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The iPhone 12, to no one’s surprise, is the world’s best-selling 5G phone. And it accomplished that feat just two weeks after launch.
A report written by Varun Mishra of Counterpoint Research showed how well the iPhone 12, as well as other popular 5G phones of 2020, sold in October. The individual figures are fun fodder for your phone brand’s fandom arguments, while the overall picture tells us some interesting things about the future of phones.
Apple actually ranks in the top two spots on Counterpoint’s list. At the top is the entry-level iPhone 12, which comprised 16% of all 5G phones sold globally in October, and one place below is the iPhone 12 Pro, which comprised 8%.
Once again, it’s no wonder the new iPhones sold well, but the fact that they topped the charts after just two weeks on sale is still impressive. Furthermore, the iPhone 12 managed to break into the top 10 best-selling 5G phones since January 2020 at No. 7 despite being released later in the year.
The rest of the list features some more familiar names. Third place goes to the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, another 5G flagship phone released in mid-2020 that was at the top of the list before the launch of the iPhone 12. Among the rest, we have a handful of Huawei phones, including the P40 Pro, a couple of Oppo phones and also the basic Samsung Galaxy Note 20 and Galaxy S20 Plus.
Counterpoint offered a few different reasons to explain why these results occurred. He suggested that iPhone users were particularly eager to upgrade to a 5G phone, and that attractive offers from US mobile operators helped convince them to do so. The fact that Apple is immensely popular around the world, rather than just in a few countries (like Huawei in China, for example) means that it was able to benefit from huge Chinese and Japanese sales, as well as those from the US.
This iPhone 12 bestseller could have a big impact on mmWave 5G specifically, which you might call “true” 5G rather than the simpler sub-6GHz 5G most networks use today. Because the iPhone 12 already supports mmWave 5G, Counterpoint suggested that this could help drive mobile carriers in the US to develop their mmWave capabilities. In turn, that could lead to faster and more reliable 5G services that could help power data-hungry applications like augmented reality and virtual reality.
Counterpoint predicted that the strong performance of the iPhone 12 will continue through the end of the year and beyond, benefiting from holiday sales and the phone’s launch later than normal, which means that the usual iPhone update cycle is still ongoing. Combine that with the fact that the entire iPhone 12 lineup is excellent, and Apple’s latest flagship is sure to cause trouble for the world’s best Android phones for at least another year.
We’ll have to see if the Samsung Galaxy S21 can take on its Apple rival, when it arrives in January.
