Apple Q2 Earnings: iPhone Sales Fall Flat (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Apple Inc reported a surprise fall in iPhone sales for the second quarter on Tuesday, indicating that customers had held back purchases in anticipation of the 10th-anniversary edition launch of the company's most important product. Apple sold 50.76 million iPhones in its fiscal second quarter ended April 1, down from 51.19 million a year earlier. Analysts on average had estimated iPhone sales of 52.27 million, according to financial data and analytics firm FactSet. However, revenue from the smartphones rose 1.2 percent in the quarter. Expectations are building ahead of Apple's 10th-anniversary iPhone range this fall, with investors hoping that the launch would help bolster sales.

Comments

Headphone jack and charger shenanigans? Nah...

[choovanski]

Our customers are just waiting for the tenth anniversary edition. Yep. Nothing to see here.

hold off or went elsewhere?

[gravewax]

did customers really hold off or did they go elsewhere? I know quite a few apple phone fans and none of them ever hold off, I also know quite a few disillusioned former fans.

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[dknj]

did customers really hold off or did they go elsewhere?

D I G I T A L L O C K I N

You bought all your videos on iTunes store, all of your music is iTunes in the cloud, and all of your photos and videos are also in iCloud. I would say half of those buying iPhones don't think there is a way out and can't fathom losing the thousands of $ they put into apple digital products

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[Anubis IV]

I know quite a few apple phone fans and none of them ever hold off

This is an anecdote, to be sure, but my parents are holding off until later this year, even though they haven't heard any rumors and even though their iPhone 5s has since been surpassed by the 6, 6s, and 7 generations.

The reason they're holding off is because their existing iPhones are simply good enough. The iPhone 5s still runs the latest OS, gets the latest patches, and runs apps nearly as well today as it did when it was first introduced in 2013. It's held up remarkably well. The fact that it was also the first 64-bit smartphone has helped to keep it on the good side of any compatibility cutoffs as well, as apps have dropped support for older architectures and devices.

Really though, none of this is surprising. Though my dad was in a line before dawn to get the iPhone 3G on launch day, he held off two generations before upgrading to the iPhone 4, three generations to get the iPhone 5s, and now holding off four generations for whatever comes out later this year.

All of which is to say, it has nothing to do with whatever's next, and everything to do with what they already have: something that's good enough.

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[Tough Love]

did customers really hold off or did they go elsewhere?

Elsewhere. Apple now counts for "negative cool". Apple is everything generation Z hates about their cringey millenial parents.

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[gravewax]

Apart from apps, most people only really buy from the iTunes store which surprise surprise is actually available across platforms. photos and videos tend to be relatively small amount stored in icloud as apple have onerous size restrictions unless you pay them a fortune. So really it is only the apps that is likely to stop most and most of them are available in both android and apple.

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[Cmdln Daco]

I can easily log into the Google Play Store using any web browser on my PC. From there, I can buy apps to install on my Android phone and tablets.

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[Cmdln Daco]

Ummm, you're a school teacher. How can you presume to know what is cool with generation Z?

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[Karlt1]

If you bought any music since 2009, it's DRM free. You can install Google Photos and sync all of your photos and videos to Google without the 5gb restriction you have for iCloud unless you pay for more and very few people actually buy video from Apple instead of just renting it.

And how many people actually pay for apps except for consumables in games and subscription services that they could cancel and re subscribe through the vendors site?

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[Anubis IV]

You're reading WAY more into my comment than is actually there. If you think I was boasting when I provided an example of how my parent's phones have been able to remain relevant despite newer models coming out, I'd suggest it says more about you than me. I wasn't making a jab at whatever your mobile platform of choice is.

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[Anubis IV]

The OP asked if people were leaving or holding off for a newer version. I was presenting a third possibility: that they were holding onto, rather than holding off. As I prefaced my last comment, it's an anecdote, so take it with the requisite grain of salt and move along. I wasn't arguing anything, other than that there may be more possibilities at play than the summary and OP listed.

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[Anubis IV]

Touch ID is a killer feature for some (5 or 5s?). And a few people really like Apple Pay (6 and up). There was Portrait mode thanks to the dual cameras on the 7 Plus. But yeah, otherwise (and in all seriousness), mostly incremental improvements these last few generations. The 7 in particular was somewhat underwhelming.

