Consumer Intelligence Research Partners collected survey responses from 6,316 people who purchased an iPhone in the U.S. during the last quarter of last year, specifically October 14th (the launch of the iPhone 4S) to the end of the year. They then did an analysis on the responses of 365 of those people and what they found was that was that more than one third of iPhone buyers are totally new to the platform. When it comes to people who specifically got an iPhone 4S, more than 20% of them purchased the 64 GB model, the most expensive model that Apple offers. As for where people are buying their iPhones, 43% of folks ordered online around the time the iPhone 4S launched, but that number dropped to 33% by the end of the year, which is still a substantial amount when you think about it.
Later today we’ll find out just how many iPhones Apple sold during the holiday quarter. Analysts peg that number at somewhere between 32 and 34 million. Unfortunately Apple doesn’t break down how many iPhones they sold in a given territory, but America’s operators typically report iPhone sales individually. It should be noted that this is going to be the first time that Sprint will having something to contribute in terms of iPhone sales. It also doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that T-Mobile is going to face a world of pain as they’re the only national operator who isn’t yet selling the iPhone, but that’s a whole other story all together.
Back to the survey results, the 36% of people who are new to iOS, they’re “switchers”, meaning they used to have an Android, BlackBerry, or Palm smartphone. Do you think some people switched the other way, as in they used to have an iPhone, but then they saw something like the Galaxy Nexus and decided to go with Android?