Consumers choose iPhone colors, with gold and yellow as the base options.

This year, in the history of Apple's products over the past few years, will likely be remembered as the most colorful. The iPhone 5c, available in five vibrant colors, and the champagne gold iPhone 5s, which initially caused a frenzy of premium-priced抢购 (scalping), reminded many of the colorful era of iMac and iPod. As the Mac lineup gradually aligned with silver tones and the iPod series became secondary, for a long time, the primary color options for Apple’s main products—black and white—led to aesthetic fatigue.

It is still unclear to what extent the new colors have stimulated sales, but consumers indeed have more choices now. The two new iPhones have been on the market for some time, so how are the various colors performing?

According to the latest survey results from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP), the champagne gold iPhone 5s, which was hard to find at launch, actually had the worst sales. Overall, fewer people chose champagne gold compared to the other two colors. One possible reason could be that Apple initially limited the supply of champagne gold, leading to insufficient sales and an inability to compete with the other two colors. On the other hand, behind the hype of premium pricing, consumers actually preferred the traditional space gray and silver.

There is also a clear divide in preferences between men and women. Men favored space gray, while women's choices were slightly more balanced, with space gray and silver being roughly equal. The ratio of men and women choosing gold was about the same. Overall, space gray held a relatively obvious advantage, and the share of gold was clearly less than one-third. At least this result confirms that black (space gray) and white (silver) remain the safest colors on the market.

Now let's look at the internal competition among the colors of the more colorful and consistently well-stocked iPhone 5c.

Men largely ignored yellow, and less than 10% of women chose yellow, proving that this color is indeed unpopular. Without a doubt, women made pink their top choice, and surprisingly, more men chose pink than yellow. However, white and blue remained the two favorite colors among men, while for women, besides pink, there wasn’t much difference between white, green, and blue.

Finally, let’s examine the overall situation without gender distinction.

Unfortunately, gold and yellow, being close relatives in terms of color, ranked last in their respective categories, especially the yellow iPhone 5c, whose market performance was quite dismal. Space gray and blue topped their respective categories, but space gray had a more obvious lead. In the case of the iPhone 5c, the differences among the other four colors were not significant.

Merchants should take these survey results into consideration when stocking up, paying attention to controlling the color ratios. For those who don't want to follow the crowd, the yellow iPhone 5c might be worth considering—it has a very low chance of being duplicated. However, an interesting phenomenon occurred: the unlocked version of the yellow iPhone 5c once sold out completely.

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