Apple Slashes iPhone 5 Part Orders Due to Weak Demand
The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has slashed component orders for the iPhone 5 this quarter, responding to weaker-than-expected demand.
Apple's orders for iPhone 5 screens for the January-March quarter, for example, have dropped to roughly half of what the company had previously planned to order, two of the people said.
The Cupertino, Calif., company has also cut orders for components other than screens, according to one of the people.
Apple notified the suppliers of the order cut last month, the people said.
There have been reports that Apple is looking to launch its next-generation iPhone in the middle of this year as part of a broader effort to shorten its product update cycles. Apple is reportedly also toying with other changes such as a cheaper version of the iPhone in order to help the company slow the momentum of Android and its leading manufacturers Samsung.
It is not unusual for demand, and thus Apple's component orders, to wane in the lead-up to hardware updates, but the iPhone 5 is just four months old, and the slashing of production at this stage of the device's lifecycle is sure to cause concern for the company, its investors, and others closely watching Apple's performance.
Popular Stories
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Best Buy is discounting a collection of M3 MacBook Pro computers today, this time focusing on the 14-inch version of the laptop. Every deal in this sale requires you to have a My Best Buy Plus or Total membership, although non-members can still get solid second-best prices on these MacBook Pro models. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a...
There are widespread reports of Apple users being locked out of their Apple ID overnight for no apparent reason, requiring a password reset before they can log in again. Users say the sudden inexplicable Apple ID sign-out is occurring across multiple devices. When they attempt to sign in again they are locked out of their account and asked to reset their password in order to regain access. ...
Apple used to regularly increase the base memory of its Macs up until 2011, the same year Tim Cook was appointed CEO, charts posted on Mastodon by David Schaub show. Earlier this year, Schaub generated two charts: One showing the base memory capacities of Apple's all-in-one Macs from 1984 onwards, and a second depicting Apple's consumer laptop base RAM from 1999 onwards. Both charts were...
Top Rated Comments
I usually try to judge these things based on anecdotal evidence, and from that perspective the iPhone 5 is a flop. Of course it depends on my location, place of work and a billion other factors, but in a modern busy city you see a lot of random people with their phones and occasionally you notice one.
I don't tend to see a lot of iPhone 5s around.
Personally, I'm not tempted to buy one, either. The iPhone today does basically the same things the iPhone 4 did, just faster. The iPhone 4 was as big of a shake-up as the iPhone's had since launch (and even then it was a new case and faster internals).
There hasn't been anything revolutionary. Nothing that really pushes the device to the next level or provides something radically different. NFC could do that, but in that case it's less about physically sticking it in to the phone and more about building up the infrastructure; unfortunately Apple doesn't seem to be doing anything there, and they don't seem to be doing anything else either.
As always, would love to be wrong, hope they have something really great. Unfortunately when you build your brand on innovative ideas, people expect you to keep delivering. When those ideas run out your brand will just lose steam.
iPhone 5S rumors (which NEEDS to happen, annual hardware updates for your NUMBER ONE product line is inexcusable), iPhone 5 initial issues with scuffing and Wifi, iOS 6 being stale and the maps fiasco, not to mention lack of jailbreak.
I LOVE Apple products, but ever since the iPhone 4S's release I've started to get bored and watch Apple be surpassed by even WP8 in some areas.
They need to lock down contracts in China and other areas of the world. They really only dominate the US market.
And the WSJ doesn't know this for sure, I'll wait to see the financials for the quarter before making judgement. Isn't it common for post-holiday shipment cuts? People surely don't buy in January like they do in December.