In the highly inward-rolling Chinese mobile phone market, how does Apple maintain its advantage?

The 2022 Apple Spring New Product Conference was officially held, and the new iPhone SE that is not the protagonist is not large, and the A15 chip supports 5G networks. The price of the Bank of China is 3499 yuan, which is 200 yuan more expensive than the previous generation of SE, but it is still the cheapest 5G iPhone.

The new iPhone SE is exactly the same as the old model in appearance and most of the configuration, the biggest difference is in the core performance, the new model upgraded the A15 processor, the same as the iPhone 13 series. There is no doubt that the new iPhone SE is an important product to consolidate the competitiveness of the 3,000 yuan price segment and maintain the continuous rise in iPhone sales in the first half of the year.

The release of the new iPhone SE has filled the gap in Apple's low-cost 5G mobile phones, but in the face of the increasingly involuted Chinese 5G mobile phone market, the competition for low-end domestic mobile phones tends to be white-hot, how can Apple maintain its advantage between short-term and short-term encounters?

01 The mid-market is in full swing The new SE sales are expected to be worrying

Let's first look at a set of global sales data for the iPhone SE, although Apple has never disclosed the sales of different models of iPhones, but from some institutional research data, the first generation of iPhone SE was launched in March 2016 as an upgraded version of the iPhone 5s, with a total sales of 30 million. The second-generation iPhone SE was launched in April 2020 and currently sells 24.2 million.

Source: Omdia

But in fact, looking back at the domestic mobile phone market, the performance of the iPhone SE is not satisfactory. According to the report shared by the domestic market research agency GfK, the sales of the first two generations of iPhone SE are not as good as expected, and the shipment of iPhone SE 2 models in China is less than 3.5 million units, which is not dominant compared with domestic brand mobile phones at the same price.

Although the new iPhone SE has added 5G functionality, it is in the domestic mobile phone market, and it is actually not a prominent selling point compared with domestic 5G mobile phones at the same price. According to the domestic mobile phone shipment data released by the Academy of Information and Communications Technology in January this year, 5G mobile phone shipments were 26.324 million units, down 3.5% year-on-year, superimposed on the impact of the epidemic and the dual reasons of the high cost of 5G packages, the new iPhone SE with 5G as a selling point to boost sales in the Chinese market actually has little effect.

02 Replace with A15 chip A trick to eat all over the world

On the contrary, the upgrade of the iPhone's A-series chip is a key factor in increasing sales every year, and this trick can be eaten all over the world.

Looking back at the conference, the chip once again became the highlight of Apple's spring new product release in 2022. The M1 series launched the flagship M1 Ultra, studio Display crammed into an A13 bionic chip, and the new iPhone SE also hitched the same A15 bionic chip as the latest iPhone 13 series, processing speed is 1.8 times faster than the iPhone 8.

The performance of the iPhone's A-series chips has always been ahead of the mobile phone industry, even Qualcomm's flagship mobile chip can not compete with it, even the A15 residual version of the new iPhone SE is stronger than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 in terms of single and multi-core performance, as well as THE CPU and GPU. At present, the Geekbench running score platform has exposed the new iPhone SE results, with a single-core running score of 1695 and a multi-core running score of 4021.

Thanks to the relatively mature A15 chip, the new iPhone SE in addition to better performance, more important is the power optimization, to know that the A15 power is only 8.5W, and the next door Snapdragon 8 Gen1 power has reached 11.1W. At this conference, Apple gave a video playback time of 15 hours, if you consider the addition of 5G, this battery life is still acceptable.

Apple's self-developed chip technology has been quite mature, the A15 chip upgraded by the new iPhone SE can undoubtedly activate many of the iPhone's stock "nail household" old users, as to whether it will tap more new users in the low-end Android camp, from the current expectation that the performance in the Chinese mobile phone market will not be too eye-catching, after all, this is not the main sales area of the new iPhone SE.

However, the iPhone SE still has high hopes in the eyes of CEO Tim Cook, who also mentioned that the iPhone SE will put Apple in a better position to "attract more customers to our ecosystem." Obviously, the iPhone SE is a product used to expand the territory, and the use of mobile phones also increases the user's consumption viscosity in digital services, App Store, cloud services and music services, so as to compete for more users who want to change camps to join Apple's software and hardware ecosystem.

03 Closed circle ecology Integration intensified

Changing the camp directly means changing the system, and changing the system is to switch the ecological platform. The reason why many fruit powders are bundled by Apple's software ecology is because the workflow between mobile phones, PCs, and tablet devices can be seamlessly switched. AirDrop, smart hotspot, companionship and universal control and other functions will be data, account, data and other information is very easy to open between different devices, Apple for users across devices to provide a good and perfect experience.

As we all know, Apple has a huge user base and high user willingness to pay, many iOS users through the Apple App Store to buy application software, and accumulated difficult to migrate data, which will increase the user completely abandon the iOS conversion costs, resulting in Apple users formed a high loyalty. According to the survey, 92% of iPhone users will still choose to use the iPhone for the next new phone.

Apple ecosystem is mainly hardware + software + services, and with the intensification of the integration trend of iOS, iPad OS and mac OS, the software ecology has formed a stronger internal circulation closed circle advantage, which is difficult for competitors under the PC and Android ecosystems to reach.

Summary

In the highly involuted Chinese mobile phone market, incremental competition has turned into stock competition, and the competition for market segments has gradually intensified, with large screens, multi-camera combinations, high refresh rates, large battery capacity, game optimization, and various types of cooling technologies emerging in an endless stream, while the new iPhone SE with flat design is out of place.

The new iPhone SE starting from 3499 yuan is not a big leap forward, nor can it be said to be a milestone in technological progress, but through the market operation strategy of A15 chip + 5G "increase the amount without price increase", it further lowers the threshold for users to use the iPhone, and at the same time, with the huge upgrade of the user base usage habits and software ecological bundling, cultivate more loyal fans to broaden the ecological moat.

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