Greg Joswiak, Apple Vice President of Product Marketing, said that “iPhone XR has been the most popular and best-selling iPhone since it hit the market.”
“Apple iPhone XR has been the most popular and best-selling iPhone” and is outselling the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max since it hit the markets last month, Greg Joswiak, Apple Vice President of Product Marketing has claimed during an interview with CNET. The executive, however, did not give any numbers and declined to comment on the recent Wall Street Journal article that reported lukewarm reception of the Apple iPhone XR demand in most markets.
Apple has been on a sticky wicket since it launched the three new iPhones in mid-September – at least for analysts. Apple priced the iPhone XS for $999, iPhone XS Max $1,099 and the iPhone XR for $749. In India, the price of the iPhone XS has touched the Rs 1-lakh mark and goes all the way up to Rs 1.45 lakhs for the iPhone XS Max. We wrote in our iPhone XR review that although the handset inherits some of the good things from previous generations of devices, minor things like the lack of an HD display, no dual camera and a terribly limited portrait mode makes the smartphone feel like an unnecessarily overpriced handset. It starts from a whopping Rs 76,900 for the 64GB model and goes upto Rs 91,000 for the 256GB one. At the time of writing this story, the iPhone X (64GB) is selling for Rs 83,990 on Flipkart.
The lack of these “minor things” and high cost could have been the reason why the device fell short of expected demand. Earlier this year, a report by Nikkei Asian Review claimed that sighting a lower-than-expected demand for the iPhone XR, Apple told its primary phone assemblers, Foxconn and Pegatron to halt any plans to add more production lines for the “cost-effective smartphone”. Citing supply chain sources, the news platform also noted that Apple had also asked its secondary iPhone assembler Wistron to stand by for rush orders, and the company will receive “no orders for the iPhone XR this holiday season.”
These claims in the story were cemented by The Wall Street Journal when it said that Apple may slash the price of the iPhone XR in Japan, and even revive the production of the older iPhone X. Apple also forecasts lesser sales in the Christmas quarter in its quarterly earnings report. The company’s CFO Luca Maestri had said the company would have “uncertainty around supply and demand balance.” and that it is facing “some macroeconomic uncertainty, particularly in emerging markets.”
CNET says that Apple's fiscal fourth-quarter results at the beginning of November “showed it may be grappling with a case of iPhone fatigue.” Citing Apple, CNET claimed that the company didn't sell as many iPhones as analysts expected in the quarter that ended September 29. Further, Apple’s decision to not release the iPhone sale numbers (and only release consolidated revenue) also raised some eyebrows.
Apple's stock has tumbled about 20 percent since the company announced its quarterly earnings, CNET says. The decline means that Apple is no longer a trillion dollar company, a feat it achieved in August. “It's also given Microsoft and its soaring stock the opportunity to become the world's biggest publicly traded company,” the report added. Earlier this week, Apple's shares took a hit after US President Donald Trump announced that he may place tariffs on iPhones and laptop computers imported from China.
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