Apple Users 'Overwhelmingly' Stay With Large Screen iPhones, New Survey Shows

• Apple, Inc. AAPL shares have declined a little over 10 percent in the past three months.
• Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster has maintained an Overweight rating and price target of $172 on the company.
• Piper Jaffray’s annual iPhone launch day survey revealed a continuing trend towards more capacity, along with a gradually emerging trend towards larger screen iPhones.

Analyst Gene Munster believes that both trends could prove positive for the company’s ASPs and revenues over the next few years.

In 2014, Apple increased the iPhone’s mid-tier storage capacity from 32GB to 64GB. There has been a “continued shift to higher capacities for the 6S,” Munster said, while mentioning that the average device capacity has increased15 percent, year on year, from 70GB in 2014 to 81GB in 2015.

According to the Piper Jaffray report, an “interesting takeaway” from the survey was that “users with the larger 6 Plus tend to overwhelmingly stay with the larger device, while users with the smaller 6 tended to opt slightly more often for the larger device.”

Based on the survey data, Munster stated that “once users of the larger screen plus get used to carrying a larger screen device, they are unlikely to go to the smaller screen,” while adding that users of standard screen sizes “seem to start with the smaller screen and slowly move toward the larger screen.”

The survey also revealed that a majority of iPhone 6s and 6s Plus users also use Apple Pay. This implies that “as more retailers adopt mobile payments, Apple has a chance to offer a meaningful mobile wallet product, driven by the security layer provided by Touch ID,” Munster added.