Apple’s glory days are all behind it and the way you can tell is that the company is more efficient at selling iPhones than it used to be.

Wait, what?

Writing for The Motley Fool, Natalie Walters asks “Are We Past the Golden Era of iPhone Launches?” (Tip o’ the antlers to Mickey.)

Most likely, but not for the reasons you think. The “golden era” of iPhone launches Walters refers to was back when people lined up but actually bought fewer iPhones than they do now.

Just a few years ago, Apple’s iPhone launch events were so popular that people were sleeping outside the stores to ensure they got their hands on one of the new models the day they came out.

Now nobody buys iPhones anymore. Except for about 50 million people a quarter. But other than those people, like, no one.

But the era of camping outside Apple stores may be over.

And why is that? Is it because people just stopped buying iPhones so there were no more lines? Actually, no! Lines correlated to iPhone popularity for a while, but they mostly caused by Apple’s inability to ramp up production and its to distribute iPhones. Now Apple ships more iPhones for home delivery on launch day and has more retail stores.

iPhone unit sales peaked in 2016, but by then lines had already begun to decrease. Let us enter a “time machine” called “a DuckDuckGo web search” to see what people were saying about iPhone lines when Apple sold the most iPhones ever sold by a company named Apple.

“Apple shares on fire; iPhone lines decidedly chill.”

Macworld