While Apple had openly prepared us for it last quarter, seeing it in print is still startling: iPhone sales have fallen, year-on-year, for the first time ever.
The company has announced it sold 51.2 million handsets in the first three months, down 16 per cent from the 61 million it shifted last year.
As the iPhone goes, so does Apple, and so the resulting revenue of $50.6 billion is also down from the $58 billion posted for the same period in 2015. Profits on the cash are also down 23 per cent.
Elsewhere iPad sales continued to slide with a 19 per cent fall compared with a year ago (10.3 million from 12.6 million).
The company’s Mac line, for so long immune from the downward trend of PC sales is now on the slide too. The 4.1 million sold were a 12 per cent drop from the April 2015 announcement.
There’s still no word on how many Apple Watches the company has sold a year into its life span.
OPINION: Not even Apple is immune from smartphones slowdown
If you think this is all bad news for Apple, try not to weep too much for the firm. It profited to the tune of $10 billion in the last three months and still has $233 billion hoarded away in cold hard cash.
Another bright spot is the announcement Apple Music now has 13 million paying subscribers, which is up from the 11 million stated in February.
CEO Tim Cook says: “Our team executed extremely well in the face of strong macroeconomic headwinds. We are very happy with the continued strong growth in revenue from Services, thanks to the incredible strength of the Apple ecosystem and our growing base of over one billion active devices.”
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Related: iPhone 8
The earnings call which follows the announcement often holds some clues as to Apple’s forthcoming announcements, so we’ll bring you word if anything of note is revealed.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.