Hartley Charlton writing for MacRumors: Survey: Nearly 70% of Users Plan to Upgrade to iPhone 17

Smartphone price comparison platform SellCell surveyed over 2,000 U.S.-based ‌iPhone‌ users in August to assess upgrade interest and brand loyalty before Apple's event. According to the data, 68.3% of current ‌iPhone‌ users intend to purchase an ‌iPhone 17‌ model at launch, marking an increase from 61.9% recorded ahead of the iPhone 16 launch in 2024.

What's fun about this survey is that these numbers are easy enough to test and see if they're in the ballpark. There are an estimated 1.4 billion iPhone users in the world (maybe reasonable given Apple hit 1 billion active iPhone users in January 2021). If last year's 61.9% of users planned on upgrading, then we would have seen in the ballpark of 866 million iPhone 16s sold in the past year. At a slightly conservative $900 average selling price, that would equal $779.4 billion in iPhone revenue over the year.

Apple's actual iPhone revenue tells a different story. According to Six Colors's wonderful charts, Apple generated just ("just" 😂) $206 billion in iPhone revenue over the last 12 months. There's some variability here since we don't have the last 2 months of data, and we don't know how many of those sales were upgrades to the iPhone 16 line specifically. But this gives us a ceiling for how much revenue Apple could be making from iPhone upgrade sales.

Reality check

With the recognition this is fuzzy math on the available data, let's work backwards. If we agree $900 is a reasonable average iPhone selling price (it's likely higher since the Pro models are the higher-selling units at $1,000 or more), that's 229 million iPhones sold in a year. That represents about 16% of the total iPhone user base, assuming there are 1.4 billion active iPhone users.

Can we take a second and recognize how positively insane that number is already? The iPhone is an impossibly complex and reliable product that sells a few hundred million units per year, and we're just used to it. Tangent over.

My takeaway

I think there's a reasonable expectation that among some groups, such as people reading this blog, 70% may expect to upgrade to the new iPhones this year. But I'm very skeptical that this number remotely applies to the general public.

The iPhone certainly had a good year, but there is no reality where 61.9% of iPhone owners upgraded to the iPhone 16 lineup. If the survey consistently overstates interest, then that would be good news for the iPhone 17, but there's no way 70% of iPhone users are going to upgrade this year.