The rise from 2% to 4% or 0% to 0.5% could be a bit of signal, a bit of noise or a bit of both. You can be relatively certain that when a number jumps from 4% to 11% on a sample of 1,000 that there is something real there. We didn’t ask when their contract expired, so we can anticipate that the 11% intent will be spread over a period from 1 to 24 months.

Your original sentiment that this is pretty obvious stuff was a fair point to make: College students are both price-conscious and tech savvy.

College students are holding off in anticipation of the inevitable ‘issues’ that people face on the first round of anything. They’re hoping for price drops to bring the iPhone into their frugal budgets and they’re ravenous for anything that makes life better, faster and cheaper.

Out of interest, did the survey ask those who said “when their current contract runs out” how long that period might be? It would be interesting to see how many of those have sufficient contract left for them to assume that by the time it runs out v.2 of the iPhone might be released.

Those intending to purchase ‘within a few months’ doubled from 2% to 4%.

Those intending to purchase ‘when their current contract runs out’ jumped from 4% to 11%.

Considering that there are 18 million college students in the US, Apple will see a 150% increase in sales from college students prior to the next version release.

Anyone interested in the full results can download them from: http://www.surveyu.com/images/press/iphone_release.pdf