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.

Comments

Suckers!!

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:Suckers!!

[Ronin Developer]

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.

Re:Suckers!!

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:iPhone X Fails

[TheFakeTimCook]

> 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...

TFDR

[SuperKendall]

Too Flowery, Didn't Read.

Re:iPhone X Fails

[dgatwood]

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.