No worries for Apple – iPhone 8 sales sure to boom, say analysts

To mark 10 years since Apple made its first phone and changed the handset game, the iPhone 8 should be something special. Opinion is divided on whether it is special, with an all-new design, or whether it just tweaks the older models without new technology.

But regardless, analysts agree that it will see strong sales figures, thanks to a strong user base and changing times.

A team of analysts from Bernstein Trading predict that next couple of years for Apple could turn out to be a huge success because there will be so many users waiting to upgrade to a new iPhone.

Toni Sacconaghi Jr and his team of analysts extrapolates four-year statistics to year 2018 to reveal that the number of iPhone users will grow to 855 million by then from the 691 million users in 2016.

The analysts also take into account the rate at which users upgrade to a new iPhone, which is so consistent that the extrapolation can be quite confidently presented. The data reveals every year more than a fourth of total iPhones are bought by users upgrading from their old iPhone.

The installed base of iPhones will eventually become so high in a period starting this year that number of users wanting to upgrade to a new iPhone will be huge. About 203 million iPhones will become old enough by 2018 and their users are likely to buy a newer, or the latest model. This alone is about 150 per cent of what Apple sold in 2016.

"Our analysis indicates that iPhone's installed base will be nearly 80 per cent larger entering the iPhone 8 cycle than it was entering the strong iPhone 6 cycle," BGR quotes the Bernstein analyst saying.

And those are just upgrades. There are always new users joining the iPhone clan - though the number has been diminishing since the year 2014 - thanks to Android, a new CEO and a paradigm shift in the phone's looks.

Apple had a rough 2016, with sales dropping by 8 per cent despite it calling the iPhone 7 an "incremental update". Android- based Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy S7 fared much better. While Apple iPhone 7 and Samsung Galaxy S7 saw an increase in number of device activations by as much as 13 per cent and 36 per cent respectively, the Google Pixel witnessed a staggering 112 per cent rise in the 24-28 November festive period in US.

The iPhone 8, which could launch earlier this year than the usual September launch, is said to come in three variants - two of them an upgrade over the iPhone 7 and one, probably the anniversary edition, with OLED display and a zero-bezel design with virtual fingerprint sensor, face detection capability, A11 chip, wireless charging, waterproofing and new battery technology.