Oliver Haslam·

iPhone X Sales Overtake iPhone 8, Two OLED iPhones With New Frames Planned For 2018

A new report has Apple’s iPhone X outpacing the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus when it comes to sales in their respective first three days on the market. After the first weekend of sales, the iPhone X is believed to have captured almost 1% market share across all iPhone models, the highest since the iPhone 5s launch, according to numbers made available by analytics platform Localytics.

By way of comparison, the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus managed just 0.3% and 0.4% market share respectively, when both devices went on sale back in September. If those numbers are accurate, there is a school of thought that would suggest iPhone buyers waited for the iPhone X to become available before making their purchase.

At this point, however, it is important to note that none of the numbers provided by Localytics are actual confirmed sales. Instead, the figures represent users who have installed one of 37,000 apps integrated with the Localytics SDK onto one of the new iPhones. It is also key to remember that there are more iPhones around now than ever before, meaning that by the nature of the numbers used, a new iPhone needs to sell many more handsets in order to compete with market share gains made by devices launched much earlier into the overall life of the iPhone line.

While the numbers provided by Localytics are troublesome, they are the best we have now that Apple does not offer its own, concrete sales numbers for opening weekends.

Apple’s reasoning is that sales are constrained by supply, rather than demand, making sales numbers for such periods of time almost meaningless.

In years past, we’ve announced how many new iPhones had been sold as of the first weekend following launch. But as we have expanded our distribution through carriers and resellers to hundreds of thousands of locations around the world, we are now at a point where we know before taking the first customer pre-order that we will sell out of iPhone 7.

These initial sales will be governed by supply, not demand, and we have decided that it is no longer a representative metric for our investors and customers. Therefore we won’t be releasing a first-weekend number any longer.

Orders for the iPhone X, placed now, show delivery estimates of anywhere between 3 and 5 weeks, suggesting that demand continues to outstrip supply.

Moving into 2018, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes that Apple will offer two iPhones with OLED displays, building on the popularity of the iPhone X. Rumors already suggest that Apple will launch two iPhones along the lines of the iPhone X in 2018, with different screen sizes on offer. Kuo also believes that a rethink of the stainless steel frame used for the iPhone is on the cards, with Apple seeking better radio performance compared to existing handsets.

(Source: Localytics, 9to5Mac)

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