Apple recently came forward and said it’s expecting lower than anticipated revenue this quarter. Now, we’re finding out why.
According to John Gruber at Daring Fireball, Apple, apparently, replaced as many as 11 million batteries inside older iPhones. The reason is due to the company reducing the cost of a battery replacement to just $29 following the debacle that saw developers discovering Apple’s technique of preserving older phones’ batteries by slowing the devices down with new software upgrades. By replacing your battery with a new one, your device didn’t need to slow down, and if it costs just $29 for your iPhone to feel new again, customers are gonna freak out.
And that’s what they did. Apple typically expects to replace one to two million iPhone batteries in the same time frame, but thanks to its aggressive reduction in price to get a new battery, users jumped right on the bandwagon and restored their iPhones to peak performance, all for 1/30th of the price of a new phone.
It’s unclear if Apple saw this coming. When the company introduced the new pricing for a battery replacement, CEO Tim Cook said they wanted to do the right thing and weren’t worried about their bottom line. Meanwhile, investors were warned by analysts that this move might be dangerous. And dangerous it was, as the company is expected to come up $9 billion short in revenue this quarter, likely due to the reduced pricing and the fact that some (if not most) people might have bought a new iPhone if they weren’t able to replace their battery for so cheap.
With a hit like this, I wouldn’t expect Apple to hold any more $29 battery replacement programs for a good while (if they ever do it again, I might add). If you didn’t get your battery replaced last year, you’ll be stuck with either paying full price ($79) or just buying a new phone ($749-$1,449). Good luck with that.
