The last couple of days are big days for Apple. Apple has launched its new iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c, and announced it has sold over 9 million in the first three days. It nearly doubles the 5 million sales of the iPhone 5, which was launched last year. The successful sales of iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c are contributed by an improvement in the way of marketing, rather than an improvement in technology. Why this works?

As the criticism says the smartphone market has already been highly saturated. From the last year, more and more people decide to buy an Android phone instead of an iPhone. Comparing to the longstanding black and white iPhones, customers can get more choices by selecting from Androids. Also, the new features added in the iPhone 5 didn’t make any big differences from iPhone 4s. People even made jokes about the length increase of the iPhone 5, and predicted what iPhone20 would look like.

However, iPhone 5s/5c is more successful than Apple’s previous model. It’s not because iPhone 5s/5c upgrades its processor from generation 6(A6) to generation 7(A7/M7), or has a larger storage. It’s just because it looks better. In other words, it’s more physically appealing to the customers. For people like me, who have limited technology knowledge can barely tell the difference between an A7 chip and an A6, or A5 chip, but I can certainly tell the difference between a color of blue and black. Therefore, to a “visual” customer, the colorful design of the new iPhones definitely adds much value to the product. When Apple has nothing to do with its hardware upgrades, “for the colorful” is a bright way to be attractive.