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[zedaroca]

This is a downvote fix... sorry.

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[Anonymous Coward]

why would they need a play store on windows? unlike apple you don't need a buggy pile of shit installed to be able to access and manage your Android device

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[tlhIngan]

I still find it really funny when Apple fans repeatedly bring up the 64-bit processor ('the first introduced in a smartphone'), yet even the latest and most expensive iPhone still has only 3 GB of RAM.

Boasting an accomplishment that has not been realized yet seems a bit silly in my opinion. I mean if Apple produced a series of smartphones with 4 GB+ to take advantage of the 64-bit register then I could understand the gloating but that has not happened yet.

64-bit is not just about RAM. If it was, Intel wouldn't sell processors that could run 64-bit OSes, but were limited to 2GB of RAM tops.

Specifically, in ARM, AArch64 is much more efficient than AArch32. ARMv8 in 32 bit more is only about 10% faster than an ARMv7. However, AArch64 code on ARMv8 can run literally 100% faster because the 64-bit more is much more optimized for today's superscalar long pipeline CPU architectures.

(And most Androids with 64-bit CPUs have less than 4GB of RAM, too).

In ARM case, 64-bit mode is much faster than 32-bit mode. It turns out things that made ARM great, like conditional instruction execution, also hold it back (it's very hard to do conditional execution in longer pipelined superscalar architectures because by the time you can find out the result, you've done' 90% of the work in fetching operands, decoding, selecting registers, etc). A lot of other legacy cruft has also been removed.

Basically, 64-bit is for speed. It's why Apple claimed the 5S (first iPhone to introduce the 64-bit processor) was 100% faster than the 5 - because AArch64 and ARMv8 was that much faster due to architectural improvements.

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[TheRaven64]

No, I don't trust, and what company can anyone actually trust to do right by buyers nowadays? IMO, it's all a crap shoot, Android's just always seemed to me to be the "best bang for my buck"

There are different degrees of trust. Having worked with both the iOS and Android security teams and with colleagues tracking vulnerabilities in mobile platforms, I treat my Android phone as something that comes pre-compromised: I don't trust it with any sensitive data and it doesn't get any of my passwords and definitely won't be used for Internet banking. In contrast, I'm perfectly happy to use my iPad for all of these things.

In terms of lock-in, both Apple and Alphabet have an interest in keeping me on the platform, and if I buy anything from either of their app stores then I'll treat it as a disposable purchase (i.e. when I calculate the value to me, I'll assume it might stop working at any point). My phone has a bunch of open source things installed via F-Droid to avoid this.

In terms of data harvesting, Apple tries to avoid knowing too much about me because they don't want to deal with legal issues, whereas Alphabet makes 95+% of its revenue from advertising and so wants to harvest as much from me as possible. As a result, I'm happy to use the built-in web browser and mail client on my iPad, but installed Firefox and K9 on my phone (before I stopped using the phone for email).

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[TheRaven64]

64-bit on iOS makes a big difference with Objective-C, because you can now embed the reference count in the high bits of the class pointer and can also embed a lot more small objects directly in object pointers. AArch64 is designed from scratch as a compiler target, whereas AArch32 has a lot of legacy that was intended for assembly programmers, some of which is hard to use from a compiler and some of which is really hard to implement efficiently on modern pipelines (say 'store multiple' or 'muldiple-wdith floating point registers' to an ARM microarchitect and watch their face sometime - it's entertaining).

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[Anonymous Coward]

I still find it really funny when Apple fans repeatedly bring up the 64-bit processor ('the first introduced in a smartphone'), yet even the latest and most expensive iPhone still has only 3 GB of RAM. Boasting an accomplishment that has not been realized yet seems a bit silly in my opinion. I mean if Apple produced a series of smartphones with 4 GB+ to take advantage of the 64-bit register then I could understand the gloating but that has not happened yet.

Yeah, isn't it funny how the Fandroids always bring up the small memory of iPhones, when real life tests show how crappy memory management on Android phones is. Just look at round 2 of this speed test https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX4JucpvbJM

As for what advantages Apple gets from 64 bits, here's a >3.5 year old article exactly explaining it that even a Fandroid can understand. https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2013-09-27-arm64-and-you.html

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[MatthiasF]

A video made by a Pro-Apple Youtube channel. Yes, quite definitive, note heavy sarcasm.

