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Apple Beats Sales Estimates Amid Reports of Poor Demand For iPhone X (bloomberg.com)

Apple today reported revenue and profit that beat analysts' estimates and projected continued sales momentum. The results come amid reports that demand for its flagship iPhone X have fallen. Bloomberg reports: Apple revenue rose 16 percent to $61.1 billion in the fiscal second quarter. That was the fastest growth in more than two years. Profit came in at $2.73 a share, the company said Tuesday in a statement. Analysts expected sales of $60.9 billion and earnings per share of $2.64, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Fiscal third-quarter revenue will be $51.5 billion to $53.5 billion, also ahead of Wall Street forecasts.

Apple sold 52.2 million iPhones in the fiscal second quarter, up 2.9 percent from a year earlier. Analysts had projected of 52.3 million, on average, although some investors expected fewer units. The average selling price was $728, versus analysts' expectations of $740. That suggested the flagship iPhone X didn't perform as well as some anticipated when it launched last year. Earlier this year, Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri said iPhone revenue would grow by at least 10 percent year-over-year in the fiscal second quarter. Apple easily hit that goal, with 14 percent iPhone revenue growth in the period.

15 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Suckers!! by SuperKendall · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Ha ha! You morons fall for trumped-up reports of Apple sales declines like EVERY QUARTER so the short sellers can cash in.

    The amusing thing is, the Apple Haters of Slashdot act as a tool of the wealthy elite.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
    1. Re:Suckers!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Ha ha! You morons fall for trumped-up reports of Apple sales declines like EVERY QUARTER so the short sellers can cash in.

      The amusing thing is, the Apple Haters of Slashdot act as a tool of the wealthy elite.

      What torture lurks within a single thought
      When grown too constant; and however kind,
      However welcome still, the weary mind
      Aches with its presence. Dull remembrance taught
      Remembers on unceasingly; unsought
      The old delight is with us but to find
      That all recurring joy is pain refined,
      Become a habit, and we struggle, caught.
      You lie upon my heart as on a nest,
      Folded in peace, for you can never know
      How crushed I am with having you at rest
      Heavy upon my life. I love you so
      You bind my freedom from its rightful quest.
      In mercy lift your drooping wings and go.

    2. Re:Suckers!! by Ronin+Developer · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They sell the same number of units as last year at a higher price and post a profit? So, how exactly is demand down?

      What is says is that people still like their products. The price point was a bit high for many, but it still sold. Go figure.

      If they lower their price point on a feature similar model later this year, they will outsell the competitors yet again.

    3. Re:Suckers!! by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Interesting

      then the profit growth for the company is nearing its end.

      Apple has a P/E of 18. Nobody is expecting much profit growth.

      The average P/E for the S&P 500 is 24.

      Amazon has a P/E of over 300, which means investors are expecting Amazon's profits to soar ten-fold.

    4. Re:Suckers!! by mentil · · Score: 2

      Amazon reinvests nearly all its profits into the company, to minimize taxes and maximize growth. It's done pretty well for them so far. Investors probably expect this to end once Bezos is out, just like Apple implemented dividends and stock buybacks after Cook took over.

      --
      Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
    5. Re:Suckers!! by TheFakeTimCook · · Score: 2

      Apple sold almost exactly the same number of phones as last year.

      So did Samsung, LG, and HTC. Yet, for some reason, you don't have the same dire predictions for those brands.

      I Wonder why...

  2. Re:iPhone X Fails by TheFakeTimCook · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > the flagship iPhone X didn't perform as well as some anticipated

    iPhone X failure - with it's price tag and ridiculous notch is probably what Apple is going to tweak next. Their expected "new" line of *cheaper* phones, support contracts and accessories (like the Airpod) will help Apple continue to fleece their customers. Battery issues will also help drive up sales...

    1. Samsung's flagship phone is priced within $50 of the iPhone X.

    2. Apple's notch is not "Ridiculous"; because it is there for a purpose. what is TRULY "Ridiculous", however, is all the Android phones that slavishly COPIED Apple (yet again!) and their "Ridiculous" Notch, even though they don't actually NEED it!

    3. Say what you will about Apple's battery performance; but at least they never got their battery-operated products banned from airplanes...

