Apple’s iPhone sales dropped during the holidays

This past holiday quarter was a particularly notable one for Apple: It released the iPhone X, probably the most hyped and anticipated device the company has launched in many years. And despite some grumblings in the financial and media world that the iPhone X isn’t selling as well as expected, and indeed Apple slipped a little bit. The company just announced that it sold 77.3 million iPhones in its fiscal year Q1, down a scant 1.3 percent compared to the 78.3 million sold one year ago.

It’s the first time iPhone sales have declined during a holiday quarter since the phone launched, as best we can tell. That speaks both to how saturated the iPhone market is getting, how relatively incremental annual iPhone updates are getting, the massive iPhone X revision aside. Despite that, Apple says the iPhone X has been the top-selling iPhone every week since it shipped in early November. It’s also worth noting that iPhone revenues increased 13 percent year-over-year despite sales slipping — that speaks to the higher sales price of the iPhone X. If Apple can keep on bringing in more money, it’ll likely not get too worried about the small sales dip.

Mac sales also dropped slightly, to 5.1 million units — good for a five percent year-over-year decline. iPad sales, however, continued a resurgence, increasing a small one percent over last year to 13.2 million units. But that’s three consecutive quarters where iPad sales bested the previous year, so Apple has to like that trend after years of decline. Services revenue, which has been Apple’s second-largest product category in terms of revenue for a few years now, stayed flat compared to a year ago, coming in at $8.5 billion.

Finally, the “other products” category (which encompasses the Apple Watch, AirPods, Beats hardware and other, lesser products) was an undeniable bright spot: Revenue increased 70 percent year-over-year, hitting $5.5 billion. That speaks to the quiet success that the company has found with the Apple Watch.

All told, total revenue came in at $88.3 billion, up 13 percent year-over-year. Net income came in at $20 billion for the quarter and was up 12 percent compared to a year ago. So despite the slight slip in Mac and iPhone sales, Apple is probably pretty pleased with its holiday quarter. We’ll be listening in to today’s conference call with CEO Tim Cook (starting at 5PM ET) and will update this post with anything else we learn.

Source: Apple