Here's a big clue that Apple will continue to dominate with the iPhone X
Andy Swan is co-founder of LikeFolio, a company that provides social-media data to investors.
Expectations were extremely high for Apple’s (AAPL) big keynote event on Tuesday, and especially the unveiling of the iPhone X. Through measuring consumer reaction on Twitter (TWTR), it’s clear the event went well beyond just living up to the hype for consumers, who are showing extremely high levels of purchase intent and enthusiasm for the newly announced iPhone 8 and iPhone X.
To measure consumer reaction, we utilize LikeFolio purchase intent data, which captures and analyzes tweets indicating the user is definitely planning to buy a brand or product. This is the same approach we took to predict Chipotle’s warning to investors as well as Express’s big earnings beat.
Drilling down into 2017’s impressive results
Let’s start with the surprising bad news. The only disappointment we see coming out of the 2017 keynote so far is the fairly muted consumer reaction to Apple Watch Series 3:
As you can see, the purchase intent levels for this latest release of the Apple Watch are almost identical to the numbers we saw for the 2016 announcement of the series 2. That’s pretty shocking considering the massive leap in technology in the series 3, with its own cellular services allowing for a truly untethered experience.
Now for the good news for Apple … purchase intent levels for iPhone 8 and iPhone X are through the roof:
The huge green bar on the right is a measure of purchase intent mentions since the keynote on Tuesday. That’s right — this is the largest level we’ve seen after any keynote event in history, by a wide margin. Given this data, we are expecting unprecedented demand and sales numbers for the iPhone 8 and iPhone X over the next 6-9 months.
Putting the iPhone X announcement in perspective
As you can see in the chart below, the immediate consumer reaction for the prior four keynote events was extremely predictive of how Apple’s stock would behave over the following 9 month period:
It looks like the next nine months could be very good for Apple.
More from Andy Swan:
Twitter data shows spike in Whole Foods shopping after Amazon deal
How we predicted Express’s big earnings beat
