The same routine of the iPhone, will consumers still "hit"?
With the hot sale of the iPhone 13 series and the iPhone 12 series after the price reduction, Apple once again won the sales champion of domestic 5G mobile phones. According to the latest data from Counterpoint Research, a well-known market research organization, the iPhone accounted for 23.6% of China's smartphone sales in November 2021, an increase from 22% in October 2021.
In addition, according to the statistics of blogger @Xiao BMax, in the Jingdong mobile phone sales list in December 2021, the iPhone steadily won four of the top five seats, with a total sales volume of nearly 1.5 million units. It can be said that in the high-end mobile phone market, the iPhone has completely no decent opponent.
But how can Apple, as the most "profitable" enterprise, be satisfied with this? It is reported that some authoritative sources have revealed that Apple has long been preparing to launch a 5G iPhone with lower positioning and price, and this iPhone is the third generation of the iPhone SE, and it is not surprising that it will meet with us at Apple's spring conference in the first half of this year.
In view of the pricing of the second-generation iPhone SE National Bank of China from 3299 yuan, the price of the iPhone SE3 is expected to further decline to around 3000 yuan, once again pulling down the lower limit of the iPhone's price. So can this mid-range iPhone SE 3 meet the needs of users and meet Apple's expectations?
Is it a leek cutting or a real incense machine?
According to foreign media reports, the design of the iPhone SE 3 is consistent with the previous generation, still for the 4.7-inch LCD screen plus home button design, this design is indeed a bit outdated at the moment.
In terms of processors, if not surprisingly, the iPhone SE 3 will be equipped with the same "residual blood" version of the iPhone 13 A15 processor, with snapdragon X60M baseband and support for dual-mode 5G networks. The addition of the A15 processor has greatly reduced the cost of purchasing a 5G version of the iPhone, which is also one of the biggest selling points of the iPhone SE 3.
In terms of other configurations, the iPhone SE 3 still uses a 12-megapixel single camera design in the upper left corner, but thanks to the blessing of the A15 processor, the performance in terms of imaging should be improved to a certain extent compared with the previous generation, and there is almost no gap between other configurations and the iPhone SE 2. To sum up in one sentence: in addition to performance, the rest of the configuration is fully castrated!
If the news of foreign media is true, then we can fully think that this is the core version of the iPhone SE 2, and the selling point is only the A15 processor and the price of about 3000 yuan. The previously rumored design that will use the iPhone XR/11 mold may be postponed to 2024.
Seeing this, I believe that many readers will think that "isn't this a machine for cutting leeks, how many people can buy it?" In fact, Xiao Lei thought so at first, but after checking the sales data of the iPhone SE 2, he found that the truth was just the opposite.
Omdia statistics show that in the global mobile phone sales list in 2020, the iPhone SE 2 sales ranked second in the world, even higher than the latest iPhone 12. Although the total sales of the iPhone SE 2 are not particularly good in the iPhone in the same period, it is also far more than the tens of millions level, which is impossible for any Android manufacturer.
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Therefore, in terms of the sales of the iPhone SE 3, Xiao Lei personally believes that it is still not too bearish, the main reasons are two, first, if there is no accident, Apple will cut the mini model in the iPhone 14 series, which will make those who love the small screen flagship have one less choice, so the iPhone SE 3 has become one of the few good choices.
The second and most critical factor, price, as mentioned earlier, the price of the iPhone SE 3 will most likely be around 3,000 yuan, far cheaper than today's iPhone 13 mini, which is one of the reasons why the sales of the iPhone SE 2 are far better than the iPhone 12 mini in the same period.
The iPhone is difficult to reach the mid-range market
Why Xiao Lei will think that the iPhone, as a high-end king, is difficult to explore the mid-end market, a big reason is that Apple is not the material for low-end mobile phones. It's not that Apple hasn't launched mid-range products, but they don't understand what kind of phone consumers in the low-end market really need.
In 2013, Apple launched the iPhone 5c, which started at nearly 1,000 yuan cheaper than the iPhone 5s launched in the same period. Apple indicates that the "c" of this suffix is "Colorful", which means colorful. But the market didn't think so, they thought that the "c" in the iPhone 5c represented "cheap", after all, it was the cheapest iPhone at the time.
Although the positioning of the iPhone 5c is lower than that of the 5s, the price difference between the two is actually only 800 yuan. Plus 800 yuan can use Apple's latest flagship phone, why choose the iPhone 5c?