  3. Re:iPhone X Fails by dgatwood · · Score: 2, Informative

    2. Apple's notch is not "Ridiculous"; because it is there for a purpose. what is TRULY "Ridiculous", however, is all the Android phones that slavishly COPIED Apple (yet again!) and their "Ridiculous" Notch, even though they don't actually NEED it!

    It may not be ridiculous, but I was watching that keynote in a room full of Apple fans, and the number of "what the f**k" reactions was telling. The word that kept coming up over and over was "ugly".

    What was ridiculous was not the notch so much as the fact that the product seemed to have clearly been rushed to market to hit a deadline. They shipped with that ugly notch because they couldn't get the fingerprint-through-the-screen tech in quantities soon enough, and if they had waited just a few months, they could have shipped the product they really wanted to ship, rather than watching as the rest of the industry made it happen a few months later.

    And I say that as somebody who has used Apple hardware almost exclusively since the mid-1980s. If S.J. (requiescat in pace) were still alive and running things, I'm absolutely certain that he would have thrown it across the room and said, "This is the ugliest f**king piece of s**t I've ever seen. We're not shipping it until you find a way to get rid of that f**king notch," except that he probably would have used a greater number and variety of swear words.

    Just saying.

    --

    Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  4. Re:iPhone X Fails by thegarbz · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why are you lying?

    1. The S9+ 64GB model is 888EUR, the iPhone X 64GB is 1056EUR a difference of 168EUR close to $200USD from Vodaphone. The price gap is the same from electronics stores. From the electronics stores the S9+ 256GB model is 1049EUR vs the iPhone X 256GB being 1319EUR, a difference of 270EUR!

    But that's just EU. I hear you man! The S9+ 64GB is $799 in the US, the iPhone X 64GB is $999 a difference of $200USD

    2. Ridiculous is in the eye of the beholder. What is not is calling it "Apple's Notch". It's a "notch" period. It is ridiculous on the iPhone X, and it was ridiculous on the 2 android phones which introduced BEFORE Apple copied it. But it's amazing that Apple "needs" the ridiculous piece of shit while Android doesn't. You just gave props to Android. Bad FakeTimCook, Bad.

    3. No Android phone on the market is banned from airplanes. There were phones that were recalled in a panic resulting in users not only being $0 out of pocket, but actually getting a significant discount on a replacement phone. All Apple users get is a middle finger, and they LOVE IT!

  5. Re:iPhone X Fails by Bongo · · Score: 2

    The sad truth is... that ALL Android manufacturers AND Apple... are making a mockery and a fool of themselves and their customers...
    And for what? To please the absolute dumbest people they can find, because they are trying to appeal to as many people as possible...

    Technology has ceased to be a tool and has become fashion instead... to hell with actual usefull functions, what matters are milking customers to the extreme AND to put whatever is HIP right here and now in to the next product ... a sad state of affairs if you ask me...

    It makes me sad and frankly a little bit sick...

    Another sad truth is that parents buy breakfast cereal for their kids, ruining their health. But that's how it is, companies make what they can sell, not necessarily what's good for humanity. But I think you are being a bit harsh on Apple. TouchID does go a long way to solving a problem: a way to help people keep their phones more secured whilst not relying on passwords. And likewise, FaceID is better than asking people to type in complex pass phrases. And actually, you can, if you look, find a lot of useful functionality. The trouble is, as you say, they gotta keep selling stuff, and often it is useless crap that sounds fashionable but doesn't do anything much worthwhile. Big energy companies went that route with wind farms, for example. Sounds great, so now people continue to make excuses to try to explain away why, actually, it is terrible in practice. Technology, society, culture, beliefs, fashions. Fortunately, you don't have to be totally depressed about it. I like the argument that innovation is an evolutionary process, in that, you CANNOT truly know in advance whether something will be useful or not. So you just have to let everyone, even greedy companies, experiment. Then wait twenty or fifty years and see how things turn out. Eventually, crap does get dropped. The thing many people forget is that the process of self-correction can take many decades. But it is largely unavoidable. Correction takes a long time.

  6. TFDR by SuperKendall · · Score: 3, Funny

    Too Flowery, Didn't Read.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  7. Re:Misleading headline by radarskiy · · Score: 2

    "Apple revenue rose 16 percent to $61.1 billion in the fiscal second quarter. ... Analysts expected sales of $60.9 billion"

    $61.1 billion is larger than $60.9 billion.

