The iPhone 14 Pro Max's popularity may help Apple decide to make the rumored iPhone 15 Ultra a reality, says respected analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.
Kuo has said before that Apple will try to split the iPhone Pro and Pro Max models further apart in the future, rather than them just differing on display and battery size as we currently see. But now he's brought in iPhone 14 order data to support this hypothesis.
Apple's already supposedly increased iPhone 14 Pro production at the expense of iPhone 14 production to meet high demand. What Kuo says now is that 60% of these redirected production orders will be for Pro Max models, with the remaining 40% being iPhone 14 Pro handsets.
Looking at current iPhone 14 delivery dates explains why: the iPhone 14 Pro Max is currently the most popular iPhone 14 model by a large margin, with orders taking over a month to ship from most retailers. Meanwhile, regular iPhone 14 demand is weak, predictably so given its major similarities to the iPhone 13.
With so many keen iPhone users flocking to the Pro Max model, it makes good business sense for Apple to give it more features and a new name (and presumably a higher price) to show it truly stands apart from the smaller Pro model, and from there persuade more users to upgrade to the top iPhone model.
It may be too soon to draw these kinds of conclusions though. iPhone early adopters tend to go for the most expensive models right after launch, while sales for the cheaper iPhones will slowly grow over the year as people's cell contracts come up for renewal or their phones break.
Beyond the iPhone 15 Ultra being rumored as a Pro Max replacement, we've also heard it could offer features like a periscope telephoto camera, a second front camera, a USB-C port instead of Lightning and, of course, a price increase to go with it
That's not to say there will be nothing new for the iPhone 15 regular and Pro models. Those could be getting a Dynamic Island for all models to replace the notch, and the new 3-nanometer chip that Apple's apparently working on should appear in the iPhone 15 Pro, even if Apple is supposedly leaving the basic models with a year-old chip, like it did with the iPhone 14.
We've still got the best part of a year before Apple has another round of iPhones to show us. In the meantime, we've drawn up an iPhone 15 wish list that contains all the features we hope Apple will add (or get right) on the next generation.
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