The genius of the 5c is that it's great advertising for iPhone in general.
The nightly news focussed on the colours of the 5c, and might have mentioned fingerprint sensor for the 5s.
It's still last year's model, which is fine for first timers, but with much more splash. Not to mention the none-too-subtle up-sell for the iPod Touch.
And the 4s is the cheapest phone, as has been the practice of recent years, so nothing's changed really, except better margins and colour!
As the year progresses, sales of the 4s and 5c will increase, as happened in previous years. Add an iWatch to wipe out the rest of the iPods, and Apple will have eaten itself & created the next big thing, all in plain sight, and none of the competitors or analysts guessed it, because they're just so far behind the puck, they can't even see the game.
The 5c is a way of reducing production costs, to recoup last year's margins, and a striking publicity gimmick to boot. I know non-tech people who really want to replace their 5 with a 5c, just because it's colourful and feels nice.
Apple seems to be increasing prices across the board to improve their margins, which is not good for consumers. Might not be so obvious inside the US, but here in Australia, the 32GB 5c sells for $30 less than the price of the 32GB iPhone 5, last year. That's not much of a price drop. The new iMacs are more expensive than previous models with, in some cases, lower specs (some have no external GPU at all). The new CPU is more about power saving than performance. Prices go up, to increase margins, and show Wall St how much of their bitch Apple has become.
What's escaping everyone, is selling almost double the number of phones this year, even in the face of the 'gold' shortage (it's a popular colour), not to mention an economic downturn & massive unemployment.
And don't get me started about how the gold and the grey are really shades of brown - that's Apple's greatest marketing hype, ever. Don't let anyone tell you Cook doesn't have a reality distortion field. It's not Steve-strength, but getting everyone to call that thing gold is a pretty impressive trick.