  8. Re:iPhone X Fails by Dixie_Flatline · · Score: 2

    The 'fingerprint through the screen' rumor was probably never true.

    Tech like FaceID is planned a long way in advance; if Apple were ever going to use fingerprint sensing through the screen, it would've been as a stopgap TO FaceID, not as a superior technology to FaceID. Apple's position is that FaceID is better, and for them, it's the future. You can quibble over that if you like, but the interviews and intentions seem clear to me: as soon as FaceID was ready to ship, they wanted to use it.

    No doubt that Apple's ultimate goal is to get rid of the notch. There's very little defense of it as anything other than a necessary compromise at the moment. When they can ditch it, you know they will. But I think Jobs would've taken this particular thing in stride. He probably would've played up the notch more, calling it magical and amazing and whatever else...until they were able to get rid of it, and then suddenly reversing course and saying that a hidden camera unit is what they were intending all along. Apple's history is full of times where Jobs talked up something only to abandon it—publicly, on stage—as if he'd never thought it was a good idea.

  9. Re:iPhone X Fails by dgatwood · · Score: 2

    Uh, the rest of the industry made what happen?

    Fingerprint scanning through the screen. I would have thought that was obvious from the context.

    --

    Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  10. Re:iPhone X Fails by dgatwood · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The 'fingerprint through the screen' rumor was probably never true.

    Apple often works with multiple companies in parallel, trying various technologies to decide what they're going to ship. I would be shocked if Apple weren't well aware of it and hadn't been using engineering samples to see how it would work in real devices. Whether they decided to go with it based on incorrectly believing FaceID to be better or because of Qualcomm's production delays, I couldn't say, but my money would be on the latter, because I apparently have more faith in the competence of their security engineers than you do.

    ... if Apple were ever going to use fingerprint sensing through the screen, it would've been as a stopgap TO FaceID, not as a superior technology to FaceID.

    It is likely that it would have been used exclusively until they could do FaceID without the notch, but I don't think for a minute that FaceID would have replaced TouchID had it not been for production ramping delays from Qualcomm. FaceID might have been eventually added in parallel, once they solved the notch problem, or maybe not, largely depending on how low they could get the BOM cost.

    FaceID really is fundamentally inferior in at least two important ways:

    • From a security perspective, FaceID is a disaster, because too many siblings look too much alike. The people most likely to be able to grab your phone and mess with it are also most likely to be able to open it with FaceID, whereas with TouchID, there's roughly zero chance of that working, because even identical twins don't have similar enough prints. The theoretical 20x improvement in security actually turns out to be a huge reduction in security when tested in the real world. This should be unsurprising to pretty much anyone who has ever looked at two siblings and said, "I can barely tell them apart".
    • From a usability perspective, FaceID is still not as good, because it requires user attention to unlock the device (unless you disable that, in which case its security gets even worse). I would estimate that I'm looking at my current iPhone for fewer than 10% of unlocks. Most of the time, I unlock it as I'm pulling it off my belt before I even look down at the thing. Stealing my attention for those extra few seconds doesn't always matter, but often, it means I can be doing something else while I'm unlocking the device. And, of course, if you happen to have a car that lacks Siri integration and are unlocking the phone to start a phone call, those extra few seconds of attention could be fatal.

    Other than a targeted attack by the sort of third party who would find a way to lift your prints and make a latex finger, there's nothing that FaceID handles better than TouchID, and in most of the common use cases, it is significantly worse. And in the case of a targeted attack by such a third party, they're likely to have their hands on hardware that can crack an iPhone externally anyway, making the differences between TouchID and FaceID moot.

    So I strongly disagree that TouchID would be a stop-gap until FaceID was ready, because FaceID can never be ready. At a fairly fundamental level, facial biometrics are trash—even more so than fingerprint biometrics. At best, FaceID would have be added as a way to augment security for specific transactions (e.g. to use Apple Pay, you must use a fingerprint *and* a face match), not as a replacement. That really is the *only* way FaceID makes sense at all. As a replacement, it is downright bizarre.

    --

    Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.