Skip to main content

iPhone sales plummeted, but Apple Music saved the day

apple earnings q4 2017 logo
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Apple’s earnings results are in for the fiscal quarter ending June 2016, and the company is reporting lower sales than the previous quarter and the corresponding quarter of 2015.

To be precise, Apple sold 40.4 million iPhone units, 9.95 million iPads, and 4.2 million Macs in the quarter. For the same quarter last year, Apple sold 47.5 million iPhones, 10.9 million iPads, and 4.8 million Macs — this year’s numbers are down across the board. Notably, there’s a 15-percent drop in iPhone sales from a year earlier.

iPhone demand was stronger than what these numbers indicated, as the company reduced inventory by 4 million units during the quarter, according to Luca Maestri, Apple’s CFO. But the lower-than-expected sales are due to slowing demand for smartphones in general. An example can be seen in Apple’s numbers in China — consumers are opting for cheaper handsets, and that has led to Apple seeing a 33-percent decline in revenue from the previous year in greater China.

Still, the collective hardware sales and revenue from Apple’s other services and products totaled $42.4 billion. That’s a lot — but it’s still down from the previous quarter’s total revenue of $50.6 billion, and is 15 percent below the corresponding quarter for 2015, which saw revenue of $49.6 billion.

“We are pleased to report … results that reflect stronger customer demand and business performance than we anticipated at the start of the quarter,” CEO Tim Cook said in the earnings report. “We had a very successful launch of iPhone SE and we’re thrilled by customers’ and developers’ response to software and services we previewed at WWDC in June.”

As Cook highlighted, the company is boasting of increased revenue from the sale of services. And it’s right to do so — revenue from services, including Apple Music, the App Store, and iCloud storage, jumped 19 percent from a year earlier to $5.98 billion. Still, services are a minor fraction of revenue compared to what the iPhone pulls in.

In the earnings call, Cook repeated how the Apple Watch is the “best-selling smartwatch in the world,” and how the iPhone SE’s demand outstripped supply.

Editors' Recommendations

Julian Chokkattu
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Julian is the mobile and wearables editor at Digital Trends, covering smartphones, fitness trackers, smartwatches, and more…
The iPhone’s new AI features may come with a gigantic catch
An iPhone 15 Pro Max laying face-down outside, showing the Natural Titanium color.

Imagine paying a minimum of $999 for a new iPhone 14 Pro in 2022, only to discover that it can’t run the full iOS 18 experience in less than two years. It might sound dystopian, especially for a product known for its long shelf life that's largely the result of an industry-leading software update policy at Apple.

Yet, it seems that nightmarish surprise will be here in just over a week. Bloomberg recently reported on some crucial AI-driven features coming to iOS 18, with Siri being one of the main recipients of all that innovation. But iPhone users might have to pay a pretty price for it all.

Read more
What Apple isn’t telling you about the new iPad Pro’s OLED display
Watching video on M4 iPad Pro.

Tandem OLED! Awesome, right? Wait … hold the phone. Tandem OLED? What in the what?

Did Apple geniuses just smash together two OLED panels and, et voilà, a brand new, unprecedentedly awesome display is born, exclusive to the new iPad Pro? Well, not exactly. There’s more to it than that, and in the end, it’s great news for all of us.
Digging into the world of Tandem OLED

Read more
Here’s how iOS 18 could change the way you use your iPhone
The lock screen on the Apple iPhone 15 Plus.

It seems the long-overdue Siri overhaul will finally arrive at WWDC in just over a week from now, and the digital assistant will embrace AI trickery in all its forms. According to Bloomberg, Apple’s planned upgrades for Siri will deeply integrate with on-device functions at the OS level and with the installed apps, too.

“The new system will allow Siri to take command of all the features within apps for the first time,” the report says. The most notable capability is that Siri will only require voice prompts to interact with apps, thanks to a major change in the AI architecture powering it and putting large language models in command, just the way Gemini or ChatGPT draw their own skills from such models.

Read more