Apple iPhone Predicted to have 68% Market share at peak

Horace Dediu has come up with another one of his interesting little analyses of the way that the electronics markets are working. Here he’s trying to predict what portion of the smartphone market Apple will have as and when the smartphone market itself peaks. That peak will of course be when the market is saturated and we move from an expanding marketplace over to one where we are only either replacing aged kit and or following the demographic changes in the population. The remarkable result is that Dediu thinks that Apple will have 68% of the entire US smartphone market at that point:

We also know from the plot of the market that F = .91 is reached around February 2017. So we can suggest that at 90% penetration (approximately saturation) the iPhone will have 68% market share of users in the US. Forecasting the addressable market (US population aged older than 13) at about 266 million that implies 180 million US users of the iPhone by early 2017.

As to the predictive accuracy of that method I’m not sure. It would appear to depend upon the idea that Apple remains the most popular phone for the next three years which is something I expect to see happen but am not sure about.

But there’s something else more interesting in these numbers I think. Which is that we expect to reach market saturation in 2017. Saturation being defined here as 90% of the population using the technology: no technologies ever achieve 100% penetration of the market of course. And the remarkable thing about this is that the smartphone won’t even be ten years old by that point. Yes, the first real smartphone (there were attempts before this but nothing that really grasped peoples’ attention) was indeed the iPhone and it was released in 2007. But not until June: so if market saturation comes in Feb 2017 then market saturation will come in just under a decade.

And that is just amazing, stupendous in fact. It makes the smartphone by far the fastest adopted technology ever. The only one that comes anywhere close is the closely related cell phone. As an example it took at least 50 years for electrification to achieve full penetration of the market. All of which is why it always slightly surprise me when people talk about this great technological stagnation we’re supposed to be going through. We’re right in the middle of the fastest technological change ever