iPhone 4S pre-orders obliterate sales records
24 hours, one million shiny-shiny seekers
Over one million seekers of the latest shiny-shiny surrendered their credit card info to Apple on the first day of iPhone 4S pre-order availability, securing their place in line for the latest iteration of the überpopular smartphone.
The iPhone 4S
Although the iPhone 4S may have been met with more than a bit of a "meh" from the technorati when it was announced last Tuesday in lieu of the expected-by-many iPhone 5, the upgraded iPhone 4 is proving be quite the tasty, tempting treat to Mr. and Ms. Average Joe and Jane.
"We are blown away with the incredible customer response to iPhone 4S," said the world's most appropriately named marketing chieftan, Apple's Phil Schiller, in a statement announcing the more-than-a-million milestone, continuing the Cupertinian tradition of eschewing the definite and indefinite articles when referring to its products.
"The first day pre-orders for iPhone 4S have been the most for any new product that Apple has ever launched," Schiller added.
We pause to wonder what the pre-order rate would have been had US carriers been ready for a true 4G phone, and had Apple delivered it – although, apparently, AT&T isn't letting such minor matters as reality stop it from wanting to market the 4S as 4G.
The iPhone 4S is scheduled to ship this Friday, October 14, when it will be made available in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and Japan. Twenty-two more countries will be added on October 28 – get ready, Estonians – and by the end of this year it will be available in 70. ®
COMMENTS
Oh go on then, I'll bite.
1. Beautifully crafted (yes, yes it is)
2. Great UI design
3. Beautiful hi-res screen
4. Decent camera with good optics, that make good photos and video (lookin' at you HTC)
5. Pocket-size (none of your 5in monstrosities please, if I wanted a tablet I'd have asked for it)
6. Top-notch build quality
7. Decent battery life (*at least* comparable to other phones with similar specs, and if you tell me your HTC, Samsung or Droid or whatever gets 6x the battery life I'll just laugh at you)
8. High-quality apps, guaranteed to work (and work well) on my device
9. Good customer service (YMMV but I've had great service so far)
10. Great, truly great, media sharing capabilities, useable by The Average Joe(TM)
11. Great accessory ecosystem
Arguably one could also add that thanks to the built-in battery, replacement batteries are cheap as chips too - although they do come in the form of an external battery pack. Potato, PoTAHto - this one
could fall in either the Debit or the Credit column depending on your point of view.
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And in the debit column?
1. Reception, allegedly (personally never had a problem but is generally accepted as an issue)
2. Semi-Walled Garden*
3. No Flash
4. No replaceable battery (although see above, this is a plus for some i.e. me)
* 'Semi'-walled because although you can only buy apps from Apple, you CAN use/play/install media from other places. MP3 for example, and Mobi ebooks. And PDF. And HTML5. Exactly like you can on Android.
Oh and will SOMEBODY please explain to me what makes Apple's walled orchard any more constraining than WinPho, or even Android for that matter? You can play MP3s, read downloaded ebooks, watch practically any video format you like with a free app, etc etc. Android apps ALSO won't run on any other device than Android, WinPho apps run on anything other than WinPho, and WTF is nobody beating up on Microsoft for WMA/WMV any more?
Oh and finally I side with Apple in saying that Flash is a hopeless, steaming, bug ridden pile of crap and should be replaced forthwith with something a bit more 21st-century.
I've had (amongst many others) a Nokia N95 8GB, an HTC HD7, and a BB Storm. All of these, arguably, exceeded the iPhone's capabilities on paper. But none were anywhere near as usable on a daily basis. My N95, for example, theoretically had media sharing capabilities. I think I got it going once, before it keeled over and refused to connect any more. Allegedly it could also upload photos to Flickr but that never stayed working long enough to be anything other than tech willy waving.
My technophobe wife streams music and videos daily from her iPhone to the AppleTV, has set up her own AirPort connection upstairs for more music, uses her iPhone to post more stuff on Facebook than is wise or healthy, spends silly amounts of money buying stuff from iTMS, and is very proud of her iTunes music library. And that, my friends, is why Apple is a success.
So. Rant over. Let the flames begin.
"Apple salesman are without doubt the best in the world!"
Except that nasty little detail about brand loyalty. 89% of iPhone users say their next phone will be another iPhone, compared to <40% for other handset manufacturers:
http://gigaom.com/apple/iphone-owners-very-loyal-blackberry-not-so-much/
Advertising and evangelism affect initial sales. Repeat buyers are more influenced by quality, user experience, customer service, and overall value.
re What do Microsoft & Nokia think?
simple. we're fucked. well and truly fucked.
RE: What do Microsoft & Nokia think?
MS probably think "We'd better get our asses into gear because nearly everything we make is like a pile of steaming donkey poo".
@MoosNC
"most people use holsters for their phones"
Hold up, is your research limited to a select group of IT nerds who dream of being cowboys?
I don't know a single person with a phone holster. I call your bluff, sir.
The rest of your counter-argument was fair enough. In short, all smartphones are equal in value, in as much as we can all now choose the one that has the features we want.
Of course you do have iPhone to thank for that :)