As far as the 64-bit explanation page you linked, it told me much of what I already knew and supports my position. To quote from your link:

"The simple fact of moving to 64-bit does little. It makes for slightly faster computations in some cases, somewhat higher memory usage for most programs, and makes certain programming techniques more viable. Overall, it's not hugely significant."

Did you even read it? Doubt it.

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[MatthiasF]

Intel sells 64-bit CPUs for limited RAM systems for continuity of code, not because the 64-bit would run the code better.

As far as the 100% faster bit, you're absolutely full of it. The most seen from the change was 28% in benchmark comparisons and most of that was attributed simply from improvements generation-over-generation in the silicon and not the bit rate change. Here's a comparison between the architectures when used by the Raspberry Pi tick:

http://www.cnx-software.com/20...

Provide a citation proving your position, because I cannot find any data supporting your statements.

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[MatthiasF]

You're spewing psuedo-tech speech for tagged pointers, which have been around in other operating systems and architectures for nearly thirty years. It's not novel and it certainly isn't that big a break through for a smart phone. Typical trumped up Apple developer non-sense.

Re:hold off or went elsewhere?

[TheRaven64]

Of course it's not new - the Lisp machines were doing it decades ago, and I never implied that it was. I don't like to use the term tagged pointer in this regard, because that's a massively overloaded term and originated with the kind of tagged pointers that exist on the architecture that I work on.

However, with 64 bits, you have a lot more space to use for values and you have a lot more bits to use for tags. The top 16 bits are unused for address translation, and so can be used to store other information in any valid pointer. 64-bit JavaScript implementations often use this, because those bits are also used for NaN flags in a double, so you can use an invalid NaN pattern to indicate that the low 48 bits are a pointer. Apple's Objective-C implementation uses these bits in the isa pointer of objects to hold the reference count. This shrinks objects and makes reference counting easier. They also adopted a trick that I added to the GNUstep implementation a few years earlier: storing short strings in tagged pointers. It turns out that in desktop applications, strings that are shorter than 7 7-bits of ASCII characters account for 5-20% of all object allocations (path components, keys in dictionaries and so on) and you can conveniently fit these in a 64-bit pointer. When these are used as keys in dictionaries, you also get a cheaper search, as you can use pointer equality rather than invoking an equality method to check for equality.

What is this trash?

[Jack9]

Marketing spin is not news. Stop parroting Reuters.

Re:What is this trash?

[Tough Love]

Marketing spin is not news.

What is not news about the richest company in the known universe missing big?

Re:What is this trash?

[stealth_finger]

Marketing spin is not news.

What is not news about the richest company in the known universe missing big?

Missing big? When they 'only' sold 50.76m instead of the 52.27m predicted? Please excuse me while I go find the worlds smallest violin.

Re:What is this trash?

[Tough Love]

Missing big? When they 'only' sold 50.76m instead of the 52.27m predicted?

Down 2% instantly, for good reason. If you bet on AAPL yesterday, today you are broke. Suggest you learn about finance :)

Re:What is this trash?

[stealth_finger]

Missing big? When they 'only' sold 50.76m instead of the 52.27m predicted?

Down 2% instantly, for good reason. If you bet on AAPL yesterday, today you are broke. Suggest you learn about finance :)

Maybe you should learn about gambling.

Re:What is this trash?

[Tough Love]

Agree that relying on Apple in any way is gambling.

10th anniversary?

[fred6666]

I know quite a lot of Apple fanboys and none of them ever said they were holding off for the 10th anniversary iPhone. Nothing special is expected, it will be better than the 9th, worse than the 11th.

Apple probably lost many sales to Android manufacturers, however.

Re:10th anniversary?

[Cmdln Daco]

As a buyer, that means I am paying a large bounty to the manufacturer if I buy an Apple Phone.

Not that many of us here are cellphone producers. Most of us are buyers.

When that has sunk in for a while, well....

They sold 50 MILLION phones. Let that sink in.

