A few weeks ago we told you that Apple's iPhone 4 terminal is recording very good sales, although the launch of iPhone 5 is imminent. This trend is maintained even in the weeks before the iPhone 5 presentation conference and those from AllThingsDigital I claim that Apple will sell 19 million iPhone terminals in this last fiscal quarter of 2011, with only 1 million less than in the previous one. iPhone 4 is more than 1 year old, but for now it is very popular among consumers and could keep Apple in first place in the top of smartphone sellers.
The biggest surprise we are picking up is unexpected strength in Apple's iPhone business. The reason why this is remarkable is demand for iPhone 4 remains fairly robust despite it being well known that there will be an upcoming iPhone 5 refresh. We had modeled a sizeable quarter-to-quarter decline to reflect a pause and inventory drawdown ahead of a refresh and we now think this is conservative.
Basically, the information from Verizon confirms again that the iPhone 4 is still attractive to consumers and is without a doubt the most popular phone made by the company from Cupertino. Unfortunately, this popularity is decreasing considering that a whole suite of Android terminals is available on the market at attractive prices and in interesting hardware configurations. Without a powerful iPhone 5 Apple will lose a lot of what it has built so far because many users expect major changes in the hardware of the iPhone terminal because in the software we already know what we will get.
