iPad Sales Help 'Bail Out' Apple Amid a Continued iPhone Slide

Apple reported a new June quarter revenue record of $85.8 billion, up 5 percent from a year ago, fueled largely by new iPad sales. iPad "saw the biggest category increase for the quarter, up from $5.8 billion to $7.2 billion year-over-year," reports TechCrunch. It helped counter slowed iPhone revenue, "which dropped from $39.7 billion to $39.3 billion year-on-year." From the report: In spite of a drop for the quarter, iPhone remained Apple's most important category by a wide margin, followed by service, which includes software offerings like iCloud, Apple TV+ and Apple Music. That category continued to grow, up to $24.2 billion from $21.2 billion over the same three-month period last year. Much of the iPhone slowdown can be attributed to the greater China region. Overall, the region dropped from $15.8 billion to $14.7 billion for the quarter. Canalys figures from last week show a marked decline in iPhone sales, down 6.7% from 10.4 million to 9.7 million for the quarter, Reuters reported.

The drop in Apple's third-largest region (behind the Americas and Europe) had a clear impact on the company's bottom line. The company aggressively discounted iPhone prices in China starting in May, as competition intensified from domestic rivals. The strategy resulted in strong iPhone sales that month, up close to 40% from a year prior. [...] Q3 marked the second consecutive quarter decline for global iPhone sales. The news puts additional pressure on the generative AI strategy that the company laid out at WWDC in June.

Re:Change for Change's Sake - nah

[blahbooboo2]

Disagree. The iPhone performs well for a long time, and smart phones haven't created a new "must have" feature in years. The last big improvement IMHO was in low-light photography (and even that was just for photography folks). This all means its a much longer sale cycle than previously, similar to how laptops/desktops 10 years old can still run Windows 10 well.

Re:

[sinij]

iPhone SE still has home button.

Re:

[dgatwood]

iPhone SE still has home button.

And Lightning. As far as I'm concerned, phones that don't provide an industry-standard way of using wired headphones aren't real phones.

Re:

[Stormwatch]

You absolutely should not charge the phone and use wired headphones at the same time. Electrocution via headphone is rare but real. [vice.com]

Re:

[Stormwatch]

I'd rather play safe. In fact, I've also heard that it's a bad idea to handle the phone at all while it's charging.

Re: Change for Change's Sake - nah

[AnnoyingBastard]

I guess you don't ever go into a car either then? I've heard chances of injury increase exponentially when entering a vehicle.

Re: Change for Change's Sake - nah

[LindleyF]

Maybe if charging it from the wall. That's something I rarely do anymore. Much more convenient to have a few 30000 mAh batteries around, one of which is always charged, and use that.

Re:

[dgatwood]

USB-C isn't the industry standard for headphones, the minijack is.

I wholeheartedly agree. But at least USB-C is an industry standard, and I can take USB-C headphones and move them reliably back and forth between the phone and my Mac, unlike Lightning. Apple leaving things in such a sorry state of compatibility for so many years must have Steve Jobs rolling in his grave.

Re:

[not flu]

What mac doesn't have 3.5mm?

Re:

[not flu]

USB-C offers absolutely no benefit for using wired headphones over Lightning. You're still going to buy Apple's dongle because it's better than anybody else's (I use one on my PC too...) and it's not cheaper or better than the Lightning edition. And Lightning connector is mechanically superior to USB-C.

Re: Change for Change's Sake - nah

[ZERO1ZERO]

and when doing Apple Pay payments, that makes it 1000x worse, because you're sitting there in your car with your phone out the window trying to unlock your phone with your face while it is horizontal above a credit card reader, and it basically just doesn't work at all.

Youre doing it wrong and ive seen many people do this. Double click your power/apple pay button, look at your phone, choose the correct payment card, NOW, offer it to the card reader.

You appear to be offering your phone to the reader before you have unlocked it. You dont need to hold thenphone at the reader when unlocking apple in fact doing this means you canâ(TM)t select the card since it will take the first card.

