Apple Replaced 11 Million iPhone Batteries in Its $29 Program (cnet.com)

Apple's $29 battery replacement program may have seriously dinged sales of its 2018 iPhone models. From a report: The company replaced 11 million iPhone batteries under the program, John Gruber of tech-focused blog DaringFireball reported Monday, citing Apple CEO Tim Cook at an all-hands meeting. Typically, the company replaces 1 million to 2 million batteries each year, DaringFireball noted. Cook cited the program's negative impact on Apple's revenue in a Jan. 2 sales warning to investors but didn't offer specific numbers.

Comments

Interesting item not considered -future sales bump

[SuperKendall]

The much larger than normal number of batteries sold, seemed to have led somewhat to a decline in new purchases that led to Apple's earnings warning.

That sent the stock down. But what I do not see anyone mulling over, are implications for the future... given the high degree of measured customer satisfaction from iPhone owners (90% +), this simply means that future sales have been deferred - not lost.

So at some point in the future, probably 1-2 years hence, there's going to be a bump in sales from all these people who got new batteries as they finally do upgrade...

Now an alternative to this scenario is: What if this gets more people accustomed to buying batteries to extend the life of phones? Even then it would just mean a longer delay, but it could lead to a deeper change in consumer behavior and generally longer ownership cycles, long term.

Totally false, here's the real deal

[SuperKendall]

It's clear the iPhone 6-series has a hardware design defect that caused shutdowns when its CPU hit heavy loads when running on batteries with reduced capacity.

Hey buddy - ALL PHONES have this issue. Just try searching for "Android sudden shutdown battery".

What Apple did was say, hey lets make it so the phone only shuts down when it's truly out of power, by throttling back performance a little bit, rather than just suddenly die at 10 or 20% left just because you played a game or something, or the battery was getting old.

Instead of being lauded for helping phone users get the thing they treasure most above all else - battery life - Apple was pummeled for helping out users, and even though this criticism was utterly unfair, Apple took the high road and said "well how about cheap replacement batteries all around that restore full performance!".

Now you can choose which path you want phone to take battery wise -but of course because people are not utter morons they 99% choose to use the method Apple added that got them in such trouble, and which Android phone makers have added over time hoping you wouldn't notice and also ask for cheap replacement batteries.