The iPhone 7 Off To A Rocky Start But May Recover
The new iPhone 7 was launched this week and despite the long familiar queues of people camping outside Apple stores, the company might have trouble generating enough interest in the device to make customers buy in large numbers according to data released by research firm Morning Consult.
The company carried out a poll of nearly 2,000 people between Sept 6th and Sept 8th. Only 10% indicated that they were very likely to buy the phone while 15% of the respondents said that they were ‘somewhat likely’. Fifty percent of those polled said they were ‘very unlikely’ to buy the iPhone7 after having seen, read, or heard about it. Seventy-eight percent of those interviewed owned a smart phone out of which 60% of the group owned Android phones and about 37% were iPhone owners.
The smartphone comes with a slightly enhanced design and brand-new internal components that Apple says, will deliver better performance than any iPhone that came before it. The iPhone 7 Plus, which has a 5.5-inch screen, also comes with a dual-lens camera for better picture taking. The iPhone 7 line features two speaker grills, replacing the headphone jack that had been available to iPhone owners since the first Apple smartphone launched in 2007. There had been earlier speculation prior to the launch that the loss of a headphone jack might not go down too well among potential buyers but the Morning Consult data revealed that most of the interviewees did not really care about the headphone jack one way or another. In fact, 28% of the survey’s respondents indicated that they might be more likely to purchase the iPhone 7 because it does not have a headphone port.
Customer feedback suggested that they would be more likely to buy the iPhone 7 if it was thinner than its predecessor, waterproof, and had a longer battery life. Apple was quick to point out at its press event last week that the iPhone 7 has the longest battery life of any smartphone it has ever launched.
A Morning Consult spokeswoman told in a statement that last September, 33% of respondents to the survey said they would likely buy the iPhone 6s, easily topping the 25% of those who said they were likely to buy an iPhone 7 this year. It is not yet clear why there has been a lackadaisical response to the iPhone 7. Indeed, 2016 is the first year that Apple has been forced to announce that iPhone sales have been sliding—and it has done so in its last two reported fiscal quarters. But the lack of interest may be temporary The company’s preorder day last week went off smoothly with the first batch of iPhone 7 models quickly selling out, pushing shipment dates out as far as mid-November just an hour or so after preorders began. The Morning Consult data is a snapshot of people’s initial reaction to the phone which may change over the course of time as some of the improvements like a longer battery life and waterproofing features help to boost sales going forward.
