Apple Will No Longer Reveal How Many iPhones, iPads, and Macs It Sells (theverge.com)

Yesterday, during the company's Q4 earnings call, Apple's chief financial officer Luca Maestri said the company will no longer report unit sales of its main hardware divisions, including iPhones, iPad, and Mac. "This is the same as protocols Apple already follows for its smaller devices, such as the Apple Watch, AirPods, and HomePod, which are bundled under the 'Other Products' category," The Verge reports. From the report: The announcement comes after iPhone unit sales percentage was unchanged year over year, despite a revenue bump of 29 percent. The decision to stop disclosing unit sales is because that figure is "not representative of underlying strength of our business," Maestri said. "A unit of sale is less relevant today than it was in our past," he says, adding that unit sales increase are still a clear part of Apple's goals. While unit sales may not accurately represent Apple's business performance, it's a figure that analysts and journalists have used to calculate a product's average selling price. For example, that number can provide insight into how well different iPhone models are selling, as newer iPhones like the XS, XS Max, and XR are priced higher than older models like the now-discontinued SE, 6S, and 6.

Comments

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[ad454]

We are still making money in the short term by overcharging suckers, while losing market share, and also pushing iOS developers away from the Macs they required.

This is the problem with the short term thinking and incentive structures in western multi-nationals corporations, who only care about the next quarter or so. Which is typically done at the expense of long term business viability.

Re:Why should they?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that the point is that they were happy to report it when it made them look good and positively impacted the stock price. Now that their sales numbers are flattening out they are going to stop communicating this information to the shareholders and the rest of the market.

Seems a bit cuntish. But then we are talking about Apple, so...

Sustainability.

[msauve]

A trillion dollar company, supported in vast majority by (essentially) a single product. Why wouldn't they try to obfuscate when basic facts start looking "iffy?"

Really, the whole iThing ecosystem came to be in 15 years, and it's a monoculture. It's a huge bet for it being sustainable. Heck, 15 years ago, GE was king of the hill and way more diversified, look where they are now.

Re:Sustainability.

[Tough Love]

Apple painted themselves into a corner on this one. To make the numbers it was just way easier to jack up prices than to attack the bargain hunter segment, which is most of the market and the only part that is still growing. Too late now, the value gap between Android and Apple is almost a factor of two, if Apple tries to close it they will be faced with a revenue collapse the likes of which the tech industry has never seen.

Apple might get lucky and make it through 4Q without a revenue miss but it's a crapshoot. After that, well... all I can say is, Apple is on the verge of becoming number 3 in volume behind Huawei and by this time next year they could be number 4 behind Xiaomi as well. The total market is saturated, no question about it, so all that comes right out of I-phone unit sales. Just no way to make up the revenue gap by price increases.

So place your bet... Apple misses big in 4Q? or they keep the game going for another couple of quarters before chickens come home to roost? The 7% haircut today says, smart money knows Apple is a growth stock no more, it's a shrink stock if anything. The technical term is Peak Apple.

Re:Sustainability.

[Kjella]

A trillion dollar company, supported in vast majority by (essentially) a single product. (...) Really, the whole iThing ecosystem came to be in 15 years, and it's a monoculture. It's a huge bet for it being sustainable.

Where that "one thing" is near the ultimate convergence device replacing your dumbphone, MP3 player, palm pilot, camera, GPS tracker and so on. And according to StatCounter more people browse the web on phones than desktops. There's a lot of good arguments against Apple, but this is a bit like saying a car company depends on a demand for cars. While that's true it's kinda hard to imagine modern society functioning without cars or something so close as to practically be cars. If I stare into the crystal ball I don't see smartphones going away the next 10, 20 or 50 years so the market seems extremely sustainable, the only question in my mind is if they're made by Apple.

There's lots of cheaper alternatives than Apple, there has been and there will be. But for a device that people use so much I don't think there's any reason to think the premium market is going away. And in some ways Apple is obviously pushing boundaries like with the A12/A12X chip, it's expensive but it's also the fastest on the market. And not everyone is a fan of the world's biggest data mining company being the other choice. If Apple is going down it's primarily because they priced themselves out of premium and into the luxury market with $1000+ phones. At least they support old phones so you can have one for years, unlike Android where all the cheap phones lose support real quick.

And IMHO they have one of the biggest market opportunities possible to launch their own ARM line of laptops/desktops and take over a huge market from Microsoft/Intel. Do they have weaknesses and threats too? Sure. This is not investment advice. But the people who declare it dead or dying will probably end up just as disappointed as those who wanted Micro$oft dead. They obviously fumbled the ball quite a bit and missed out on the whole phone market, but to really go away they have to hit a dead end hard. It happens sometimes like Nokia did, but that's actually the exception not the rule.

Reality Distortion Field

[somenickname]

These are not the numbers you are looking for...

Very telling ...

[CaptainDork]

... it is.

There's a good reason to abandon bragging rights.

Re:Hmm, sales are down?

[Tough Love]

We already know that I-phone sales are down, it was in the quarterly report. The fact that Apple will keep unit sales numbers secret from now on means they know that sales will soon be a lot more down from next quarter on, probably forever, and that's how the market read it today.

Re:Hmm, sales are down?

[cyn1c77]

We already know that I-phone sales are down, it was in the quarterly report

We do? It was?

The year ago quarter they sold 46.7 million phones. This quarter they sold 46.9 million.

FY 2017 they sold 216.8 million phones
FY 2018 they sold 217.7 million phones

Which of those figures show that sales are down?

You are cherrypicking data. Their sales dropped after 2015.
FY 2018 they sold 217.7 million phones
FY 2017 they sold 216.8 million phones
FY 2016 they sold 211.9 million phones
FY 2015 they sold 231.2 million phones
(Sales continuously increased before that time.)

Also, the issue is not that their sales are dropping, it's that their rate of increase is dropping, which is indicative of lack of enthusiasm in their product.

You can see this from their sales trends here and here .

Re:Apple not losing market share ...

[Tough Love]

Apple is not losing marketshare.

Apple is losing marketshare.

Now Apple is already down to 11% of the worldwide market and was passed by Huawei at 15%. Xiaomi is now only 2% behind Apple, coming up fast, and Oppo is 3% behind. Apple will soon be fourth or fifth by market share.