iPhone rising: amid Samsung ban, 50% increase in Android phones being dumped

Now that U.S. federal court has ruled that Samsung’s Android phones are illegal knockoffs of the iPhone and will be banned from the market as of December, the fallout is coming fast and furious. While technology geeks appear to be clinging to their Android devices more tightly than ever (and calling for a boycott on Apple products no less), mainstream consumers are doing just the opposite. Gazelle, a service where users can resell their used electronics devices, has seen a fifty percent spike in Samsung Android products since the court ruling. That means consumers are fleeing Android in spades…

The reasons for the mass exodus could be multiple. While most geeks prefer Android devices because they’re easily tinkered with, Apple’s iPhone and iPad are more streamlined and aimed at mainstream consumers with their intuitive interface and ease of use. Many consumers who wanted an iPhone were steered toward Android instead. In some instances it was because the iPhone was only available on one carrier per nation – and only available on the much maligned AT&T in the United States – for the first several years it was on the market. In other instances, the geeks who write the tech headlines and work in the tech retail stores conspired to steer consumers away from the iPhone because they consider Apple to be the devil and they want their preferred Android platform to grow in size. But as of this week, that particular con game appears to no longer be working, as those who had been steered toward Android are now putting their devices up for sale without hesitation…

Some may be doing so out of general fear: they’ve heard that Samsung Android phones are going away, and they don’t want to be stuck on a dwindling platform. But for others, it may simply be the tipping point. As they’ve come to gradually figure out that their Android phone is not in fact “just like an iPhone but better” as the sales geek had promised, they’ve likely rationalized reasons for sticking with it. But with the court system confirming what they had already increasingly begun to suspect – that Android is merely a crude knockoff of the iPhone and iPad with nothing to offer – it may have pushed them over the edge such that they don’t want their failed Android experience to last one minute longer. No more rationalizations, no more benefit of the doubt, and instead an emphatic confirmation that they’re ready to admit they’ve been had and that they’re now moving to the real iPhone they had wanted in the first place.

With Apple just weeks away from introducing the new iPhone 5, the timing couldn’t be better for both sides: consumers get to migrate to what will ostensibly be a better iPhone than the one they would have ended up with last time around, and Apple gets a significant sales boost for its new iPhone which would have set all-time consumer technology sales records with or without the influx from the court ruling.

Some geeks have suggested that Microsoft’s largely ignored Windows Phone platform will be the beneficiary of the Samsung Android exodus, not Apple’s iPhone, but that appears to be little more than wishful thinking on the part of a group of geeks whose hatred for Apple stems from the fact that the company caters to the mainstream instead of to them. And now it appears that a much larger chunk of the mainstream is ready to embrace Apple’s mainstream-leaning iPhone and iPad rather than making due with the geek-oriented Android they’d been saddled with, and doing so in large numbers and with a swiftness which suggests they have no intention of looking back.