[andrewljohnson]

Me and the rest of the developer community laugh at the contrary blog posts, all the way to the bank. This weekend, there will be hundreds of thousands more iPhone owners, and the developer community will make a fortune.

I applaud Apple for focusing on what's important - speed and sex, not features and fapping. Because when they do, all my apps get faster and all my customers get happier, and I don't have to do much work at all. Integrating with new APIs and hardware is a necessary evil, but we just want the devices to keep getting smaller and faster, as do the consumers.

[smackfu]

OTOH, if Apple had killed the 3GS this time around, rather than keeping it around for another year, that probably would have been better for devs since they wouldn't have needed to support that old slow platform.

[andrewljohnson]

I wouldn't call the 3GS slow. The 3G was slow, and represented a development pain in which we would do optimizations to suit the device. 3GS is plenty fast, and the iPhone4 and iPad2 are smoking hot rods.

[jarek]

The contrarian community wonders where your data regarding the percentage of iPhone 4S orders that represent new customers comes from. Is this based on past launches? What were the percentages then?

[cyggie]

"Every customer who buys an iPhone 4S at an Apple retail store will be offered free Personal Setup service, helping them customize their iPhone 4S by setting up email, showing them new apps from the App Store™ and more, so they’ll be up and running with their new iPhone before they leave the store." They don't need to be new owners. Imagine a sale team that will sit down with millions of your users (existing or new), showing them what new apps are out there, reminding them to buy from your store and walking them through on purchasing your product again. This will sure generate a big spike overall.

[ugh]

It’s a pretty safe bet. Apple has had a stable marketshare in this rapidly growing market for a long time.

[andrewljohnson]

I don't know the percentages, but when iPad2 and iPhone4 hit, we made a lot of money. Those days were like Christmas spikes.

Industry wonks will probably estimate the % who are new customers this week though.

[beej71]

Hey, iPhones have features, too.

[cooldeal]

So if there was an iPhone 5, it's preorders would be the same as worse as now, right? A lot of people upgraded from the 3GS to the iPhone 4 even when in contract, I believe the percent of people doing that is lesser this time and would've been higher at this point.

I don't think anyone said the iPhone 4S will do badly. It's a new iPhone after all and there's a ton of 3GS'ers out of a contract, not to mention people holding off on buying an iPhone 4 waiting for the new phone from a few months.