That said, I think Apple is taking a pretty significant risk with the iPhone 8 in particular: we know the company can succeed by selling the “best” phone, but the one example we have of building a less-than-best phone was underwhelming; to that end, how many iPhone buyers will forgo the 8 to wait for the X?
I’m very interested in seeing how this pans out. Apple won’t announce iPhone sales but when they run quarterly numbers that include the quarter where only the iPhone 8 was available, we can see just how much sales dip or increase. A dip would indicate people waiting on the 10, an increase would indicate enough people thought the 8 was good enough and in their price range to forgo the iPhone 10 for a year.
I’ve explained why I’m an iPhone 8 customer and I’m very happy having the last generation of the 4 year old design. It’s a perfect iteration of the iPhone 6 Plus design with 4x the performance and I look forward to purchasing the second year of an iPhone 10 with more improvements over the current 10.
How will the market react? That’s unclear. I think there will be a lot of disappointed people a year from now when the iPhone 11 or 10S arrives and people will have buyer’s remorse when their 6 month old iPhone 10 is outdated but it wasn’t their fault. Supply constraints kept them from getting a 10 for months after release.