Apple Making Moves to Sell More iPhones in India
The Wall Street Journal reports on recent moves Apple has made to increase sales in India, one of the fastest growing markets in the world. Recently the company has launched the iTunes Store and the Apple TV there, and it was rumored that Apple Retail Stores were coming to the subcontinent as well.
Apple is sidestepping wireless carriers to seize greater control over marketing in India and offering no-interest loans to lure lower-income consumers. The company has also boosted staff in India by 30% to 170 employees in the past six months. And it is ramping up the introduction of other products, with the Apple TV video-streaming gadget expected to reach stores in coming weeks, people familiar with the matter say.
The result is that Apple shipped more than 252,000 iPhones to India in the quarter through December, more than triple the number in the previous three months, according to research firm Canalys.
India has frequently been mentioned when talking about Apple's possible development of a lower-cost iPhone, because most smartphone users in India use postpaid plans and pay for their phones up front, instead of the subsidization model that is used in the West.
The Journal quotes a number of experts saying that Apple will have to come out with a more inexpensive phone to compete with other manufacturers -- Samsung sells Android phones that start at $100, while the cheapest iPhones sell for $500 and a new iPhone 5 is close to $850.
Popular Stories
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 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 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 ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
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...
Top Rated Comments
Do you think they get mad when they get transferred to customer service in another country?
Random indian customer "Bah, I hate when I get American customer support"
And profit margins plunge! And investors sell! And stock price plummet!
Also watch the image of Apple possibly releasing high class products start to tank.
With division of class in India (yes I'm Indian), I'm sure they could appeal with their current prices as a high status item.
Now if the chaiwala has an iPhone...
Not my experience at all here in Canada at least. I get someone on support within two minutes, often less than one minute every time I call past couple of years.