Apple Will No Longer Reveal How Many iPhones, iPads, and Macs It Sells (theverge.com) 158
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.
Re:Why should they? (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
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OK, I'm going to explain to you why a company cares about a stock price after the first sale. Are you ready? You might want to sit down for this.
Because, in Apple's case, they've been buying back as much stock as they can with their windfall from the Trump tax giveaway. In fact, Apple is one of Apple's biggest sharehol
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They could make the price go down any time they want, just by releasing sales figures again.
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They could make the price go down any time they want, just by releasing sales figures again.
You got that right. They could also make the price go down by never releasing sales figures. See how it works?
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As far as I know it is impossible for a corporation to own stock in itself and I am embarrassed on behalf of pope ratzo, even more so for anyone who would take anything he says seriously, ever again.
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The part your missing is that the largest tranches of stock are being held by APPLE EXECUTIVES.
And trust me, bucko, they're not retiring those shares.
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the largest tranches of stock are being held by APPLE EXECUTIVES.
You are deeply clueless about all matters financial, yet you blow hard on the internet.
0.1% of Apple is owned by insiders. [fidelity.com]
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Yeah, yeah. The only problem is, the top five shareholders of Apple stock are all Apple executives.
https://www.investopedia.com/a... [investopedia.com]
And nothing about your link contradicts my point: That the biggest individual beneficiaries of Apple pumping their stock price are Apple execs. And not surprisingly, they're the ones making the decisions on the buybacks (which by the way, strengthen their voting positions and enrich them g
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the top five shareholders of Apple stock are all Apple executives.
Individual shareholders. [investopedia.com] See 0.1%, above. Bucko.
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Right. Individuals who are making the decisions at Apple.
Gosh, you're just so close to understanding. Don't give up.
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You said "the largest tranches of stock are being held by APPLE EXECUTIVES."
That is just wrong and stupid.
Fighting with a pig, I know I just get dirt on me.
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That's the general public. Do you talk that way in general life?
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It does not matter whether a company retires its own shares or not. If not retired (struct from the register by shareholder resolution) then it is simply unissued stock, pure paper. It is common for companies to have unissued stock, this has no effect whatsoever on the share price or any other valuation measure.
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A common one I see often is the belief that a company buying its own shares increases the price of the remaining shares. No. Because the decrease in company value exactly balances the larger portion of the company represented by each share. The share price therefore remains the same.
As an exercise, assume that a company has only two shares issued, and its entire assets consist of $100 in the bank. Each share is obviously worth $50. Now the company buys back one of the shares, the company is now worth $50. A
Re: Why should they? (Score:2)
So in effect, executives have to plan months ahead what they will do that raises or lowers the stock value on the day of sale.
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Companies care about their stock price because if it does not go up, major shareholders will get together and throw out the current management. Happens all the time. Another major reason is employee stock compensation, top employees head for the exits really fast if their options go underwater. There are other reasons but those are the big ones for tech companies.
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You know why they call it Silly Valley.
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They're allowed to withhold that info from shareholders? I know publicly traded companies have to release their tax information publicly, but... not sales figures?
Not specific to Apple, smartphones in general (Score:3)
Re: Not specific to Apple, smartphones in general (Score:2)
Can't Apple sell Macintoshes and wristwatches made out of any Iphone parts they are unable to sell? Isn't there a strong untapped market for laptops and wristwatches made out of proprietary cellphone parts?
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Necklaces and bangles made out of unsold I-phones should do well. Maybe just add straps and turn them into flipflops.
Re: Why should they? (Score:2)
Pepsi would have a similar problem with the volume of their sale of sugar water to kids if they weren't diversified into other markets like Pizza Hut, etc.
translation... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Market share doesn't matter in their iPhone division, at least. They've the luxury brand market tamped down pretty well. They don't want to risk cannibalizing sales by releasing cheaper iPhones.
What they should be worried about is losing desktop and laptop sales. They have almost nothing for actual serious professional users. Trashcan Mac Pros are old and can't be upgraded. The iMac Pro is new, but it's an all-in-one that can't be upgraded. The new Mac Mini is an i3 for $800.
Their laptops are overpric
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The connector is the same (and it's shitty) but the signaling is very different
The connector is not shitty, it's a fine piece of work in terms of capability, ergonomics, form factor, mechanical stability and basically all the things that matter about a connector. Thunderbolt 3 conforms to USB Type-C [thunderbol...nology.net] physically, electrically and protocol-wise, using Type-C's "alternate mode" functionality to provide PCI-E and DisplayPort functionality. So I take issue with your "very different" characterization, it indicates that you have not bothered to read the Wikipedia page or "Thunderbolt Technolo
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The foul mounted troll is actually right, Thunderbolt is a superset [wikipedia.org] of USB-C. Seems to be you who doesn't understand the electricals.
