I don’t see the connection to Apple. Apple offers limited choice and little room to optimize. You get what everyone else gets, I can’t imagine “Optimizers” buying Apple products.
Edit: Wouldn’t you buy an Apple product exactly if you are tired of having to compare all the time? All of Apple’s products fit on a decent sized kitchen table (five computers, four music players, two phones, two tablets, one set-top box). Wouldn’t many people who like Apple say that the nice thing about Apple is that you can trust them, that you can blindly buy their products and still be reasonably certain that you are getting a good package? The best Android phones might well be better than the iPhone but you actually have to find them in a sea of many phones of wildly differing quality.
Apple provides reassuring reinforcement that you have indeed bought the "best" (at least until they come out with new model in year or so. Apple products are widely hyped as the "best" while actually being rather poor in everything other than style, hipness, simplicity. These "Optimizers" don't make rational choices, they are fueled by emotion, desires to feel good about themselves and better than others. These are qualities Apple markets to.
I think its is just the question of the size of your universe. Apple users don't compare with Lenovo and Sony but with Apple. I know a couple of Apple users who owned every generation of iPhone (and don't even consider Android).
Since there's not much of an upgrade path for Android devices in quite the same way I suspect finding numbers to compare against will be hard. Besides, the platform didn't start to really become popular until 2009-ish, so most people are still on their first Android phone.
That stat refers to the first month of sales. I would imagine "normal" people neither time their purchases to coincide with Apple product announcements, nor like to pay early termination fees to be the first on the block with a new gadget.
Theres two other things I've noticed about the phenomena. When an iProduct is launched, my local Apple store has a line around the block on launch day. But then a week later, no line and plenty of inventory. You can just walk into the store and buy one.
When a new major Android phone is launched, there's no line, but it takes weeks on a waiting list to get one and months for the inventory to catch back up so you can just go buy one.
I have a feeling one of the two (or both) is either a manifestation of what we're talking about, or its Nintendo style artificial scarcity at play.
In the last 8 years I've been buying primarily Apple products: an iBook 8 years ago, an iPod mini 6 years ago, a MacBook 3 years ago, and an iPhone 2 years ago. I used to fiddle with Linux and know about the latest CPUs, but then I found that I was spending a lot of time on something of little benefit to me.
My MacBook does everything I need, and it has the Unix underpinnings I prefer. My iPhone is very useful, although it is getting a little slow as apps get bigger. I will probably upgrade to the iPhone 5 when it comes out, if it turns out to be good enough.
I'm the same way with cars. I bought a Honda Civic recently without a lot of comparison shopping because I have had good luck with them before, and I know it's a quality car. A friend of mine bought another kind of car that had some cool features that mine doesn't have, and I was a little envious for a moment, but it soon passed. I'm very happy with my solid little car.
I don’t see the connection to Apple. Apple offers limited choice and little room to optimize. You get what everyone else gets, I can’t imagine “Optimizers” buying Apple products.
Edit: Wouldn’t you buy an Apple product exactly if you are tired of having to compare all the time? All of Apple’s products fit on a decent sized kitchen table (five computers, four music players, two phones, two tablets, one set-top box). Wouldn’t many people who like Apple say that the nice thing about Apple is that you can trust them, that you can blindly buy their products and still be reasonably certain that you are getting a good package? The best Android phones might well be better than the iPhone but you actually have to find them in a sea of many phones of wildly differing quality.