iPhone XR: Affordability from the ground up

Until now, says Mark Hibben, Apple’s approach to making iPhones affordable was to sell you last year’s phone.

From Where No iPhone Has Gone Before, posted Wednesday on Seeking Alpha:

Following Apple’s launch event, the takeaway of most of the tech media was that Apple had simply gone for higher priced iPhones and was trading ASP for unit sales. This could be a misinterpretation. I think the value proposition of XR is quite compelling, since it offers most of the features of the XS at a $250 discount.

Apple did something new with the iPhone XR, and this completely escaped the attention of the tech media covering the September launch event. iPhone XR represents the first iPhone engineered from the ground up to offer better value while retaining key features of its more expensive siblings. Apple has never done that before. Even the iPhone 5c and SE were just rehashes of the iPhone 5. Making affordable iPhones was something of an afterthought.

Up until now, Apple’s approach to offering more affordable iPhones was based on selling previous generation iPhones, or previous generations with minor changes. Each new iPhone represented the “best” that Apple could achieve in a particular year.

My take: Hibben, who writes a newsletter called Rethink Technology, is one of Seeking Alpha’s best.

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