Delayed Disgratification ⇥ macworld.com

The Macalope, commenting on this tragedy of an article by the Motley Fool’s Ashra’s Eassa:

The phone was shipped “on time.” It was shipped when it was announced to ship and when Apple was able to meet enough demand. Your imaginary ship dates do not enter into this equation.

Eassa thinks there are people who looked at the later release date for the iPhone X and were “discouraged at having to wait until November to buy an iPhone that would ultimately be replaced by a newer, better model in about 10 months” and therefore didn’t buy an iPhone this year at all.

That seems like a very small set of people. And it’s quite likely that the 2018 release schedule will be exactly the same as the 2017 release schedule, with a base phone coming first and a higher end model coming second. So it’s a very small set of people who are very bad at evaluating choices.

Interestingly, one year ago — nearly to the day — Eassa argued that releasing the then-rumoured OLED iPhone in November was preferable:

Of course, Apple is better off delaying a product a smidgen to make sure it’s ready to go and if the redesigned fingerprint scanner meaningfully enhances the user experience, then the delay is probably worth it.

Three things about last year’s article:

1. This was published when some rumours still claimed that the OLED iPhone would ship with a fingerprint scanner, hence that reference.

2. Its headline frames this as “bad news”, so it sounds like Eassa is just sticking with that narrative rather than revising it in the face of facts.

3. In interviews about the iPhone X, Apple executives have claimed that it actually shipped early — internally, they were apparently targeting a 2018 release.