[sethmeisterg]

Only jagoff financial "analysts" can spin this as bad news. That's a massive number of new devices sold, and that's WITH people holding back for the 10th anniversary iPhone. If they don't raise Jesus from the dead each quarter they're panned. What horseshit.

Re:They sold 50 MILLION phones. Let that sink in.

[rogoshen1]

Are you implying that the stock market is something other than legalized gambling requiring ever expanding growth (and nothing more?)

Re:They sold 50 MILLION phones. Let that sink in.

[Cmdln Daco]

Who is holding back for the 10th Anniversary phone?

What value is there in waiting?

I mean, we need to see some real reasons cited as to why these mythical customers are 'waiting.'

Meh.

[Frosty Piss]

My iPhone 5S works fine, does what I want, serves its purpose. The only thing I want is more realestate, which will maybe drive me to an iPhone 6-something when I feel the price point is right (soon). I like my iPhone, so I will not be getting an Android. But I'm not going to spend a fortune on The Latest and Greatest a long as what I have works. It's a phone, not the center of my world, so I'm fine both sticking with Apple and being a few years behind the bleeding edge.

Re: Meh.

[Frosty Piss]

Guy who says "meh" + guy who names himself "frosty piss" / guy who is satisfied with his 5s = DOUCHE BAG. Don't get offended Frosty, it's math. It's never wrong. Just checking - do you drive a 15 year old Subaru without a/c?

Worse. I drive a Tarus wagon.

Re:Meh.

[lazarus]

Suggestion: Go with 6+ not 7+. I've had both and preferred the 6+. Battery life seemed to last almost forever. Disappointing battery life in the 7+ I think because they've ratcheted up the speed (which seems mostly unnecessary for regular use). Even turning all the junk off doesn't seem to help.

The 6+ is an awesome phone.

Analysts fail to predict future, again

[radarskiy]

But since they face no consequences, they have no incentive to improve.

Re:Analysts fail to predict future, again

[WheezyJoe]

since they face no consequences

They face no consequences unless they post copy (write something). True? Untrue? Don't matter. Tomorrow's another day. Business journalism. Pays bills.

In other news, Apple has $250 Billion sitting around in cash, in spite of spending on a completely insane spaceship headquarters and still not offering a decent tower workstation. Upcoming iPhone 8 rumored to be cool.

Whatever. Probably fit the entire Pentagon inside the courtyard of that spaceship. But if they would just take an 8-figure round-off error on that cash and give it to me, I would be ok with that.

Re:Analysts fail to predict future, again

[Cmdln Daco]

The people who pay the most attention to the fact that Apple has $250B laying around in cash refer to Apple as 'a gadget maker.'

They don't care about the Mac. Almost nobody who is an Apple customer cares about the Mac anymore. Their gadget division has dwarfed their computer division.

Re:They sold 50 MILLION phones. Let that sink in.

[Tough Love]

Trying to get that number to sink deep down in, I really am, but it's just not happening. Citizens of the world buy more than a billion Android phones a year now. By that yardstick, it is hard to get all slack jawed about Apple's numbers.

Re:They sold 50 MILLION phones. Let that sink in.

[knorthern knight]

>Trying to get that number to sink deep down in, I really am, but it's just not happening.

Apple gets just about all the industry's profits... http://www.reuters.com/article...

> For the second quarter, the company's net income rose to $11.03 billion, or
> $2.10 per share, compared with $10.52 billion, or $1.90 per share, a year earlier.

And, oh yeah, Apple now has a quarter of a ***TRILLION*** dollars of cash.

Try to get that to sink in.

> Citizens of the world buy more than a billion Android phones a year now.

"Losing money on every sale, but making up for it in volume" does not get you a quarter of a trillion in the bank. The goal of a business is to make a profit, and Apple is doing that very nicely, thank you. I am not an Apple fanboi, and do not own any Apple products. I have Dell PCs and a Samsung tablet at home, so I'm neutral here.

Re:Apple vs Android - apple in for a shock

[Cmdln Daco]

Have you ever used a Windows Phone?

I have run iOS, Windows Phone 8, and Android. I presently use some Android devices. Windows Phone as an operating device was really nice, I would rate it above Android. There just aren't any apps for it and never will be. WP8 has a nice snappy interface, even on the low-end Nokia that I used.

Re:They sold 50 MILLION phones. Let that sink in.

