If you didn’t hear, Apple’s results from last quarter were pretty good (apart from the iPad). But that was last quarter.
“Apple reversed its iPhone slump. But what’s next?” (Tip o’ the antlers to Philip Speicher and Paul Lefebvre.)
Yeah, come on! We are we even talking about the past when Apple’s future’s so dark they have to wear night-vision goggles?
Apple has snapped out of the first sales slump in the iPhone’s decade-long history, although the modest upturn doesn’t mean that it has broken out of its innovation funk.
Innovation Funk sounds like an awesome James Brown meets electronica fusion movement. It also sounds like you don’t own a pair of AirPods.
If anything, the numbers Apple released Tuesday highlight the company’s growing dependence on the iPhone…
Higher iPhone sales are a real problem. Just like lower iPhone sales.
Meanwhile, Apple’s rivals have been rolling out new products in other promising fields such as augmented reality, virtual reality and artificial intelligence.
Oh, yeah? And how much money are they making off all that? In this calculus, Facebook owning Oculus equals winning while here in reality Apple’s services business alone is larger than Facebook’s total revenues.
To provide another example from the upside-down world of Apple analysis, Apple is actually making money in the smartwatch market, unlike basically everyone else, but the conventional wisdom is that the Apple Watch is a tremendous flop so… It would be rude to buck conventional wisdom. Can’t have that. They spent all that time coming up with it at the convention.
iPHONES ON THE RISE AGAIN … BARELY
…
If not for the calendar quirk, the iPhone sales slump might not have ended. Apple sold an average of 5.6 million iPhones per week in the latest quarter compare to 5.7 million iPhones per week in the previous year.
Yeah, the quarter had an extra week and if you only take that factor into account, then iPhone sales were down. However, if you take all the factors into account, like Bernstein’s Tony Sacconaghi did…
I understand there were differences of the timing of the launch, so—making all those adjustments, it looks like iPhone units were probably up by low single digits.
So, iPhones sales were up but Apple still gets a sad face sticker, for reasons.
Let’s roll back the clock all the way to, oh, Saturday, when Microsoft was lauded for its great quarter when Surface sales only went down a little. If you don’t think it’s a little off that Microsoft gets praise when Surface sales only fall a little and Apple still gets shade when iPhone sales actually rise a little… well, then the Macalope doesn’t know what to say to you. Except maybe banana frog town the elephant button.