iPhone XR and 5C’s relation to matching market
https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/09/15/3-reasons-apples-iphone-xr-wont-suffer-the-iphone.aspx
In 2013, after the success in iPhone 5, Apple announced it’s new product iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c. This is the first time iPhone announced two iPhones together in one keynote event. 5c is designed to aiming for a lower market, and it’s about 100$ cheaper than the cheapest 5s. We can understand that why Apple does this — apparently iPhone’s price is not very affordable for everyone, so they hope the announcement of 5c can help them cover a lower end market — which hopefully can help Apple cover a larger range of market. However, the turn out of 5c wasn’t as good as expected. 5c didn’t sell very well, meanwhile 5s become the most popular iPhone in the world.
I believe this is because the price difference $100, when compared with the product difference between 5s and 5c — is not that significant. People tends to pay for another 100$ gaining a fingerprint scanner (which was one of the “new” technologies that is integrated to the phones at that year), a better camera, and a aluminum case. So it can be explained that Apple didn’t successfully identified the matching market for those two phones. This not the optimal choice by setting their price like this. The target audience of 5c and 5s are somehow overlapped.
This year, Apple did this again — announcing products targeting at different audiences again — XR and XS. However, XR is having a much better fate than 5c. I think the reasons can be 1. the price differences gets bigger — XR and the cheapest XS has a price difference of 250$, much more than the difference between 5s and 5c. Moreover, Apple also provided some unique features on XR, so that people has to buy it instead of choosing other type of new iPhone. For example, the double sim double stand function only works in xr and a even higher end iPhone — xs max, which is even more hard to afford for most of people. In this case, people are forced choose XR if they want this function. Also, XR provides LCD screen, colorful back colors, while ensuring the same chip -A12- as the higher end types. In this case, Apple is able to separate its matching market more clearly, so XS’s exist won’t affect XR too much as the matching market is clear and the perfect matching is found.