The iPhone 5C Is No Flop
Seeking Alpha blogger Kofi Bofah contends that contrary to popular meme, Apple’s colorful iPhone 5c is not a failure. Bofah observes that pre-announcment rumor had speculated that Apple was working on a cheaper iPhone to slug it out for market share with Android smartphones, but maintains that Apple never had any intention of slugging it out in the price war trenches with Samsung, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — content to cast the iPhone (including the 5c) as a premium brand and largely remain above the fray. He sees the 5c as a bit of a compromise between advocates arguing for an all-inclusive Apple and the exclusive legacy of the late Steve Jobs.
When the iPhone 5c was revealed as being only $100 cheaper than the full-zoot 5s last fall, Bofah observes that Big Media prematurely and mistakenly pronounced it a market flop in company with Microsoft’s Surface, Windows 8, and BlackBerry 10, but in fact the 5C has been a successful product for Apple, with the two-year-old but still reasonably powerful and feature rich iPhone 4s remaining in production as Apple’s price-leader handset, and that going forward the iPhone 5C launch should actually power long-term outperformance in Apple shares. That analysis is confirmed by for example market intelligence firm comScore, Inc.’s Mobile Metrix report on key trends in the U.S. smartphone industry for December 2013 finding Apple the top smartphone manufacturer with a 41.8 percent OEM market share.
While the 5c’s plastic shell casings are available in neon green, Carolina blue, bright yellow, hot pink, and pure white, reprising an Apple motif of the late ’90s and early ’00s, the 5s, 5c, and discontinued iPhone 5 have all been designed with similar physical dimensions and a common four-inch Retina 1146 X 640 pixel resolution screen, and the 5c and 5s sharing the same powerful 64-bit A7 SoC, as opposed to iPhone 4s’s less elongated form factor, slower A5 chip, and 960 X 640 pixel resolution graphics.
Bofah acknowledges that superficially, the iPhone 5C will remain effectively in limbo as a value, the critics, or haters, must recognize that the iPhone 5C was not designed for Apple to compete against itself, and that it has actually fared quite well as a replacement for the discontinued iPhone 5 and as a direct competitor to Samsung’s Galaxy line, with research firm Counterpoint listing the 5c as the world’s fourth most popular handset through October 2013, and while never intended to be a blockbuste, the 5C has actually been a smash hit when graded for its supporting role.
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