iPhone 5s/5c Take 76% of Smartphone Sales in Japan for October
According to research firm Kantar Worldpanel (via Unwired View), the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c accounted for 76% of new smartphone sales in Japan during the month of October, including 61% of phones sold on NTT DoCoMo, the country's biggest carrier.
Availability of the new iPhone 5s and lower-cost iPhone 5c through DoCoMo marks the first time that Apple's mobile phones have been offered on the carrier, coming after a July report pointed to a loss of 3.2 million users over the last four and a half years as the carrier did not have a deal with Apple to offer the iPhone. DoCoMo's losses continued in September with a record loss of 66,800 subscribers, with that drop attributed to a lack of stock of the new iPhone 5s.
Reports of DoCoMo adding the iPhone ramped up ahead of the September iPhone 5s/5c launch following comments from CEO Kazuto Tsubouchi citing "compelling reasons" to reach a deal, and the carrier did indeed launch the new iPhones alongside other Japanese carriers on September 20.
All three major Japanese carriers including DoCoMo, SoftBank, and KDDI have been offering the iPhone 5s free on contract through special promotions since its launch in September. DoCoMo has also been offering rewards points for users who bring in used iPhones from SoftBank or KDDI.
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 ...
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. ...
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...
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
These comments about the 5s being free are simply not true. One can either pay up front (and have a cheap monthly bill) or pay in 24 installments over 2 years (the contract period). This second option is interest-free.
I think in some way they try to pretend it's free - masqueraded as a monthly fee which is coincidentally "discounted" by exactly the installment amount if you pay for the handset in full up front!
But the bottom line is you pay for it either way. Of course you do. No network is going to simply give away millions of $800 phones.