How Many iPhone 5s Can Apple Sell in a Weekend?
On Wednesday morning, Apple will officially unveil its next-generation iPhone, setting the stage for what some observers say will be one of the biggest upgrade cycles in consumer electronics history. — Hyperbole? Maybe.
Context & Ripple Effects
The frame for Wednesday's event was set five years ago: when the original iPhone launched in June 2007, Piper Jaffray counted 500,000 units sold over the opening weekend. Every subsequent Apple launch has been scored against that weekend baseline, which is why the pre-unveil question is not whether the new iPhone sells, but how many the channel can move in the first 72 hours.
The story traveled unusually widely for a preview piece — pickups at Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Engadget, NPD and others on or about September 11, 2012 — reflecting how much weight analysts put on the number. Observers are floating the idea of one of the biggest consumer-electronics upgrade cycles ever (a rumor, not a forecast), and the backdrop sharpens it: Apple arrives fresh off its [[confirmed patent victory over Samsung]], while the imminent device is already being cited as added competitive pressure on RIM.
First-order effects
- Apple's opening-weekend sell-through becomes the immediate verdict on the 'biggest upgrade cycle' talk, with the 2007 half-million weekend as the historical floor every comparison will cite.
- RIM absorbs the pressure directly: an imminent next-generation iPhone lands in the same buying window as BlackBerry's own refresh efforts, giving carriers' upgrade-eligible customers a reason to wait.
Second-order effects
- Samsung, having just lost the patent lawsuit to Apple, must defend its Galaxy franchise against an upgrader wave carrying extra momentum from Apple's legal win.
- Ecosystem players keep repositioning around what ships on the device: Apple's removal of the preinstalled YouTube app in iOS 6 has already forced Google onto a standalone-app strategy, and each hardware cycle redraws those distribution deals.
Third-order effects
- Launch-weekend unit counts are hardening into the industry's standard scoreboard for handset debuts — a measurement convention Apple effectively created in 2007 and that competitors and analysts now apply across the market.
- If upgrade-cycle superlatives keep attaching to each iPhone generation, component suppliers and carriers will increasingly plan inventory and spectrum around a single weekend's demand spike rather than a quarter's steady sell-through.
The trend: Smartphone launches are increasingly judged by opening-weekend unit sales, a metric Apple turned into the industry yardstick since its 2007 debut weekend.