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Over 100 Million iPhones Now in Use in U.S., Nearly Two-Thirds Are iPhone 6 or Later

SSD-GUY said:
I'll gladly take your S5 instead of you throwing it in the bin.

Thanks.
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Oh no. I wouldn't wish that phone on my worst enemy. I fully regret choosing it over the iPhone last year.

According to the mobility program manager, the majority of the people who got the SGS5 have tried to return it for an early upgrade.

I managed to get mine approved for an early upgrade because when I called thenhelpdesk the second time they put me through to Verizon and then to the network folks. They could literally see my phone dropping the Good app regularly. So after some monitoring over a couple of days they agreed to upgrade me a year early.

None of the people in my branch have had trouble with their iPhones. Two with SGS5 have been dealing with issues like mine. As soon as they know I got my early upgrade approved they'll do exactly what I did to troubleshoot and then get the phone upgraded.

Most people in the agency, by the way, got iPhones originally. A large number of SGS5 have been returned and exchanged for iPhones.
 
hspace said:
I doubt the accuracy of this. I still see a lot of people with iPhone 4/4S around here in California.
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I agree, same here..i live in Spain- Madrid, and i think i saw more iPhone 4/4S in the wild than Android
 
oldmacs said:
I mean that there would be less 5's out in the wild simply because it was sold for a short period of time, and people's contacts with 5's would have now ended, where as the 5C was sold for longer and more recently meaning more people would be on contracts still.
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Exactly. It's not that the 5 would perform worse, it's just that it was only on sale for a year, so they were entering circulation for half the time the 5c was. And the 5c was on sale more recently, too.
 
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Are these iPhones in active use in the US? Because I bought an iPhone 6s this month in the US but its not being used there.
 
Anonymous Freak said:
That's some seriously flawed methodology. Only people who bought an Apple product in the preceding quarter? Only 500 such people? Not enough sample size or randomness to properly gauge what people are doing with older/replaced models.
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I can't believe no one else picked up on this. A voluntary survey of 500 has serious bias issues. Also, of course most people bought a 6 or 6s in the preceding quarter! This report is beyond useless.
 
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Are these iPhones in active use in the US? Because I bought an iPhone 6s this month in the US but its not being used there.
 
Michael Scrip said:
The chart shows iPhones currently in-use in the US.

There are waaay more older iPhones in-use from a year or two ago... than phones that just came out two months ago.

Basically... you bought an iPhone 6 last year... and you're still using it today.
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It also shows the number of iPhone 6S in use in September, it had been out a whopping 5 days.
 
Cuban Missles said:
US population is at 326M people per http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/

So just about 1 in 3 people in the US has an iphone.

However, according to the census, 62% are 18-62 (what I would expect to be the prime purchasers of smartphones), so 202M. So half of the buyers of smartphones in the US buy iphones.

That is a pretty amazing.

Please like my statistical gymnastics :D
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OTOH, 23% of the population is under 18, and we all know they love iPhones. So another gymnastic conclusion is that 10% of the population buys iPhones for themselves and their kids.

:D

Seriously, there was an interesting article about how older men do buy the most Apple stuff, possibly for gifts:

http://money.cnn.com/2015/10/29/technology/apple-customers/
 
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I gave my 5s to a younger friend and he still hasn't bought cell service, but uses iMessage and iCloud over wifi. He seems pretty happy as it is his first smartphone. I think the 5S will really hold up well because it has 64bit A7 and its performance is still on par with Cheaper android phones. I used it with iOS 9 and other than a couple animations it was very smooth.

I'm hoping this 6S I have will hold up just as well. It is amazingly fast.
 
I find it hard to believe that 1 in 3 Americans has an iPhone, more like 1 in 10 has 3 generations of iPhone. My 3G is still at home, though I haven't used it for several years. I have a 4S that holds my ATT sim card while I use a 6+ with a Polish sim while I live in Europe. I'd like to know how they compiled this data since obviously many, many people have bought several generations of iPhones in recent years and probably aren't using more than 1 at a time.
 
I hope Samsung does some research and posts a similar graph for android. I wonder how many Galaxy SIIs there are still chugging along? An ex of mine was all about her Galaxy SII she got in 2011 up until we broke up in 2014. I think she was considering upgrading because her phone was like 90% popups and 9% worms with 1% being allocated to actual phone functions.

