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I'll have to repharse, not everybody is a worker (lowly paid) in China. I bet there would be somewhere around 9-10 million people in China who can afford an iPhone. That is a very significant number.

My point was, that even at $100 subsidized (and who knows if it will even BE subsidized) it still represents a decent amount of money compared to the average worker's earnings.
 
My point was, that even at $100 subsidized (and who knows if it will even BE subsidized) it still represents a decent amount of money compared to the average worker's earnings.

Agreed. I'll tell you how it works in countries like China and India. Nobody buys a phone on contract basis. Everybody pays off-contract, full amount and that's it. If people want to buy a luxury item, they save. It doesn't matter how much you earn. If you want something, you will buy it by hook or crook (not unlawfully). When the 5C is introduced, most people will be lured by a lower cost of a genuine Apple product and buy it eventually after saving a bit. To add to that, Apple offers monthly installments of 6 to 12 months at 0% interest. So partial payments every month is also something the average consumer goes for.

At the end of the day, if you earn and want something, you will buy it. Even if it means going on an expensive holiday (Okay I might have exaggerated that a bit) but you get the gist of it :)
 
I don't think the millionaire crowd is what Apple is trying to secure with a low cost iPhone.

I'm not forgetting anything, I am just trying to say that even the lowest price pointed iPhone in China still represents a significant portion of the average Chinese worker's monthly income.

If there are that many millionaires, there is bound to be a lot more people within the range of 47k to 1,000k.
 
Samsung sales are fueled by the anti-Apple group, which is growing daily. They'll gladly pay full price on the newest Samsung phone to give Samsung ammunition against Apple.
People who buy Apple products don't care about quality and features. They just want a phone with an Apple logo on the back. They would gladly trade in their $600 iphone for a cheap, $200 POS from Apple.

The fact that the iPhone 4 and 4S are outselling the iPhone 5 is proof of this.
Perhaps you need to work on your reading comprehension. The "fact" is that the iPhone 4 and 4S are outselling the iPhone 5 *in certain emerging markets*. Thus, the iPhone 5C will come out to replace them - the goal being to standardize the screen sizes for developers (and by extension, the users).

Overall? No, the iPhone 5 is outselling the iPhone 4/4S quite handily. http://appleinsider.com/articles/13...of-apples-smartphone-sales-iphone-4s-takes-30
 
Lower cost iPhone will cannibalize sales of more expensive iPhone.

1) Some of that is bound to happen. But it will be offset by the billions of potential customers in emerging markets.

2) Apple has never minded cannibalizing their own products. If you lose a sale to a cheaper phone, it might as well be your own cheaper phone instead of a competitor's.

Expect sub $4 billion profit per quarter while Samsung surpasses $10 billion per quarter. :cool:

As a person who has major products from both companies, I don't really understand why people care so much about Apple vs Samsung wars.
 
I'll have to repharse, not everybody is a worker (lowly paid) in China. I bet there would be somewhere around 9-10 million people in China who can afford an iPhone. That is a very significant number.

9-10 million?

Try 100+ million.

China has a rapidly growing urban middle class. Hell, there's probably 9-10 million potential customers in your average tier-2 city. In somewhere like Beijing or Shanghai, where wages and the cost of living rival most European cities, there would be a whole lot more potential customers.

If you live inside Beijing's 4th Ring Road, there's no way you couldn't afford an iPhone. That's a whole lot of customers.

I say this as someone with quite a few friends and relatives who are middle-class workers (police, nurses, sales reps) in tier-2 Chinese cities. Most of them have iPhones, or high-end Samsung Galaxy phones. I don't think they particularly struggled to afford them.
 
Troll! ;-)
.....why not just get a Galaxy SIII and put an Apple sticker on the back? ... then they'll be supporting Samsung and satisfy their ego at the same time... :)

Touché!

Samsung sales are fueled by the anti-Apple group, which is growing daily. They'll gladly pay full price on the newest Samsung phone to give Samsung ammunition against Apple.....

This certainly speaks volumes about your level of maturity.

.....People who buy Apple products don't care about quality and features.....

You've probably never been more wrong in your life.....Then again, you probably have.....

.....Do you not know what cannibalization means? They'll sell a lot of cheap, low-margin 5Cs, but the sales of their high-margin 5S will drop like hell.....

To comment on two devices, that have at this stage, not yet been officially announced, much less released, you sure sound like a voice of authority. I must say, if your aim is to antagonize people, you can be proud of yourself, because it seems you have certainly succeeded.

For a person with your username, you seem to harbor a lot of anger towards Apple. You are entitled to express your opinion, just like everyone else, but why not just get a hobby, and find another outlet for your anger?
 
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Why does everybody tend to forget other countries in the list of BRIC nations? Those are emerging markets as well. I read other forums and tech news pertaining to India and the biggest complaint that people have against Apple is that they're too damn expensive (nearly $700 for a 16GB model). If they can manage to launch a cheaper iPhone at say half of that price, people will buy it at the drop of a hat! Pitch that with a recently introduced market strategy of monthly installments, Apple will have a hard time keeping up with the stocks.
Out of BRIC countries only India is close in population to China but in economic sense India is much more poor country than China. One would need to lower price not by half but even more to make iPhone affordable and popular there. But in China there's already a *huge* interest and many users of current iPhone.
 
iPad mini and iPad.
Checkmate.

iPod and iPod nano and shuffle

Checkmate.

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Ok, deal, you bet your pay check, I bet mine.

Don't. What if he's Tim Cook in disguise?:D

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I'll have to repharse, not everybody is a worker (lowly paid) in China. I bet there would be somewhere around 9-10 million people in China who can afford an iPhone. That is a very significant number.

I was there last month and about 70% of the people were using smartphones. I went to a urban area so I don't know about the country side. Of that 70% about 15% were using an iPhone and about 80% using a samsung.
 
I still think the big issue stopping the iPhone from being officially offered on China Mobile is compatibility with China Mobile's unique TD-SCDMA digital cellular network. My guess is that Tim Cook was in China to do the final sign off on the paperwork that certifies the iPhone 5C and 5S as TD-SCDMA compatible, since the A7 SoC and the radio chips on the new iPhone models should work with both the CDMA standard used by Verizon and Sprint here in the USA and TD-SCDMA.
 
I'll have to repharse, not everybody is a worker (lowly paid) in China. I bet there would be somewhere around 9-10 million people in China who can afford an iPhone. That is a very significant number.

China mobile has about 170M 3g users and China Telecom and China Unicon has a little bit less. So we can figure about 400M+ 3g users in China. If 10% of them can afford an Iphone, we are talking about 40M+ potential Iphone sales in China.
 
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