all about the price.
Compare to Automobiles. For example, not everyone buys a brand new car every year. Some people have never purchased a brand spanking new car - they always buy a used car. Some people lease their car. Some people only drive the top brand vehicles, and others only buy the economy models.
Think about how Apple can penetrate the India market. One way would be to simply wait for the middle class to grow.
That is what happened in China. In China the middle class grew and grew - it's to the point where many millions of new iPhones are sold in China every year. But in India, maybe the other way to penetrate the market will be for refurbished iPhones to be sold there.
The customer pool can continue to grow if the older used iPhones are kept alive and working instead of being decommissioned and recycled into scrap.
All the crying about $1200 phones is silly. Do you know what the new 2020 Porsche 911 retail price is? It was shown yesterday. Do you hear many people complaining that it is priced too high? I don't think so.
Apple's cost of production, not even including non-recoverable engineering costs, is easy to calculate. They sell most phones with a 38% margin. So as little innovation people claim is in these iPhone's, there is a real cost to produce them. Maybe it's just not for everyone to buy every year. Or maybe it is something we should all be buying new every year because it is so important to our lives. It's another layer of "senses" in some ways. What price for 6th sense?
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The install base for iOS devices is still growing via the 2nd-hand market, which helps to fuel sales of new iPhones (from people selling their older iPhones to help fund the purchases of newer iPhones).
So even if sales of iPhones stagnate, your user base is still growing, which in turn means more people to sell accessories, apps and services to. We know that Apple is slowly but sure pivoting to wearables (the Apple Watch is without doubt a success in its own right, AirPods are no slouch, and AR glasses are rumoured for launch in 2020), services (Apple looks to be launching a subscription-based news service in the very least), plus accessories (HomePod, Apple TV).
What people don't seem to get is that Apple has an entire ecosystem to allow it to continue monetising its user base long after the sale of the iPhone has been made, while companies like Huawei only earn from hardware sales.
Apple will do just fine.
That's what I was trying to say! You said it better