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Non-Apple USB C devices such as Moto G6 (recommended!) do just fine with hardware compatibility. I don't need any dongles at all, just cables with type C instead of micro B. The computer/power wart end remains type A. This is fairly painless.
Type C on both ends gets into guaranteed crazy land, where Apple is jumping in with both feet. Saner companies are introducing host-side type C gradually as just one of several ports, typically also including several type A, at least one HDMI, and a DisplayPort. Maybe i
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So far I'm not complaining, my G6 came with Oreo and supposedly there will be a Pie update in 19Q1. Already got a couple of security updates to 8.0.0, I'm calling that so far, so good. If the Pie update arrives I'll upgrade that to excellent, and of course we need to see how long the updates keep coming, especially security updates.
Re: translation... (Score:2)
So like the sellers of luxury automobiles in 1928 they have a secure market. Go Dusenberg! Hurrah, Pierce-Arrow! The market of wealthy plutocrats will never shrink.
Re: translation... (Score:1)
He is talking about the US military. It doesnâ(TM)t mean tough, it means expensive.
Apple not losing market share ... (Score:2)
Re:Apple not losing market share ... (Score:5, Informative)
Apple is not losing marketshare.
Apple is losing marketshare. [counterpointresearch.com]
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.
Your citation: market down 2% apple up 1% (Score:2)
Apple is not losing marketshare.
Apple is losing marketshare. [counterpointresearch.com]
You are mistaken, from your own citation: "Global smartphone shipments declined 2% annually ... Shipments for Apple were up 1% annually". That's a share increase. You are confusing market position with market share.
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Sustainability. (Score:5, Interesting)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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iPhones are arguably less expensive than bargain Androids once you factor in how much longer they're supported.
Re:Sustainability. (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
These are not the numbers you are looking for...
Hmm, sales are down? (Score:3)
I'm wonder if this isn't a sign that sales are down?
e.g. Blizzard did the same thing with WoW when they peaked at 12 million subs and were hemorrhaging customers.
Re:Hmm, sales are down? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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?
Re:Hmm, sales are down? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [statista.com] and here [businessinsider.com] .
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On the conference call, Tim Cook said it is Apple's objective to always grow unit sales and at the same time he had his CFO state that they would be keeping those unit sales secret from now on. (Why Tim Cook was not man enough to state this himself... oh wait.)
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Oh wait.. what? Go ahead. Complete the thought. Own up to it. You can do it.
Also.. if you read the transcript of the call you'll see that it was Luca who said "I can reassure you that it is our objective to grow unit sales for every product category that we have". Tim said nothing of the sort.
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Now who's cherry picking? 2015 was a massive outlier. Pent up demand for a large phone was satisfied when they released the iPhone 6. 2016, while a decrease from 2015, it was still a huge increase over 2014 and the trend continued upwards ever since.
Indeed it has slowed (as sales invariably must) but none of this is what the post I responded to said. They said that the iphone sales are down now and that this fact was admitted to in the quarterly report. Which is just not true.
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To be precise, Apple's 4Q I-phone sales were flat as they have been for 16 quarters now, and missed expectations. Worse, Apple provided revenue guidance for Q1/19 about $1 billion below analyst's expectations, suggesting a solid miss on I-phone sales. Much much worse, Apple announced it would no longer provide I-phone sales numbers, leading investors to expect the worst. See, Apple is supposed to grow but this very definitely is not that.
Now Apple investors are wringing their hands and fretting what's goin
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So in other words.. not at all what you originally posted (that we *know* iPhone sales are down and this fact was clear from the q4 earnings report).
When you say "sales are down" it is assuredly *not* a more precise clarification to say "well.. actually they're flat". Apple has many times offered guidance lower than analysts' expectations. This is nothing new.
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Apple sales growth is down. Way down. Shark Apple needs to keep moving, otherwise it drowns.
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What irrational predictions? Apple's share of the smartphone market did shrink. Apple's unit growth has now stopped. Soon Apple's revenue growth will stop.
You worried? Just don't own AAPL and you will be ok. I would suggest also not owning an I-phone because it makes you look stupid, but that's just what I think. You go right ahead.
Re: Hmm, sales are down? (Score:2)
They seem more jubilant than angry.
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Okay, I've got to ask: Why do you spell it "I-phone" rather than "iPhone"? :-)
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Did you know what I was talking about? Yes? Then we're good. That's why I spell I-phone that way, so you know what I'm talking about. It's not my job to do your branding for you.
