Apple will struggle to find new buyers for iPhone

Taken from: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425582,00.asp

The article suggests that most iPhone sales in the future will come from replacements / upgrades rather than new purchases.

The article noted:

An interesting new report from Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi suggests that Apple might be on the cusp of seeing a drop in new iPhone buyers.

The news doesn't suggest a drop in the popularity of the iPhone. Rather, many people already have one, so Apple will soon be selling more devices to upgraders rather than new iPhone customers. According to Sacconaghi, the percentage of "net new iPhone customers" is set to shrink approximately 13 percent between 2012 and 2013, dropping from 62 percent to just around 54 percent.

Going forward, those numbers will drop to 37 percent in 2014 and a mere 28 percent in 2015. Concurrently, iPhone "replacement" purchases will jump up to nearly 3/4 of everything Apple's selling by 2015.

We talked about switching power.  My guess is that the great majority of the population has smart phones.  But, Android phone users would have to learn a new environment if they switched to the iPhone; and (likewise) iPhone users would have to learn a new environment if they switched to a different type phone.  And ... is the competition over for Blackberry, Microsoft Windows Phones and others?