[Cmdln Daco]

That doesn't translate 'waiting for the 10th Anniversary Phone.' That translates 'waiting to see if there is anything good coming.'

Re:They sold 50 MILLION phones. Let that sink in.

[Cmdln Daco]

This is a nerd site. Not a shareholder or financial site.

If this wasn't a nerd site, we would probably all love Larry Ellisison and Oracle. He is fabulously rich and got that way selling software. Instead nerds consider Ellison to be a blight on the technology industry.

There isn't the same consensus regarding Apple at this time, but citing 'huge amounts of money made' isn't going to impress Slashdotters. That isn't really the measure of success in nerd culture.

Avoiding dongles?

[Midnight Thunder]

Maybe it's due to the stupid need for a dongle to listen to music? I have an iPhone 7 and the need to have a dongle is nuts. I don't use Apple's earbuds since my ears aren't compatible. Maybe 2016 was the year of the dongle? Hopefully Apple comes to their senses in 2017?

Re: Avoiding dongles?

[MachineShedFred]

You know any Bluetooth audio device works with an iphone 7, right?

Re: Avoiding dongles?

[Midnight Thunder]

I am fully aware, though beyond the need to charge yet another device there is typically at least an $80 price difference between the wired and wireless equivalents.

Re: Avoiding dongles?

[MachineShedFred]

Moving the goalposts is fun.

"I don't want a dongle to listen to music" quickly becomes something else when it's discovered that you don't actually have to have a dongle to listen to music. Amazing!

Re: Avoiding dongles?

[MachineShedFred]

Okay, but that's moving the goalposts. A dongle is not required to listen to music. Bluetooth may not be an adequate solution for you for several legitimate reasons (audio quality, battery, etc.) but saying that the phone requires a dongle to listen to music is pure FUD, and I think you know that.

Re:They sold 50 MILLION phones. Let that sink in.

[Karlt1]

Yes because Slashdot users are the market makers....

https://slashdot.org/story/01/...

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:They sold 50 MILLION phones. Let that sink in.

[Tough Love]

...He is fabulously rich and got that way selling software. Instead nerds consider Ellison to be a blight on the technology industry. There isn't the blah blah, and blah and blah...

Spoken well and truly as someone who has never had to wallow in crappy Oracle applications and buttfucking Oracle license fees or be the target of Oracle's legal trolling.

Re:Apple vs Android - apple in for a shock

[stealth_finger]

Can't see how an iphone is better than a Windows Phone? If you're referring to apps sure, however the operating system and capabilities are far superior.

I have a windows phone and it's a fine piece of hardware, no real complaints I can come up with. Apps on the other hand are seriously lacking and like it or not it's the apps that make the difference.

Re: They sold 50 MILLION phones. Let that sink in.

[Anonymous Coward]

So apple customers are suckers who got taken by very effective marketing. For all viral marketing, my wife just replaced her 6c with a Samsung. And, magically, the Samsung phone just works. She installed the half dozen apps she wants, and the 10 year old did something to make the keyboard a swipe one, and yesterday, in about 4 hours, it became better than the iPhone it replaced. Oh, and the battery lasts longer and I saved $200.

iPhone almost a mature product now

[steve90]

I have an iPhone 6 and it still runs perfectly, battery life still good, runs latest version of iOS etc. I am not going to replace it unless it breaks or becomes unusable - it was an expensive phone when new. There must be huge numbers of people in a similar position. It is a pretty small group of people that need or want the absolute latest and greatest.

Re:They sold 50 MILLION phones. Let that sink in.

[Tough Love]

Apple gets just about all the industry's profits...

That tired old lie is getting tired and old. It depends on a credulous listener overlooking the fact that there are thousands of companies involved in the Android ecosystem, from lithography equipment vendors to front line salespeople, all making money on Android. The sum total dwarves Apple's income by a factor of, oh, roughly 5 and growing. Which is the rapidly growing total amount spent on Android phones compared to the shrinking total spent on Apple phones.

Tired old lies. Tired old liars. The more down Apple goes, the more up will go the lying. Courage, yeah, that's what it takes, it's courage. Not cynicism at all, no, it's courage.

There we have it: basically all the modern Apple cultist can manage is courage to downmod. Sucks to be you.