iPhone 11 vs. iPhone 12

Seems like most of YouTube has established my concern, which I've been having for months but thank you all for catching up, that the 12 Pro does not have that many great features over the regular iPhone 12. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited for all the updates and I'm very happy with all the changes and I'm glad that there's so many added benefits to the more affordable iPhones now, but you gotta admit, the price difference between the iPhone 12 Pro and the iPhone 12 is pretty sizable and there's not a whole lot of noticeable differences. I mean, we got telephoto, LiDAR, and stainless steel, I guess, that's like the biggest change and we've established that but I'm here to talk about something that I feel like not enough people are talking about and that's the fact that Apple decided to keep both the iPhone 11 and the XR for reduced prices and those might do a little bit better than we think. Let's begin. So the very easy to miss thing that Apple did is lower the price of the iPhone 11 by $100. This is kind of a big deal if you consider that it was by far the best selling smartphone in the world. Globally, even if you combine second, third, and fourth place, it barely matched the success of the iPhone 11 and Apple just slashed $100 permanently off that price and more than likely it's gonna be sticking around for another year. Now let's say there is certain people in the market for a new phone and for whatever reason they don't have much interest in the 12 Mini because while it is cool, it's very compact, they're worried about battery life, and they don't care about having a smaller phone. They like the 6-inch displays which have been selling great in the last couple years with the iPhone XR and iPhone 11 and they're happy with that and the proof we have from the past few years of smartphone sales is that the average consumer doesn't really care that much about OLED. I think that the iPhone 12 and 12 Mini are still gonna sell great, there's still gonna be a lot of people upgrading and it's mainly because Apple's marketing is so good and they're gonna be pushing 5G on everyone, you need 5G, you need to get the latest iPhone, it's got the ceramic shield, this will save your life, you know, they're gonna do all kinds of marketing tricks to get people to upgrade but I think the main reason Apple kept around the 11 and XR is probably to combat Apple's true greatest enemy, who competes with Apple more than anyone, it's not Samsung, it's not Google, it's not OnePlus, it's not anybody who makes Android phones, it's people's old iPhones. Apple's biggest threat is people deciding they don't want to upgrade or they don't want to upgrade to the latest phone. The used market, the third party market of iPhones out there and people not buying iPhones directly from Apple, that is who they're competing the most with. They kind of consider the whole iOS versus Android thing kind of a lost cause because people have their preferences and they're never really gonna change but they don't want people going out and figuring out that they can buy cheaper iPhones from some other source that isn't them. So if they keep competitive prices directly on their own store, lots of people can go back and figure out, hey, there's an iPhone for pretty much every price margin above $400 and once you start factoring in trade-in, it probably can fall a little bit below $400. So we have the iPhone SE at $400, XR at $500, iPhone 11 at $600 now and iPhone 12 starts at $700 and you guys know the story from there. And if someone does not give a crap about the darker blacks and the thinner bezels, which, you know, the pro iPhones and the XS and XS Max, they had OLED and they had thinner bezels than the 11 and XR for the past few years and of course the XR and 11 outsold them like crazy because most people don't care and they just want the more affordable option. So what I'm saying is that 6-inch form factor seems to be very, very popular these days and people can now get the iPhone 11 for around $230 less than the equivalent 6-inch iPhone 12. Sure, there's lots of great features, don't get me wrong. I love the low-light camera and I love the new design and I love that it's a Super Retina XDR display on a sub-$1,000 iPhone. All that stuff is great, but I'm a techie. I'm a nerd in that way and if an average consumer is just walking into the Apple Store or checking out the site and they have their own skepticisms about 5G, which based on my own tech Twitter polls seems like even the tech community doesn't really care that much about 5G. So I can only imagine what the average consumer really thinks and I imagine that the everyday smartphone user probably knows very little about 5G and might not see it as essential as so many carriers and so many tech journalism sites or investors think it is. So if they just see, okay, I need a new 6-inch iPhone. This one looks pretty good and it's $600, but it doesn't have 5G. And then someone asks, well, how much is the 5G iPhone? And then at first they're like, well, it starts with the 12 mini and they're like, this is too small and this has a worse battery, so I don't want that one. Well, then you better get the regular iPhone 12 and that's going to cost you an extra $230. I think that could end up turning off a lot of people knowing that they can still get an iPhone that looks fairly recent, you know, you still got gesture control, you still got face ID, you still even got the dual camera on the back for people who don't care about the camera. The XR is even more compelling now because it has the same exact display as the 11 for a hundred dollars cheaper and yeah, you can even still take portrait mode shots and that kind of thing. Battery life and all will also be fairly decent. It'll get you through the day. The XR will still have a better battery than the entry level iPhone 12 at 700 bucks, 730 bucks if you're buying on lock. So there's $230 between these two phones and the cheaper one has the bigger display and has the better battery life. I don't know about you guys, but my thinking is that the XR and 11 might kind of stick around and be a bit more prominent in smartphone sales than we think and it's not going to be complete iPhone 12 dominating the rest of the lineup. Who knows? I mean, Apple does have very good marketing and carriers are very, very good, especially now at pushing 5G on people. Hopefully you guys have caught a few of my rants on the subject and how I'm just sick of the infrastructure and the current 5G networks not being ready and also them not making that much of a difference in our lives, despite the fact that carriers are acting like it's everywhere and it's basically all done. You just need to buy the phone and get on our plan really quick and then you'll experience the true 5G speed, even though there's probably tons of you out there that are nowhere near a 5G tower and you might not ever be near a 5G tower in the foreseeable future and as I'm seeing with my own data collecting, there's a lot of people that really don't give a crap about whether their phone has 5G or not and because of that, I could see the XR and 11 still sticking around for another year and being a very compelling option and honestly, I won't fight that. I won't argue that the 12 is worth it because of course, worth is a very subjective thing. It depends on your financial situation, what you care about in a smartphone and I'm just saying statistically speaking, a lot of people have not cared about OLED in the past few years and the best selling phone on the market has been that Liquid Retina 6.1 inch design and the fact that those are now getting cheaper might increase the sales of them a little bit in the long term and I'm very curious to see how the iPhone 12 performs. I definitely think that carriers and Apple are going to push that as basically, this is the only iPhone. Okay, you don't want to think about the XR and 11. Those are yesterday's news and if you're not buying a phone with 5G, you're basically shooting yourself in the foot. It's really going to backfire on you later. So for that reason, I still think the 12 and 12 mini will end up being best sellers but I also think that the 11 and XR have a good chance at picking up in that 3rd or 5th place and I also want to say to those of you out there who are unimpressed or disappointed with the iPhone 12 lineup, either because there's no headphones and charge brick included anymore or they're $30 or $80 or $100 more expensive than you thought they were going to be, I do heavily recommend checking out that 11 and XR with these reduced prices because I think both of those phones are still going to age really, really well. They're still going to get probably more years of software updates than any Android phone you're buying for $500 or $600. Of course, they still run the latest iOS, they still have great biometrics, they still have decent battery life and even pretty solid cameras to the point that I would just say, yeah, if you're not crazy about the iPhones they announced, iPhone 11 is a really good deal now. I genuinely thought $700 was really fair for what you were getting and now that they reduced it by $100 and the differences between that and spending $230 extra on the iPhone 12, for a lot of people I can't really say that upgrade is worth it, that extra money you're spending. Of course, I'm very wrong all the time and I completely accept that so what do you guys think? Am I giving more credit to the XR and 11 than they deserve? Feel free to let me know. This is your Apple Sheep here. I'll see you in the next one.