In the weeks and months leading up to the iPhone 7 introduction, Apple’s next-gen smartphone was largely panned as ‘boring’ upgrade. Incredibly, this narrative carried so much weight that it even compelled Samsung to rush its Galaxy Note 7 to market, a move which backfired in the worst of ways.
The reality is that the iPhone 7 appears to be much more popular of a device than most analysts anticipated, as evidenced by record-breaking pre-orders at a number of carriers. Apple, though, said that it won’t be issuing any weekend launch sales figures this year, which means that we’ll have to wait until Apple’s earnings reports in October and then again in January before we can accurately assess the true popularity of the iPhone 7.
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That aside, a pair of analysts from South Korea believe that the iPhone 7 is nothing short of a bonafide success. In remarks relayed by ZDNet, analyst Lee Seung-woo of IBK Investment & Securities anticipates that Apple will sell upwards of 100 million iPhone 7 units by the time 2016 comes to a close.
Korean component vendors for Apple expected a volume of 80 million to 85 million units, but this has jumped by between 17-25 percent to over 100 million by the end of the year, said IBK Investment & Securities analyst Lee Seung-woo.
Seung-woo also believes, as do many, that the PR disaster that was the Galaxy Note 7 has served to divert sales in Apple’s favor.
Meanwhile, analyst Song Eun-jeong of Hi Investment & Securities is equally as confident that the iPhone 7 will eclipse sales of the iPhone 6s. Of course, what that means exactly remains to be seen given that iPhone 6s sales checked in lower than the iPhone 6 in 2014.
Regardless, it’s quickly becoming clear that all those notions of us having reached ‘peak iPhone’ were far too presumptuous.
