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Liveblog: Apple’s Q1 2017 earnings call

Company is expected to return to year-over-year growth after being down in 2016.

The iPhone 7 and the AirPods.
Enlarge / The iPhone 7 and the AirPods.
Andrew Cunningham

Apple will host its earnings call for the first quarter of its fiscal 2017 this afternoon at 5pm Eastern (10pm UK), and we'll be liveblogging the call and the analyst Q&A session to give you all the information along with our insights and charts.

This quarter's results are expected to be a return to year-over-year growth after a disappointing 2016 in which Apple's year-over-year earnings fell for the first time since 2001. Apple's guidance from last quarter predicted that the company would make between $76 and $78 billion this quarter with profit margins between 38 and 38.5 percent. It made $74.6 billion in revenue in Q1 of 2016.

Expect services revenue, a consistent bright spot in Apple's 2016 earnings reports, to continue climbing. The Mac's slow decline throughout 2016 could be slowed or reversed by the introduction of the new MacBook Pros in October. This is the first full quarter of availability for the new Series 1 and Series 2 Apple Watches, which could offset decline in the company's nebulous "Other Products" category. And the iPad, which has been in decline since Q2 of 2014, showed signs of bottoming out in the last couple quarters of 2016. The major wildcard will be iPhone 7 sales—the iPhone is nearly two-thirds of Apple's revenue, so slower sales of the iPhone 6S throughout 2016 were primarily responsible for the company's decline last year.

Finally, we can probably expect the analyst Q&A after the main report to be dominated by questions about the new presidential administration, which has proposed and begun implementing several immigration and international trade policies that could affect Apple's business.

Channel Ars Technica