Re:

[jonbryce]

Usually the default card you pick is the one you are going to want to use, and with a TouchID phone, holding up the phone against the reader with your thumb on the finger print reader is super-convenient.

Re: Change for Change's Sake - nah

[unami]

My experience with FaceID vs. TouchID is exactly the opposite. Personally, I had much more trouble with the latter. faceID works even with the phone at an awkward angle or when wearing sunglasses. With touch ID I very often had to try several times, regardless of how often I retrained it or which finger I used - in the end I switched to just putting in my passcode every time - that was faster and less frustrating. The only time I hate FaceID is, when I'm lying sideways on a pillow, with my face half-covered

Re:

[dgatwood]

My experience with FaceID vs. TouchID is exactly the opposite. Personally, I had much more trouble with the latter. faceID works even with the phone at an awkward angle or when wearing sunglasses. With touch ID I very often had to try several times, regardless of how often I retrained it or which finger I used - in the end I switched to just putting in my passcode every time - that was faster and less frustrating. The only time I hate FaceID is, when I'm lying sideways on a pillow, with my face half-covered. So, ymmv, I'd be interested which one works better on average.

That's weird. I've almost never had Touch ID fail except when my hands were wet, covered in something, or (rarely) after carrying concrete blocks that wear down the ridges temporarily.

Face ID can't work at arm's length out a window, whereas a thumb press doesn't care where the phone is. And Face ID doesn't work if I'm not able to look in the general direction of the phone. That makes it generally far less convenient, because it demands my attention on the phone before it unlocks, whereas with Touch ID, e

Re:

[Papaspud]

Agree

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[diffract]

I stopped using iphones because I could no longer jailbreak them. thank god android became usable by then

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[Stormwatch]

Android has been "good enough" for over a decade now.

Re:

[Stormwatch]

This is now a good day.

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[Stormwatch]

Foldable is an "innovation" that I can go without, an expensive gimmick that makes the device insanely fragile.

Innovation and Performance

[darkain]

For phone and tablets, there is essentially no innovation left. The formula has been essentially perfected. In terms of performance, other than higher poly count 3D games, they're also more than fast enough and have been more than fast enough for several generations for 99.9%+ of users.

And thus why companies are trying to shove AI down our throats. They're trying to FORCE "innovation" on us, to force a reason to continue "infinite growth" - this is the same shit TV companies tried with 3D TVs. But its just cheap gimmicks. True innovation in these markets are dead.

Re: Innovation and Performance

[reanjr]

"The formula has been essentially perfected"

Then why do all the phones suck?

Re:

[darkain]

software, not hardware. companies want to sell all your data for profit.

Re:

[narcc]

It's not about what's good for the user, it's about what's good for the company. They're goal isn't to make your phone better, it's to make you spend more money. Blackberry made the foolish mistake of putting users first with unrivaled usability and productivity in addition to best-in-class security and build quality. Apple users didn't even get copy and paste until iOS 3 / iPhone 3GS. Android is ... well, let's just say that I understand why people want to upgrade frequently.

Did you ever wonder why ba

Re:

[SouthSeb]

I have a Samsung and my wife an iPhone. Both of them read QR codes with the default camera app just fine.

Having to sneak around

[Malay2bowman]

For some reason I always feel like I have to be the subversive sneaking around in the night, because everything available pretty much sucks by default. Everything these days is aimed for the (absolutely fucking moronic- honestly tried not to say that but there) masses, people who believe crap such as "It's better in the app", or "upgrade for the best experience" yada yada. If they believe that, then they might as well believe "Your call is very important to us" and "I won't cum in your mouth, I promise". An

Re:

[oogoliegoogolie]

It's not the the hardware, it's mostly it's the terrible 2020s UI designs. The UI is supposed to be intuitive, easy to use, easy to see, obvious object differentiation, clean, not complex. Today's UIs are unintuitive, every icon is the same color, font control is abhorrent, there is more whitespace than text on the screen, icon images are abstract and don't represent their function.

