The further you read into a piece, it becomes clear how the iPhone 8 exists in an bizarre quantum mechanical state a bit like Schrödinger’s cat. Up top it’s horribly overpriced and no one wants it. But once you read and understand everything, it turns out it looks like it’s going to be very successful.
Writing for Fortune, Don Reisinger explains to us in no uncertain terms “Why Apple’s Next iPhone Could Be an Expensive Problem.”
The page title for this piece is “Apple iPhone 8: Rumors of $1,000 Price Tag Rattles [sic] Buyers”.
Nobody wants a thousand dollar phone! Besides, Apple will not be able to make enough to keep up with demand.
Apple’s rumored iPhone 8 could cost $1,000 or more, according to reports, and many consumers don’t like the sound of that.
MANY CONSUMERS, I ASSURE YOU.
In a study released on Thursday by ad company Fluent, just 13% of American consumers said that they would buy the iPhone 8 if its price is over $1,000.
So, Fluent, an outfit known for craptastic Apple surveys, asked all American consumers and “only” 13 percent of them said they’d buy an iPhone priced over $1,000.
THAT IS INSANELY HIGH. Now, these surveys of buying intentions for things that haven’t even been announced yet are completely meaningless, of course, but if 13 percent of American consumers ran out and bought an iPhone 8 later this month, Apple executives would be making cash angels on the lawn in front of their new circular campus.
When it comes down to it, the real reason pundits think the iPhone 8 is overpriced is because $1,000 for a smartphone just sounds like too much. The fact that fewer than a plurality of respondents to a survey say they’d buy one just backs up that preconception, despite the fact that the iPhone’s total U.S. market share is maybe 30 percent on a good day. It seems impossible that pundits continue to misunderstand how Apple still makes more money than anyone else while having lower market share but… here we are.
There’s been some debate between Apple fans and detractors over whether the iPhone 8’s possible price tag would be too expensive.
The former who’ve been mostly correct over the last decade and a half, and the latter who’s been spectacularly, flamboyantly, pants-around-their-ankles-wearing-a-Philly-Phanatic-head-and-waking-up-in-a-dumpster-outside-Scranton wrong.
Reisinger does at least mention the iPhone 7s, the phone that pundits have shoved down the memory hole because it gets in the way of them pretending Apple expects everyone to shell out a thousand bucks this month. Look, ridiculous narratives don’t make themselves. They are hand-crafted in a time-honored artisanal method.
Somehow, despite all the iPhone 8 pricing derangement and headline-garnering survey nonsense, when you get down to the last few paragraphs of these pieces, things look pretty good. (Tip o’ the antlers to Daniel Foss and Philip Speicher.)
RBC thinks the next iPhone will sell really well, and raised its price target with the release of the survey up by $4 to $180. RBC rates Apple a buy.
We will not know for some time how well the iPhone 8 will do, but don’t let misinterpreted results of silly surveys be your guide.