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# Are 70% of iPhone users actually planning on buying an iPhone 17?
- URL: https://birchtree.me/blog/are-70-of-iphone-users-actually-planning-on-buying-an-iphone-17/
- Published: 2025-09-04T22:38:26.000Z
- Updated: 2025-09-04T23:41:03.000Z
- Author: Matt Birchler
- Tags: Links

Hartley Charlton writing for MacRumors: [Survey: Nearly 70% of Users Plan to Upgrade to iPhone 17](https://www.macrumors.com/2025/09/01/nearly-70-of-users-plan-to-upgrade-to-iphone-17/?ref=birchtree.me)

> Smartphone price comparison platform [SellCell](https://www.sellcell.com/blog/iphone-17-pre-launch-survey/?ref=birchtree.me) 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](https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/iphone-16/?ref=birchtree.me) 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](https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/number-of-iphone-users?ref=birchtree.me) 1.4 billion iPhone users in the world (maybe reasonable given [Apple hit 1 billion active iPhone users](https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/27/22253162/iphone-users-total-number-billion-apple-tim-cook-q1-2021?ref=birchtree.me) 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](https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/07/apple-q3-2025-results-and-charts-95b-revenue/?ref=birchtree.me), 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.