Because of this, the market performance of the iPhone 5c did not meet Apple's expectations, when some agencies counted that a month after the release of the two mobile phones, the sales of the iPhone 5c accounted for only 27%, and the more expensive iPhone 5s accounted for 64% of the total sales. Supposedly, cheaper iPhones should sell more, but users voted with real money and silver not to eat Apple. Not surprisingly, Apple then cut off the entire C series product line.
But Apple is not dead hearted, in 2016, Apple came up with a "performance small steel cannon" iPhone SE, once again into the mid-range market. Compared with the iPhone 6 series sold in the same period of the year, the starting price of the iPhone SE was only 3288 yuan, which was two thousand yuan lower than the iPhone 6 in the same period. Perhaps after 3 years of reflection, this cheap iPhone is much cheaper than the main flagship. However, even if the price is greatly increased, the first generation of the iPhone SE does not sell well.
Although the iPhone SE is almost the same as the iPhone 6s in terms of configuration, its shape uses the mold of the iPhone 5s. More importantly, in 2016, the entire mobile phone market has begun to develop to a large-screen design, and only a few users like small-screen mobile phones.
According to the sales list given by foreign media, as of March 2020, the sales volume of iPhone SE just ranked fifteenth, specifically 30 million units. This result is even 5 million units less than the "Big Brother Big Brother" iPhone 3GS.
Through the previous combing, it is not difficult to find that Apple does not want to enter the low-end market, but after experiencing the failure of the iPhone 5c, iPhone SE and iPhone mini series, it is not difficult to conclude that Apple is not good at doing mid-range mobile phones.
This conclusion is honestly difficult for Xiao Lei to accept for a while, after all, according to common sense, a manufacturer that is originally sitting in the high-end market wants to win the low-end market, then it only needs to reduce the price slightly, and it can beat countless opponents, which is what we often call "dimensionality reduction blow". Apple's past efforts in the mid-market, though, tell us that things aren't that simple.
Since 2013, Apple has been trying to lower the price of the iPhone, thereby attracting more users and expanding market share. However, from the current situation, Apple's efforts in the past seven or eight years have not achieved the desired effect.
Although we all know that Apple's global market share is not low, but because the positioning and price of the iPhone has always been the highest batch in the mobile phone market, the audience of the iPhone is not as good as Samsung Huawei Xiaomi, which will do high-end flagships, mid-range products are also handy mobile phone manufacturers.
Therefore, although Apple's market value has reached the first, its global market share has been difficult to successfully reach the top.
The so-called high-end market of smart phones is fighting for brand influence, innovation and the ability to lead the trend, and at present, only Apple can fully meet these requirements. However, the logic of the low-end mobile phone market is completely different, and the crowd of mid-range mobile phones will pay more attention to the configuration and price of mobile phones, which is simply more concerned about cost performance.
Therefore, in the low-end market, playing a price war is indispensable, and it is necessary to talk about cost performance, which can be seen from the increasingly serious degree of internal rolling of domestic mobile phone manufacturers, but Apples that are accustomed to the high-end market are obviously not good at these, and this is also contrary to the positioning of Apple by the outside world.
Although apple's innovation range today is not an absolute advantage over Android mobile phone manufacturers. However, overall, the expectations of the public, the media and the industry for Apple are still the role of the leader. As a leader, the mission is to make a cross-era, cooler iPhone, rather than going to the low-end market and competing with other mobile phone manufacturers for market share through price wars. This expectation and its own brand positioning is Apple's fate, and it is also the key to Apple's new machine can not penetrate into the low-end market.
Therefore, as far as the iPhone SE 3 mobile phone is concerned, Xiao Lei believes that its sales performance will still make many Android manufacturers look red, but its audience is still quite limited and cannot have any impact on the domestic mobile phone market.
If the iPhone SE 3 uses the mold of iPhone XR or iPhone 11, and the price is around three or four thousand yuan, then it will definitely bring a lot of impact to the domestic mobile phone market. But Apple is still Apple, it will never lift the stone to drop its own feet, in case the extremely cost-effective iPhone SE 3 affects the sales of the iPhone 12 or even the iPhone 13, it is definitely not worth the loss.
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Of course, Xiao Lei does not deny that there will still be some friends around him who will buy the iPhone SE 3, but these people who are willing to pay for the iPhone SE 3 are difficult to feed Apple's SE product line. As for those netizens who often shout on the Internet that they hope that Apple will launch a new iPhone SE as soon as possible, they are actually just hoping to buy a product that experiences similar to that of a contemporary iPhone at a more cost-effective price.
But will Apple really care about this part of the group, and it will not, Apple just wants to clear the inventory and make a lot of money.