Apple iPhone 8 And iPhone 8 Plus Receive Underwhelming Response At Launch Across The Globe
When Tim Cook announced the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus and paused for a second before saying, “One more thing,” the anticipation of the iPhone X turned into reality. He went on to unveil the iPhone X with an all-screen design, “superior cameras” and “revolutionary FaceID” technology. The afterthought of the iPhone X announcement was, “What about the iPhone 8?” That thought translated into action as the launch of the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus saw an underwhelming turnout across the globe. Over the years, iPhone launch days have seen huge turnouts with people camping outside retail outlets just to get their hands on the new iPhones before it runs of out of stock.
In countries like the UK and Australia, it was heavily reported that there hardly any people waiting to buy the iPhone 8 and that most of the consumers are holding back their credit cards for the new iPhone X. This begs the question, why did Apple release the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus? Why not name them the iPhone 7s and iPhone 7s Plus and keep a sizeable price difference between these phones and the iPhone X to attract consumers? The 256GB variant of the iPhone 8 Plus will cost you Rs 86000 in India and the 64GB variant of the iPhone X will retail at Rs 89000. People who love iPhones have used 16GB variants of their favourite devices for a long time and using a 64GB variant now will anyway be a storage bump for them. So, anyone willing to spend such a large amount of money for an iPhone would rather wait a month and get an iPhone with a new design and cameras.
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Another point to note here is that even though the new cameras on the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus are better than the previous generation and the A11 bionic chipset is destroying the Snapdragon 835 on speed tests. Historically, iPhones have never been slow or have buggy software due to the internals. Apple has been known to optimise the software and hardware in a way that an iPhone 5s after 4 years of its launch still operates better than most of the Android phones launched back in 2013. This begs the question that will an iPhone 7 or even an iPhone 6 user upgrade to an iPhone 8, or wait for the iPhone X? There are reports that the 2018 iPhone will get TouchID back and the fingerprint sensor will be placed under the display. If people are sceptical about FaceID, won’t they rather wait a year and upgrade to the 2018 iPhone?
Apple has definitely put in a lot of though here and wouldn’t have invested so much of money if it didn’t see a return and has targeted the consumer section that will buy the iPhone 8 or the iPhone 8 Plus. Have you bought the iPhone 8 yet or are you waiting for the iPhone X? Let us know in the comments.
