Chicago – Forty percent of iPhone owners upgraded to an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus between the phones’ September 2014 launch and the end of March 2015, a CIRP survey found.
iPhone users’ adoption rate of the 6 and 6 Plus was faster than the adoption rate of the 5S during the year-ago period, added CIRP (Consumer Intelligence Research Partners) . A total of 38 million of the new iPhones were sold during the September-March period compared to about 18 million iPhone 5S models sold during the year-ago period.
Out of an iPhone installed base of 94 million, a total of 25 million iPhone 6 models are in use along with another 13 million iPhone 6 Plus models, the company found.
CIRP sees the potential for 56 million owners of older iPhones to upgrade. However, only 26 million of them are owners of the 5S, and those models “are at most 18 months old, so owners will only begin to upgrade them in the coming quarters,” CIRP said. In addition, 8 million iPhone 4S phones, dating back to 2011, are still in use, but “while they are ripe for upgrade, many of these consumers have owned their
iPhone 4S for only a fraction of its three and a half years on the market,” CIRP noted.
As a result, CIRP said, “the size of this upgrade cohort, relative to the number of new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus units sold, suggests that the coming quarters may prove challenging for Apple in the U.S.”
CIRP based its findings on a March survey of U.S. Apple customers, sampling 500 consumers who purchased an Apple product (iPhone, iPad, or Mac computer) in the preceding quarter.
