Apple had planned to release the iPhone 5 this year, but that launch has been pushed back to early 2012. Knowing that they needed some type of offering for the holiday shopping season, just months before his death two weeks ago, Steve Jobs came up with the idea of the iPhone 4S. It was simply meant to be a bridge between the Apple iPhone 4 and the Apple iPhone 5. Launching on October 14, evidently no one told the iPhone 4S that it wasn’t expected to do much. The iPhone 4S, according to an announcement by the Cupertino-based Apple, has sold 4 million units in the first three days after launch.
Some analysts have noted that following the death of iconic founders of popular companies, new products following closely on the heels of the founders passing usually do well, but these sales claims by Apple far outstretched any analyst’s estimations. Usually, Apple rolls out their releases across a period of time in several countries. However, with the iPhone 4S, they released to the United States, Canada, Germany, Australia, France and the UK simultaneously, which certainly helped the sales numbers. 22 more countries will be able to purchase the iPhone 4S on October 28, an additional 70 countries by the end of 2011.
To give you an idea of the sales strength of this most recent Apple iDevice launch, the iPhone 4 launch was considered successful, and sold 2 million units in its first three days. Philip Schiller is Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, and he proclaimed that the new iOS 5 operating system built into the Apple iPhone 4S is one of the reasons for the sales success.
The Apple iPhone 4S also debuts a virtual assistant named Siri which allows for vocal communication between you and your handset. The Apple iPhone 4S is available in either white or black, and has three separate price levels, $199, $299 and $399. Those prices are for the 16 GB model, 32 GB model and 64 GB model respectively. When the iPhone 4S launched on October 14, the iPhone 4 was dropped in retail price to $99.
