A new report today reveals how iPhone 14 users feel about their smartphones and how that stacks up against predecessors going back to iPhone 4. While iPhone sales remain strong, the new data says the drop in iPhone satisfaction hasn’t been this big in over a decade plus it shows the all-time highest-rated and lowest-rated iPhones, and more.
The new study comes from PerfectRec which organized data from over 600,000 user-generated Google reviews for iPhone 14 and the other iPhone models. While the data likely includes some erroneous reviews, with a sample size this big, it likely still gives a good picture of iPhone user sentiment.
For context, Apple said during its fiscal Q2 earnings call that a study from 451 Research found iPhone 14 family satisfaction to be at 99% – which is in contrast to the user-generated reviews that this new study observed (however, they are comparing two different, yet closely related metrics).
Here’s how PerfectRec used the data:
We looked at the base model iPhone released each year between 2011 and 2022 and charted what percentage of all user-generated reviews that were five stars. The base model iPhone is typically Apple’s best-selling model of each generation and gets the most user-generated reviews. Over this period, the proportion of five-star reviews for the base model iPhone steadily increased from a low of 65% for the iPhone 5 to a high of 80% for the iPhone 13.
iPhone 14 5-star ratings see a big drop
Up against an all-time high of 80% of reviews being 5 stars for iPhone 13, iPhone 14 saw an 8-point drop with 72% of users giving it the same 5 stars.
As you can see, the only other drop in the last 12 years was from iPhone 4 to 5 which saw a 4% decline in 5-star reviews.
The iPhone 14 Pro saw higher ratings with 76% being 5 stars, but it saw the same 8% drop from the iPhone 13 Pro having an 84%.
Meanwhile, the iPhone 14 Pro Max saw a 6% drop from the 13 Pro Max, going from 86 to 80% 5-star reviews.
Those higher ratings for the Pro models line up with a recent study that shows the higher-end iPhones selling better than the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus.
Lowest- and highest-rated iPhones of all-time
The study also has a chart with every iPhone going back to iPhone 4. When looking at all of those devices, the user-generated portion of 5-star reviews peaked at 86% with the iPhone 13 Pro Max.
And the wost-rated in the last 12 years was iPhone 5C with 64% of users giving it 5 stars.
Why have reviews dropped for iPhone 14?
There are two main reasons that PerfectRec believes iPhone ratings kept growing over the years – until now.
First, it believes Apple consistently improved iPhone making users appreciate it more and more over the last 12 years. Second, it thinks something called “reputation inflation” may have been part of the year-over-year increase in iPhone ratings.
The trend of Reputation Inflation was first identified in online marketplaces by PerfectRec CEO Joe Golden in a 2022 economics paper co-authored with professors John Horton of MIT and Apostolos Filippas of Fordham University. It is possible that the habit of rating everything five stars – taught to consumers by apps like Uber, Airbnb and Etsy – has also spilled over into general product reviews.
And after over a decade of improving reviews for iPhone, PerfectRec says:
We suspect what happened with the iPhone 14 is that the rate of improvement simply didn’t match customer expectations. There wasn’t a big new, must-have feature and consumers didn’t view the incremental improvements as worth it, so fewer of them rated it five stars as a result.
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