Apple's public confirmation of slowing down the older iPhone models to prevent the handsets from abruptly shutting down caused an outcry from consumers. Followed by an ever-growing list of class-action lawsuits and probes by governmental bodies.

In order to understand the events from analytics point of view, we dove deep into Apple.com's heatmap engagement data.

Anonymized heatmap data, tracking 1.8 million unique visitors' mouse movements on Apple.com reveal that, percentage of people who showed interest in its support page was around 0.4%, between the period of August 2017, and November 2017.

August, 2017



September, 2017



October, 2017



November, 2017





However, during the debacle last December when Geekbench discovered that iOS upgrades were slowing down old iPhones, number of people visiting Apple.com's support page increased by 23x.

December, 2017



January, 2018



February, 2018

Battery controversy impacts new iPhone sales negatively

Considering 77 percent of iPhone users can instantly double their device performance, and are eligible for an upgrade $50 cheaper than regular, new generation iPhone sales were expected to take a hit.

However, according to exclusive data from Seotify, the damage on new iPhone sales could be much more significant than Barclays analyst Mark Moskowitz's estimations.

Most noticable jump in support requests happened in January, 2018, a few days after Apple apologized for the iPhone slowdown drama, and offered $29 battery replacement.

During the same period, Apple.com's support page attracted 1.4x more visitors than iPhone's, indicating that number of people who are opting for a new battery, instead of upgrading to a new device, could be as much as 3x higher than Barclay's estimations, which comes out to $30.87 billion in lost revenue.

This ratio also reveals that, in January, more people were interested in doubling their device performance by replacing the battery, instead of buying a new iPhone.

About the data

Heatmap data used for the research comes from Seotify's Site Explorer, a website traffic and engagement analysis app. The anonymized dataset used for this study was gathered from 2017 August, to February 2018, tracking more than 1.8 million PC user's mouse movements who visited Apple.com between the time periods mentioned above.