Think of someone you know that bought the first iPhone in 2007. Is the person you’re thinking of a man? Was he between the ages of 18 and 44 at the time? Did he earn more than $100,000 a year in income?
Those three attributes were true of a significant portion of the iPhone’s earliest adopters. At the end of 2007 — the year the iPhone made its debut — 48 percent of iPhone owners made more than $100,000 a year; 61 percent were male; and a whopping 75 percent were between 18 and 44 years old (with 50 percent of all users between 18 and 34), according to comScore MobiLens.
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Fast forward five years, and the iPhone is no longer a device only for the rich. (It helps that Apple has lowered the device’s price from $499 — which only got you a 4GB model at the time!) Indeed, the fact that a wide range of consumers are lining up to buy Apple’s mobile device have made the iPhone an appealing platform for payments players, much less everyone in the mobile commerce ecosystem.
For one, the gender gap has closed; to no one’s surprise, women now make up 47 percent of the iPhone’s user base, compared to just 39 percent five years ago. Also, older Americans are buying iPhones too; the share of iPhone users aged 45 or older has grown from 22 percent to 28 percent since 2007. And while the wealthiest Americans still hold a plurality, now 19 percent of iPhone users earn between $50,000 and $75,000 a year, compared to just 12 percent in 2007.
As the use of smartphones has exploded since the iPhone’s debut five years ago, Apple’s device has played a key role in spurring U.S. adoption. Today, comScore MobiLens estimates that smartphone owners will be in the majority in the U.S. by year’s end.
So, with seemingly every payments company making a mobile play keying in on the smartphone’s popularity, it’s important to know more about the consumers you’re trying to reach.
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