iPhone Color’s Don’t Really Matter, Do They?
The iPhone 15 and 15 Plus (but not Pro and Pro Max) usher in a new era for Apple. For the first time, there is no white (or silver) flagship iPhone! Since the first iPod, white has always been an option - and sometimes the only option. iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max do offer a “white titanium” version, but without a white standard iPhone 15 model, this is still a momentous occasion.
One might think iPhone color is a trivial detail, right? It’s not nearly as important as technical features like camera quality and battery life. Only teenagers think hard about which color. Then why does Apple pay so much attention to color?
It seems consumers do care about color. Or, at least they make choices from among the array of iPhone colors that Apple makes available. And, we see some unexpected color choosing that suggest it helps sell iPhones.
Following the launch of the iPhone 15 models this week, the most recent model lineup has more than a dozen available colors across all models. Two basic choices have been around for a while, under different names: Black or Midnight, White or Starlight or Silver. The others in the most recent lineup reflect color choices that tend to change as new models are launched.
Versions of black and white together account for almost half of all iPhones (Chart 1). Black/Midnight alone accounts for over one-third of all iPhones sold since the launch of the September 2022 models.