The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are tremendous successes for Apple and have driven iPhone sales to new records — the company sold 74.5 million iPhone units during the first quarter of its 2015 fiscal year, with the bulk of them being 2014 iPhones. Tim Cook praised the devices during Tuesday’s earnings conference call, MacRumors reports, revealing the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus managed to bring more users to iOS from Android than any other iPhone before.
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Apple’s CEO said that only a “small fraction” of the installed iPhone base has upgraded to a new iPhone, and that the majority of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are new to iPhone, including Android users who have switched to iPhone.
“I would point out that only a small fraction of the installed base has upgraded, so there’s a lot more people within the installed base, but I would also point out that we had the highest number of customers new to iPhone last quarter than in any prior launch,” Cook said (via SixColors) when asked about Apple’s expectations for iPhone going forward. “And also that the current iPhone lineup experienced the highest Android switcher rate in any of the last three launches in any of the three previous years[iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c, iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S]. We didn’t look back to the other years, I don’t know about those.”
Cook also admitted the company does not have all the data, but the first estimates suggest more Android users got an iPhone last quarter than before.
“At this point, just shortly after the quarter, we don’t have all of our research in from all of the people that bought last quarter yet,” Cook said. “But in the aggregate, as I’ve mentioned before, we saw more new customers to iPhone than we’d ever seen before, and we had a higher rate of Android switchers than we had in the three previous launches, and it’s not that we had more in the fourth one, it’s that I don’t know what those numbers are. And so between the switchers and the people that are just new to smartphones and selected an iPhone, and our upgrades, which we’re very happy with but represent a small fraction of our installed base, we feel really great about what’s in front of us.”
