No.
The Asymco blog has talked about the average sale price of the Iphone, taking into account all models and capacities. Every time they jack up the price of the top of the line model, they have also lowered the price of the cheapest model, with the effect that the ASP of the iphone has stayed remarkably consistent over time. Apple wants the overall price to stay the same, in order to please Wall Street. They want there to be a smooth gradient between the cheapest model and the most expensive model, so that there’s always a “for just a hundred dollars more I could get a better one”, psychological factor encouraging people to buy a more expensive phone. But they also want there to be a low price model, so that there’s an affordable entry point for those who cannot afford a $1k phone, in order to ensure that they sell as many phones as possible to as many people as possible.
Add those together and there needs to be a range of models from cheap to expensive. The SE anchors the low end of the scale and provides a little phone to those who value reachability. Apple would love to lower the cost of the SE further, expanding their market size, but in order to do so they need there to be a smooth gradient of models from the SE’s price point to the X’s price point, and they need to ensure that the X’s price point stays where it is so that the overall ASP does not go down. Which means they need to continue to have multiple cheaper models in between the SE and the X.
WHich means in addition to a new X and X+, the 8 will get upgraded to the 9, at the same or a very similar price, and the two prior year’s models will stick around as usual at the usual price cuts.
