According to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, storage upgrades are “Apple’s not-so-secret weapon for maintaining healthy gross margins.”
While the opportunity applies to all Apple products, it has special relevance for iPhones. Storage upgrades allow Apple to maintain base prices from year to year while extracting more revenue from customers. However, CIRP says it appears these upgrades slowed in the past year, countering the impact of the introduction of a more expensive model, iPhone 16e, and increased popularity of the premium Pro and Pro Max models.
In CIRP’s quarterly surveys of iPhone buyers, the research group asked survey subjects to list the storage capacity of their newly-purchased iPhone. They used that to estimate US-WARP and to identify shifts in purchasing patterns.
Their analysis is about buyers’ propensity to upgrade from the base storage available for a given iPhone. For most models, that’s 128GB, although for iPhone 16 Pro Max base storage is 256GB.
Storage upgrades go as high as 1T on the Pro and Pro Max. In the most recent twelve month period, 48% of all US iPhone buyers upgraded from the base storage available for the model they purchased.