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That's why I spell I-phone that way, so you know what I'm talking about.
To be honest, it makes you look ignorant.
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To be honest, getting triggered by I-phone makes you look like a snowflake.
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I'm not triggered by you looking ignorant. I'm just telling you that your fly was open.
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Better look down.
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I-phone.
Very telling ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... it is.
There's a good reason to abandon bragging rights.
Declining sales maybe? (Score:2)
Really? It seems to be a major part of the yearly (or so) Apple product rollouts... all the people lined up around the block waiting for days for the newest iStatus product. Come to think of it... I haven't noticed those spots on the nightly news for a while. Maybe the lines aren't that impressive any more. Has it gotten harder to find enough suckers to stand in line to fork o
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Really? It seems to be a major part of the yearly (or so) Apple product rollouts... all the people lined up around the block waiting for days for the newest iStatus product. Come to think of it... I haven't noticed those spots on the nightly news for a while. Maybe the lines aren't that impressive any more. Has it gotten harder to find enough suckers to stand in line to fork over a grand or more to get the latest
shiny bauble that's only marginally shinier than the old one?
Yeah, the new iPhone came out and not one of my friends who are Apple fans said boo about it... they were so quiet about it that I thought that they had turned into real zombies (vs just Apple zombies)... but it turns out that they were just dressed up for halloween... (grin)
Sales are slowing...So (Score:1)
As an investor I want as much data and transparency as possible, this is worrisome as they are intentionally trying to obfuscate some key metrics.
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And the higher the price, the faster the volume shrink. Also kicks the stuffing out of online subscription numbers, if that is the salvation they hope for.
Re: Sales are slowing...So (Score:2)
Maybe they will start selling Apple Music on Android. It could do as well as iTunes on Windows, or that QuickTime player for Windows with the brushed aluminium frame did. They could integrate the Apple Watch to connect to Amazon Echo.
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Good idea. I suggest they start an orchard, they've already got some investment in branding. But not sure how strong the market is for black apples though.
Re: Sales are slowing...So (Score:2)
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I probably didn't know that because I've banned the Google Play Store from my phone.
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The number of units sold will have to keep up for the profits to stay up.
The only way out if numbers sold is not working anymore is cheaper than China production lines.
I used to be an Apple fanboy ; now I am done. (Score:1)
Seriously, since Jobs got sick and even more so after he died, Apple has made mediocre hardware and OS X has become worse with
each revision.
This is all pretty discouraging. I know Microsoft sucks, and now Apple sucks too. I sure as hell don't intend to use anything Google has to offer because I trust Google about as much as I would trust a rattlesnake.
Is Linux the smart choice these days ? I am sincere when I ask this. I know next to nothing about Linux. I need a secure and reliable system which allows me t
Re: I used to be an Apple fanboy ; now I am done. (Score:1)
You can try Linux for free for a month before buying it so there is no risk.
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If you aren't able to or can't justify learning how to maintain a system from the command line, it might be your least worst choice. I'm switching to OpenBSD myself, which requires that, can't tell you without doing some research if it has video editing software ported to it.
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Tim Cook buys budget underwear in bulk* (Score:2)
Perhaps that says something regarding the future of the company.
* https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
It's about value (Score:3)
Apple was first, and it locked in a lot of older folks who had more disposable cash. Meanwhile, my employer bought me a mobile, and it was never an iPhone, so by the time I needed to buy my own, Android was pretty equivalent and MUCH less expensive, so I went with Android. As a huge plus, Android phones can sideload.
On the other hand, I was a super Mac fanboy . . . until its products provided less value--less bang for the buck--than the competition. I'm typing this on the second work/gaming laptop that I've purchased since my last MacBook purchase. Sure, it's Windows, and sure, some things about Windows are annoying, but how much would a MacBook with a fast GPU, expandable RAM, fast SSD, and huge second HDD cost? Oh, wait, you can't buy one, but something ALMOST equivalent is twice as much. Double. 2X. The operating system is not so fantastic, the Foxconn production lines not so much better for Apple than the Foxconn production lines for other manufacturers, to justify this kind of premium.
People know value . . . eventually. Apple used to be rather innovative, and their products, while much more expensive than the competition, were priced according to their value. Now Tim Cook is just wringing out the profit machine. There is no vision at Apple. Cook's a logistics guy, a Wall Street darling, but he's not a leader; he's just in charge. There's a huge difference.
I suppose (Score:2)
this probably means that their sales are falling and they want to protect their stock price. The last thing they want is all the executives loosing their bonuses!
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Of course not (Score:2)