Amalgam Insights: Apple could lose $10 billion in revenue from ‘Batterygate’

Amalgam Insights, a consulting and strategy firm, predicts that Apple stands to lose as much as $10 billion in 2018 from delayed revenues associated with “Batterygate” — its disclosure about batteries in older iPhones.

Hyoun Park, CEO at Amalgam Insights, writes in a new blog post that as many as 15 million owners of older iPhones, such as the iPhone 6 and 7, will take advantage of Apple’s offer to replace their older batteries.  

“Given that the average iPhone sale was roughly $650 in the last fiscal year,” he writes, “this means that Apple will get roughly $300-$400 million in services revenue and postpone refresh revenue of roughly $5 – $10 billion over the next year as a result.”

Apple disclosed last month that it had configured its operating software in the phones to slow down the performance of older iPhones as their batteries aged. Park says this may give companies with large iPhone installation across their company a chance to save substantially, writing, “all affected or potentially affected iPhone 6 and 7 phones under management or under corporate expense reports should be upgraded to the new battery. The $29 cost to add an additional year of life to a device should be a no-brainer.”

Park says the situation should have been discovered earlier by corporate IT leaders where iPhones are used across the organization, and may also serve as a lesson to them.  

“Basic uptime and performance need to be the responsibility of a competent IT organization. Monitor your devices or force your vendors to provide this information,” he says. “This is a lesson across the board in IT. As everything becomes software-defined, sensor-enhanced, and data-collecting, everything must be monitored as a computing asset.”