From the constant complaining about the failure of Apple’s iPhone 5c, you’d think the phone is selling poorly. The reality is that the middle tier model, while dramatically less popular than its brother the iPhone 5s, still managed to outsell every Blackberry, every Windows Phone and every Android flagship in the winter quarter, including the Samsung’s Galaxy S4.
In fact, Apple’s popular iPhone 5s has been so greatly successful, that Apple’s critics have been forced to pounce upon the supposed “failure” of the iPhone 5c instead. A phone that sells so “terribly” that it also outsold the successful Samsung Galaxy S4 on half of America’s top carriers and pushed every other Android phone out of the top U.S. sales charts entirely, from the first month it went on sale, as you can see on the chart below.
The main point supporting the 5c failure propaganda campaign is that the cheaper model hasn’t been able to outsell Apple’s great iPhone 5s; but Apple isn’t going to spend money on making the 5c popular when they could be making $100 more selling the 5s.
iPhone 5c sold twice as many units as all Blackberry smartphone sales combined (6 million), more than all of Nokia’s Windows Phone smartphone sales in the winter quarter (8.2 million), and all of Microsoft’s Windows Phones sold globally in the winter quarter (slightly more than 8.2 million, as Nokia makes 90 percent of the world’s Windows Phones).
So what does “flop” actually mean? Would Microsoft’s Zune been a “flop” if it had outsold any model of iPod? Would Microsoft’s Surface or HP’s Slate PC, Motorola’s Xoom, Samsung’s Galaxy Tab or Google’s Nexus 7 have still been flops if any of them had outsold iPads? Would Blackberry, Windows Phone, HTC’s One, Google’s Moto X or LG’s G2 been flops had any of them outsold Apple’s iPhone? The answer is no.
Kyron Timbs