Saturday 30 May 2015

Apple's Leaked iPhone Will Be A Glorious Failure

When you post the photos by mistake on your own website, it’s hard to discredit the rumors. Following Apple’s mis-displaying of an iPhone 6C image on its apple.com domain (see Gordon Kelly’s reporting of the posted image here on Forbes for more). So let’s run with the assumption that the iPhone 6C is happening. What will the reaction be to the handset, and will that matter to Apple and its strategic plans for the 6C?

I can image the reporting of the handset launch now. Why would Apple push another ‘not-budget’ model at the lowest point in the price range? Why would Cupertino push out a handset with two-year old technology? Why will it have a stupidly low amount of storage (I’m thinking 16 GB, because not even Apple would try to push 8 GB on a new iOS smartphone in 2015)? Why is Apple not offering a genuine ‘budget’ iPhone instead of this hack around the iPhone 5S?

Once all these discussion points are raised, the iPhone 6C will likely be labelled a folly, a freak of nature, and a failure.


And they will all be wrong, because the iPhone 6C will carry on the quiet success of the iPhone 5C. It will bring more consumers into Apple’s services, and it will be one of the biggest selling mid-range handsets on the market – when Android manufacturers are struggling to even turn a profit in the mid-range space.

The iPhone 6C clearly helps Apple. It will likely be a plastic-cased variant of the iPhone 5S, and the biggest benefit for Tim Cook and his team will be the inclusion of TouchID on the lowest placed device. Not only does this make the handset a touch more convenient in use (such as unlocking the handset and verifying iTunes purchases), but it also allows Apple’s ’next big thing’ in Apple Pay to flourish across more of the portfolio.


It’s important to remember that the iPhone 6C (and the current lower tier iPhone 5C) are not budget smartphones as such – the 5C still cost £319 here in the United Kingdom for a SIM free unit. Thanks to  the subsidy that can be offered by carriers they can be sold for ‘no cost’ at the time of purchase with just monthly payments in the contract to take care of. The iPhone 5C (and surely the iPhone 6C) will be perceived on the High Street as ‘free’ smartphones.

The marketing message that a network can make by selling a ‘free’ iPhone is immense. The iPhone 5C is getting a bit long in the tooth now, so a refresh on the line and bumping the model number up to ’6′ will allow both the networks and Apple to push the 6C as a ‘new’ handset, even if it is effectively an iPhone 5S with a cheaper casing.
source forbes

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