Windows 3.11 from the 1990s was more intuitive than today's UIs.

I have a iPhone 3g that I charge up every now and then and po

Re:

[organgtool]

Because nobody needs to upgrade to a new phone if their current phone is "perfect". Thus, enshittification took over and now iPhones are worse. This isn't just my opinion. For years, if you asked people what was the best iPhone, the answer was almost always "the current iPhone" or "the upcoming iPhone". If you ask that question now, you'll likely get a wide variety of answers, some of which go back quite a number of years. For most companies, that would be a reason for serious concern, but Apple can ju

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

There is still room to improve the cameras. Sony's new sensor used in the Pixel 8 is incredible, especially in low light situations. I can take videos that only a full size sensor would have been capable of a year or two ago.

Re:

[not flu]

And if all else fails you can always make the sensor bigger and I for one would lap it right up. Compact camera market segment is entirely dead so there's nothing else to buy than phones for that use case. Camera humps aren't even close to being big enough to bother me yet.

Re: Innovation and Performance

[fortfive]

What you say is kinda true and kinda not. Itâ(TM)s just that next wave innovations are kinda sci-fi. I want my phone to be the size of a quarter and interface directly, wirelessly, with my brain.

Stepping back from that, a smaller, lighter phone with a floating display would be awesome.

Stepping back from that, lighter and smaller batteries would be awesome, also more durability.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Maybe Apple will eventually realize a dedicated back button, whether hardware or software, is a million times better than having to touch somewhere (but not a consistent part of) the upper left corner of the screen.

Probably not though

Re:

[narcc]

I'd much rather apps handle 'back' in whatever way makes the most sense for them, rather than trying to force Android's outdated and unintuitive 'stack' concept onto everything. I picked up a Samsung phone for my wife back when Angry Birds was a thing. After just a few days with that stupid capacitive back button and she ordered a new Blackberry. I'd blame the frustration on the capacitive button, but the virtual navigation bar is also a pain.

I'm not sure what you think is wrong with putting the back but

Re:

[drinkypoo]

I'd much rather apps handle 'back' in whatever way makes the most sense for them, rather than trying to force Android's outdated and unintuitive 'stack' concept onto everything.

Everything already works like that, including the iPhone. You pull the running apps up from the bottom the same, though how you manage them subsequently has changed on Android over the years.

I'm not sure what you think is wrong with putting the back button in the upper-left corner contextually?

It's awkward to touch it there, especially when all the other controls are across the bottom of the screen, and you pull apps from from the bottom of the screen.

Re:

[narcc]

You're describing switching between tasks, which is an entirely different thing. You're a competent user, so if you don't understand what's happening, what hope do ordinary users have?

Users aren't thinking in terms of tasks and activities and stacks, they're thinking in terms of apps that they can open, close, and switch between because that's what the UI presents to them. This mismatch between what Android is doing and what users expect causes a lot of needless confusion. Hell, I'd be surprised if most

Re:

[mjwx]

For phone and tablets, there is essentially no innovation left. The formula has been essentially perfected. In terms of performance, other than higher poly count 3D games, they're also more than fast enough and have been more than fast enough for several generations for 99.9%+ of users.

And thus why companies are trying to shove AI down our throats. They're trying to FORCE "innovation" on us, to force a reason to continue "infinite growth" - this is the same shit TV companies tried with 3D TVs. But its just cheap gimmicks. True innovation in these markets are dead.

Apple were never that innovative to begin with, if you wanted to know what Apple would be releasing in 2 years you looked at what Android was doing now and forgot half of it.

Android has long since passed from fast moving innovation to slow evolution. There aren't many new features and most of the improvements are just refining what we already have, it's been that way since Android 5 (I think we're on 14 now, that that there's much difference. The last huge noticeable to the end user difference was the in