Good grief, talk about burying the lede. The 5C has lower-than-expected demand because the 5S has been wildly successful, even with it's higher price point (evidence for this: Apple announcing that they exceeded expected sales for all models of iPhone during the first month of sales, and that despite the fact that the 5S is still supply-constrained).
I think "exceeded expected" is a bit of marketing speak here. Did the sales really exceed what they expected? If so, they must be pretty bad at forecasting how much of their own stock they sell, time and time again.
And if the 5C was one of the models that exceeded expected sales, why would they be notifying their suppliers of cuts? Wouldn't they be saying "Good news, sales are better than we thought".
The exceeded expectations is completely meaningless. It clearly didn't.
Just to be clear, Apple didn't announce that they exceeded expectations, at least not to my knowledge. They simply (and objectively) announced how many sales they had made, which beat analysts' expectations by a large margin.
Agreed. I also can't find any reference about iPhone 5s wildly exceeding expectations.
It looks like Apple put two horses in the race. One performed as expected, the other did not.
The article did say that iPhone 5s sales were good, but in my view, that's secondary. No burying the lede from my view.
They adjusted their revenue guidance upwards after announcing weekend sales. I would think at least one of the iPhone models exceeded sales expectations, not just "performed as expected".
>The 5C has lower-than-expected demand because the 5S has been wildly successful
Correlation is not causation
The 5S is doing well not because the 5C isn't. Apple meant the two models for different markets with the 5C meant to ride into the market of low/mid-end android phones unfortunately they aren't finding as much love in that market.
There is no reason Apple (or any other company) to release a product to cannibalize its' own existing market especially when they are getting consumers to pay a premium for the existing product
Apple always exceeds their own numbers. They're notorious for setting extremely conservative guidance so they can easily jump over it and claim amazing success (even if revenue growth has ground to a halt and profit 'growth' is moving backwards).
Every version of the iPhone that has ever been sold has been supply constrained, there's no news there. They do it on purpose (or they're wildly incompetent after seven years of making the iPhone).
I don't think being supply constrained at launch means they are incompetent. When you have a large % of people who want to buy it as soon as it comes out, if you build your logistics to have enough supply at that time, you'd have too much capacity other times.
But they definitely set the bar pretty low each time so they keep the image of every new product selling out.
Edit - Here's a better example of how the same facts can be reported: http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/16/4843902/apple-said-to-be-...
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