iPhone 17 Enjoys Stronger Early Sales Than Its Predecessor

Consumers seem much more enthusiastic about the iPhone 17 than they were about its predecessor, a fact that helped drive Apple’s stock up and its valuation to nearly $4 trillion.

Early sales of the latest version of Apple’s flagship device outshone those of the iPhone 16 in China and the U.S., according to a report Monday (Oct. 20) by research firm Counterpoint.

The newer phones outsold the iPhone 16 series by 14% in their first 10 days after their release compared to the same period for the 16, the report. Sales of the iPhone 17’s base model nearly doubled in China compared to the previous version during the same period, the report added, with sales of the model rising 31% in China and the U.S.

This trend boosted investors’ confidence in Apple, because the iPhone makes up close to half the company’s total revenue, Seeking Alpha reported Monday.

Reuters reported Monday that Apple’s stock had leapt 4.2% during the day and that if the gains hold, this will be its biggest one-day jump in four weeks. The gains also lifted the company’s market capitalization to about $3.9 trillion.

“The base model iPhone 17 is very compelling to consumers, offering great value for money,” Senior Analyst Mengmeng Zhang said in the Counterpoint report. “A better chip, improved display, higher base storage, selfie camera upgrade – all for the same price as last year’s iPhone 16.”

The report added that the iPhone 17 Pro Max has seen the strongest uptick in demand in the U.S. after the three major mobile carriers increased their subsidies.

“Carriers here are looking to maximize lifetime value by converting strong device subsidies into years of higher monthly service revenue through 24 or 36-month financing contracts,” said Maurice Klaehne, a senior analyst for Counterpoint.

In other Apple news, last week saw the report that the company’s top executive for its ChatGPT-like search initiative is departing the company for Meta.

Ke Yang, who led Apple’s Answers, Knowledge and Information team, known internally as AKI, is departing after only weeks on the job, Bloomberg reported, marking another senior departure from Apple’s artificial intelligence (AI) division.

The AKI group is part of Apple’s artificial intelligence and machine learning unit and is responsible for building the company’s AI-driven search and reasoning capabilities. Its mission is to allow Apple’s voice assistant Siri to retrieve live web data and provide factual responses instead of depending solely on preloaded information. This step is aimed at bringing Apple’s voice assistant closer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini models.

“Yang’s exit adds to a growing list of high-profile departures from Apple’s AI and machine learning organization,” PYMNTS wrote. “Roughly a dozen members of the Apple Foundation Models team, including its founder and lead scientist Ruoming Pang, have left the company this year. Many of them have joined Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs division, which is building large-scale reasoning and multimodal AI systems.”