Amid worries about demand for iPhone XR, Apple VP of product marketing Greg Joswiak says it's “been our most popular iPhone” every day since it became available
Apple's iPhone XR has been outselling the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max every day since the cheaper, colorful phone hit the market last month.
Context & Ripple Effects
Joswiak's comment is Apple's direct answer to the demand-worry narrative that built after launch: Kuo had reported the XS Max far outselling the XS with storage shortages in September, and skeptics read the XR's slower start as softening appetite. The defense leans on positioning Phil Schiller laid out when he explained how Apple tuned the R's trade-offs to appeal to a broader audience.
What makes the remark more than spin is what the corpus shows next: CIRP found the XR took 39% of US iPhone sales the following quarter, and Counterpoint later tracked it as the global top-seller every quarter from Q4 2018 — so the marketing claim anticipated the sell-through data rather than fighting it.
First-order effects
- Investors and supply-chain watchers tracking the demand-worry narrative get a named counter-signal from Apple itself: the cheapest new model, not the XS pair, is the daily volume leader.
- The XS and XS Max are confirmed as the niche tiers of the lineup, with the XR carrying unit volume while the pricier models carry margin.
Second-order effects
- Component orders and assembly mix tilt toward XR specifications, forcing suppliers to plan around a mid-priced model's bill of materials rather than the XS Max's premium configuration Kuo flagged.
- Rivals competing at the $600-$750 tier now face Apple's most popular phone head-on, pressuring their own flagship-pricing strategies.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — and the subsequent quarterly data suggests it does — Apple's hardware annuity is anchored by a deliberately de-specced volume model, making tier segmentation, not any single flagship, the structural engine of upgrade revenue.
The trend: Apple's iPhone business is settling into a tiered structure where a lower-priced flagship carries the volume of its annuity-like upgrade base while premium models monetize the top of the market.