Apple surprised the world in the year 2019 with the sale of iPhone 11 for a price of $699. It was actually a clever marketing trick because the $999 iPhone 11 Pro was the real flagship of the series but Apple’s gambit paid off and reports have said that the iPhone 11 has been one of the best-selling phones in the world since the time when it made its debut.
Instead of sticking to the winning formula in 2020, Apple decided to shift the strategy once more by launching four models of iPhone 12 which includes a brand new iPhone 12 Mini. Apple slapped the price of $699 on iPhone 12 Mini and increased the price to $799 but unlike in 2019, the most affordable model was not able to come out on top. A report by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP), iPhone 12 Mini sales was able to represent only 6% of the total iPhone sales in the weeks following iPhone 12’s launch.
Mike Levin, the partner and co-founder of CIRP said that the new iPhone 12 Mini disappointed Apple with only 6% sales in the period. It had many of the same features like the other iPhone 12 models in a smaller form factor for $699. Its share was more than that of iPhone XR, launched in the year 2018 and priced at $499, the one-year old iPhone 11 is now being sold at $599 and the 2nd generation iPhone SE launched in April 2020 at $399. It looks like it’s high price point in comparison to other three models limited the appeal of iPhone 12 Mini.
The iPhone 12 Mini may not had an impact on the basis of what was being expected by Apple and mainly in a year when most of the people were watching their spending more closely than normal and the rest of the series looks to have potentially surpassed expectations. CIRP says that the four iPhone 12 models accounted 76% of total iPhone sales shortly after the launch which is a notable jump over 69% for iPhone 11 models in the same period in 2020.
One more interesting takeaway from the report of CIRP is how evenly split the sales of iPhone 12 series were in the four weeks followed by the launch of iPhone 12 Pro Max and iPhone 12 Mini. The iPhone 12 came out on top with sales of around 27% and the iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max were not far behind at 20% each. If we look back to 2019, the results were completely different. The iPhone 11 accounted for sales of around 39% in the similar four-week stretch in 2019 and the iPhone 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max combined for sales of around 30%. Its difficult to know if this was a quirk of 2020 or it had more to do with the sheer number of new models launched by Apple.