Last Updated on September 29, 2017 by Preetish



Apple introduced its master plan for the next 10 years at its newly built ‘spaceship’ headquarters in California on 12th September. Several gadgets like Apple watch, TV, iPhones were unveiled in this event and the new iPhone 8, 8 Plus and iPhone X were the ones which garnered maximum buzz. The iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus will feature superior cameras and more – while the flagship phone, iPhone X will come with ‘Face ID’, a ‘TrueDepth’ selfie camera and a power-packed battery that will last two hours longer than the iPhone 7. The crux of the event was that the ‘Ten’, won’t be in market until 3rd November and it’d cost $999. Just like any other Apple event, this one also garnered massive number of tweets.

Considering tweets are a gold mine for text mining of publicly available data, we created datasets by downloading 5,000 tweets (excluding retweets) for each of ‘iPhoneX’ and ‘iPhone8’ hashtag. Given below are the goals of the study:

Analyzing term frequency

Performing sentiment analysis

Let’s first start with the word cloud to get an overview of the most frequently used words. Note that certain generic terms like ‘Apple’, ‘iPhone’ and ‘iPhoneX’ were excluded. Given below is the word cloud for tweets containing ‘#iPhoneX’.

We can see that there is a large number of tweets around giveaway and sales. Apart from that, the Face ID technology, battery, iOS and design were among the other most-discussed topics. Samsung also features as a brand when it comes to the alternatives — probably because of iPhone’s comparison with galaxy series which is also present in the word cloud. Now, let’s check out the word cloud for ‘#iPhone8’.

Here ‘Case’ has taken the limelight which can be attribute to the fact that iPhone 8 is readily available for buyers unlike iPhone X. That’s the reason ‘orderonline’ can also be seen. However, ‘giveaway’ and ‘win’ still feature in this case as well. Coming to the product related topics, we can see that ‘charging’, ‘wireless’, ‘camera’ and ‘iOS’ are the prominent ones. Next, we’ll go through the bar chart of the top 10 most frequent terms.

This is in line with the word cloud and shows that most of the conversation points are driven by giveaway related topics, Face ID and the new iOS.

As discussed earlier many are discussing about phone case apart from topics related to giveaway. We also see significant number of tweets also feature ‘AppleInsider’ which is a popular media outlet dedicated to Apple news and rumors.

Now, it’s time for us to study the sentiment of people: Are they are happy? Sad? Positive? Or Negative? Let’s first check out the chart that shows sentiment for tweets with ‘#iPhoneX’.

It shows that largely there is positive sentiment and the least expressed sentiment is disgust. Also, many are still in anticipatory mode while almost equal score goes to negative sentiment. The next most expressed sentiment is trust! What about the tweets for “#iPhone’? Let’s find out.

The sentiment expressed for iPhone 8 series is similar to that of iPhone X with highest being positive and the least being disgust. One surprising aspect is the fear sentiment which is higher in comparison to iPhone X. Also note that the relative difference between positive and negative sentiment for iPhone 8 is narrower than that of iPhone X.

Takeaway

This study shows that there are giveaway offers going on for both of the phones and people are talking about the Face ID in case of iPhone X while a major topic surrounding iPhone 8 is ‘case’. In terms of sentiment analysis it seems iPhone X has touched the right cords in comparison to iPhone 8. Let us know about your thoughts in the comments section.

Note: Charts created via R and ggplot2.