Timothy Donald Cook - Apple, Inc.
Analyst · Cross Research
The iPhone demand is made up, as you know, of upgraders, switchers and new to smartphone. And so if you take it in reverse order for a minute and look at a new smartphone, smartphone penetration right now around the world at the end of December was 42%. And so there's quite a bit of room there. It is true that a lot of those are in emerging markets, but we have done – we've had reasonable business success in several emerging markets. And so we don't enter into those with no experience, although we will enter into them humbly. On the switcher side, we really like what we're seeing. And we think that from a user point of view, as the smartphone itself becomes more and more essential to people's daily lives, which is a part of what I had talked about before, a part of bringing it into the home in a bigger way and in the car and at work and so forth, we think people will put more and more focus on what they're buying and the thing that Apple does best, which is provide this killer experience. A killer user experience that's integrated across their lives I think becomes more important and I think that really plays to our advantage. I also think that the deployment of AI technology is something that we will excel at because of our focus on user experience, and so I like that. From an upgrade point of view, there are pluses and minuses as I see it. A plus is that more and more people have already joined upgrade programs. Some of these programs, like the one that you referenced that we've done, replaces the iPhone every year. There are also carriers that have similar kind of plans, where they also replace or change out the iPhone every year. Others have an 18-month clock. Some have a 24-month clock, and there are even some that have a 30-month clock. And so there's various time schedules there. And so, as of today, there are obviously a lot more people on those programs than ever before because they just started. It really got underway in a big way last year, in a smaller way two years ago. And so we'll see more of those this coming fall. The minus side is that the bifurcation of the smartphone from the service itself has a plus and a minus into it. The subsidy, the lack of that – and this is more of a U.S. phenomenon than the rest of the world, some of that can be a shock for people that were used to paying $199 for their smartphone. They come back in and they pay less for the service but they pay more for their smartphone. And so there's lots of pluses and minuses on this. But overall, as I look at this for Apple, and this is not a statement on the industry itself, but for Apple, I'm very optimistic.