Android adoption rates are always atrocious but that should be expected for a budget OS.
 
navaira said:
Interesting to see 5C and 5S holding so strong.
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Wholly expected. 1/3 of all iPhone users in the US prefer a 4" phone, even though a large percentage of those 4" phones is likely eligible for an upgrade currently.

What I find is interesting is that only about 1/3 of all phones in the US are iPhones. I fully expected the number to be closer to 200 million.

This more or less confirms the rumors about the new 4" phone will pan out. If nothing else, Apple has to find out why 1/3 of all iPhone users are not upgrading to the 6 series phones.
 
As others have pointed out the methodology is flawed in regards to older phones. They extrapolated this data from what appears to be merely buyers of new iPhones over the last quarter or last year.

Common sense tells you the iPhone 5 numbers are off. And I think the 4s numbers are too low as well. I'd say a minimum of 10% are still on these phones. Apple probably has a much more accurate figure.
 
At the end of the September 2015 quarter, more than 101 million iPhones were in use, and two-thirds of those iPhones were newer iPhones that have been released in 2014 and 2015.

An estimated 58 million of the 101 million iPhones in use were the iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, while four million were iPhone 6s and 6s Plus models.
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nepalisherpa said:
Without me, it would have been 99,999,999. Apple should thank me. :D
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You've purchased and use 101,000,000 - 99,999,999 = 1,000,001 iPhones?
 
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omikun said:
I can't believe no one else picked up on this. A voluntary survey of 500 has serious bias issues. Also, of course most people bought a 6 or 6s in the preceding quarter! This report is beyond useless.
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But they do this survey every quarter. So they have data over many years. And they also have a lot of data on how long people tend to keep their phones.

-- "CIRP analyzes data on iPhone buyers, their new model selection, and their prior phones and compares that to iPhone sales data adjusted to the U.S. market."

And remember... the bars on the chart show how many iPhones are in-use.

Let's pick a starting point for the iPhone 6, for example.

The survey in Sept 2014 found that people purchased an iPhone 6. CIRP has that number.

The next survey in December 2014 found that people purchased an iPhone 6 then too. CIRP has that new number... and they add that number to the number from the earlier survey. That's why the bar on the chart gets longer.

And again in March 2015... another survey... more people have purchased an iPhone 6. Then they add that number to the two earlier numbers form the two earlier surveys.

And so on...

It's safe to say that the people who purchased an iPhone 6 in September are still using it the following March. Most people keep iPhones for over a year... mostly two years.

So the chart shows more iPhone 6 in-use as more people buy them... and as people use existing iPhone 6

Finally... whatever data they have collected from those 500 surveys... they extrapolate that with the estimated numbers of US iPhone sales.

Is it perfect? Nope. But it gives you an idea.

Apple knows EXACTLY how many iPhones are in-use in every country around the globe.

But since they won't share those numbers... this is what we have to do.
 
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> CIRP's numbers are extrapolated from a September 2015 survey of 500 U.S. Apple customers who purchased an Apple product in the preceding quarter.

So they asked people who just came out of an Apple store with a shopping bag if they have an iPhone and extrapolated from there? That's some crazy math.
 
polterbyte said:
Where did all those iPhone 5 go? I'd expect 4Ss and older to be out of commission, but not the 5.
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Yep. This report does not pass the smell test. Most i5 phones should be fully operational though maybe in need of a battery replacement. Maybe everything that gets sold used in the U.S. ends up overseas after being refurbished. But that seems unlikely.
Maybe surveying 500 Apple users isn't capturing the used iPhone market very well at all.
 
Michael Scrip said:
Those two phones came out September 2013... so those two-year contracts will be ending depending on when they were purchased.

A launch 5S or 5C could have already been upgraded by now... while a phone purchased in April 2014 will have to wait until April 2016.

And then there are some people who are holding on to the 4" form factor. :)
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Having owned a 5c, 5s and now a 6s, I feel like the "everyday use" jump in performance is not there from the 5s to the 6s... UNLESS you like the bigger form factor or take a lot of photos.

The spec jump is nice and not insignificant, but it isn't several hundred dollars worth either unless there is a "must have" feature or spec.
 
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