A new study claims that the buyers of Apple's best iPhone are willing to upgrade to the best storage options.
With the iPhone 14 lineup being on sale for a few weeks now, early numbers show that those picking up a new handset have been willing to hand over extra cash to avoid the base 128GB model, sometimes choosing to go all the way to the maximum 1TB.
All the gigabytes
The iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus are sold in 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB configurations, whereas the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max are also available with a larger 1TB capacity. Now, numbers shared by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) point to people going further up the storage chart with this round of releases.
CIRP notes that the same data was found when looking at those buying iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max models, too.
"Consumers continued their long-standing tendency to upgrade from base storage," the CIRP report says. "For the new iPhone 14 models and the more expensive iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max, most customers paid a premium for larger storage capacity phones."
It isn't clear why people might be going for more storage and ignoring the 128GB option, but there are some possibilities.
The first is that stock shortages mean people buy whatever model is available. So the 128GB model selling out could lead customers to upgrade to 256GB and beyond rather than wait weeks for their preferred configuration to become available. The numbers could back that up — 50% of people buying an iPhone 14 Pro this year went for the 256GB model.
Another option, especially with this year's iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max, is that people know the ballooning file sizes of images and videos created by the new handsets. The Pro iPhones now have a 48-megapixel camera capable of shooting ProRAW photos as big as 100MB each, for example.
