Macalope thinks it was Shakespeare who wrote “Kill all the estimates of the iPhone Sales.”
He may have turned off, but he is pretty sure it was something like that.
This has long been a hot topic for Macalope, probably peaking when the iPhone X was released. Boy, it was a wild avalanche of rubbish. Take your mind back to the hard days of early 2018 if you can. Philadelphia Eagles were Super Bowl masters (can you imagine?), California legalized recreational use of marijuana (we got so tall that weekend -you couldn’t feel your face, you remember?) And Nikkei reported that Apple had cut iPhone X orders of not 10, not even 20, but a whopping 50 percent. This made complete sense as Apple is notoriously terrible about running its own business.
This WackaDoodle idea was taken at face value and we were informed that almost no one would have iPhone X via headlines that read “Almost no one wants iPhone X”. Obviously, this was a big problem and pundits were only too ready to explain where Apple went wrong with iPhone X under headlines reading “Here’s where Apple went wrong with iPhone X”. So helpful. And have Apple even said thank you?
IDG
Pundits fell over themselves repeating this story, and some even raised ante and said Apple hadn’t cut orders by 50 percent, don’t be ridiculous. No, it had cut the iPhone X orders by 66 percent. This would probably have continued until they hinted that Apple had cut the iPhone X orders by endless percentage, but this comment ran through the spring and teachers had to move on to tell us what disappointment iPhone XS would be.
As it turns out – ha, was funny story – this was all wrong. IPhone X topped sales charts and took 35 percent of the total profits on the handset industry. Oopsie Doopsie. Oh, yes.
Macalope brings this up not only because it is except easier to write a column that is basically a reduction of previous columns he has written over the years. Partly because of that because boy is ever! It’s like making a clip -episode! But really because John Gruber noticed the other day that it is still going on. Not about iPhone X, but now about the iPhone 16 line.
As pits pointing out, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicted last fall that the iPhone 16-Profs would underpoint and the big winner would be the iPhone 16 Plus. These were guesses (or “estiguesses”, depending on which part of the country you are from) that was not born out of the facts.
… I think Kuo chooses these numbers not randomly and is not based on an honest attempt to even guess the actual sale, but rather to create headlines and inject his name into the news.
John Gruber, March 2, 2025
There is no doubt that this is a tactic that many analysts take. Macalope doesn’t think Trip Chowdhry actually thought Apple would “disappear” in 60 days if it did not release a “iwatch” in 2014. He made a bombastic statement to get attention. Why someone wants to get attention as a wrong engine is slightly beyond Macalope, but it is clear that some people see it as a winning strategy.
In fact, when they look around at things today, they are probably right.
Macalope has been talking about estimates of Apple Sales since October 2006 when Merrill Lynch cut iPod Estimates (do you remember iPods?) From 8.3 to 7.7 million, just days before the company announced the real number. That number?
8.7 million.
Look, maybe we should just stop trying to estimate the Apple Unit sale until we can find out what’s going on.
Which is probably never going to be.