Week-Old Claim Chowder for Bloomberg Regarding iPhone Average Selling Prices

Alex Webb, writing for Bloomberg last week, under the headline “Apple iPhone Price Under Pressure as Buyers Seek Cheaper Devices”:

Apple Inc. results next week will likely show iPhone sales growing again, bucking a year of declines. That’s the good news.

But in a sign that customers are opting for less expensive models, some analysts predict that the average selling price for the handsets likely declined over the holidays, a crucial period for Apple. Some purchasers are settling for older iPhone 6S models, rather than the iPhone 7, introduced in September, analysts said.

“Recent smartphone customers increasingly are opting for the iPhone 6S,” Barclays analyst Mark Moskowitz wrote in a note to clients this week as he downgraded his recommendation on Apple stock to hold. “We detect increasing concern among industry participants that smartphones in general have evolved technologically to become more than good enough to serve most users’ digital needs over multiple years or until the device breaks.”

The problem here isn’t that a few analysts got it wrong. Analysts get this stuff wrong all the time. The problem is that Bloomberg’s headline took analyst speculation and treated it as fact. Turns out the headline was completely wrong. The iPhone is seemingly not under any price pressure, and the ASP even went up a few bucks. Oh, and in the same quarter two years ago, iPhone ASP was $687, and three years ago (the last year before the higher-priced Plus models were in the mix), iPhone ASP was $637.

Bonus Peter Thiel claim chowder, from the same article:

“We know what a smartphone looks like and does,” billionaire technology investor Peter Thiel told the New York Times recently. “It’s not an area where there will be any more innovation.”

★ Wednesday, 1 February 2017