Apple leaks new thinner, lighter iPad ... revenues

Apple's iPad sales continue to plummet, and iPhone sales are going flat due to over-hype – but the Cupertino idiot tax operation was still able to haul in a hefty $11bn profit in the past quarter. The iGiant said that for the three months to April 1, its second quarter of the 2017 fiscal year, it recorded: Revenues of $52. …

[Anonymous Coward]

you really got to admire apple

... for managing, time and again, to convince people to buy their phones at the profit margin higher than the end-customer sale price of an otherwise quite comparable smartphone from any other manufacturer.

Of course, it probably tells more about how inept and out-of-touch their competitors are. When was the last time you were able to buy a phone which was a perfect fit to your requirements, regardless of the price? For my taste, they are all too large, too thin, suck at battery life, and never have enough sim and sd card slots :-(

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: you really got to admire apple

Apple is just selling their phones better than Google (Pixel) or Samsung (S7/S8 etc)

All are around the same price these days. I looked at getting a Pixel and it was exactly the same price as the iPhone. Funny that.

As for SIM and SD card slots, the majority of users don't really care about them any longer. A phone with 256Gb of storage (incidentally the same as the new laptops announced by MS yesterday) is good enough for IMHO, 99.999% of customers.

I'll make do with a 16Gb device and even then, there is 5Gb free.

[22ten]

Re: you really got to admire apple

Although, given the sales figures this does seem to be a Western phenomenon, or maybe Asian consumers are less impressed with Western brands and more interested in how much technology you get for the price.

[Voland's right hand]

Re: you really got to admire apple

Services (including the App Store and Apple Pay) accounted for $7.04bn on the quarter, an 18 per cent increase.

Not any more. They have retargeted quite successfully to fleece the punters from services:

Services (including the App Store and Apple Pay) accounted for $7.04bn on the quarter, an 18 per cent increase.

That is where the growth is. They can continue to produce flat (or even reduced) sales in hardware for decades. As long as that keeps the punters locked in into their services model that particular line in the balance sheet will continue to increase. It is already pulling in about the same amount of money as the iPad and the Mac combined.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: you really got to admire apple

The reason services are increasing is because the installed base of iOS devices is increasing. It isn't like 50 million old iPhones were retired in the last three months to balance out the 50 million new ones that were sold. Since Apple supports iPhones with updates for far longer than any Android phones they hold their value better and almost all have second (and probably in many cases third) owners. Except for high end Android phones like Galaxy/Note, Android phones have almost no value after a couple years and it isn't worth the cost for carriers to refurbish/resell tradeins - instead they are recycled.

The bigger their installed base the greater their services revenue, even if their per user services revenue were to stay flat.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: you really got to admire apple

"They can continue to produce flat (or even reduced) sales in hardware for decades."

The share traders don't seem to think so. Profits were up by a decent margin, but just a shade less than the analysts predictions and that caused a 2% drop in share price. Traders are greedy fickle bastards who don't care about actual performance, just whether said performance matches up to their airy fairy fantasy predictions.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: you really got to admire apple

Apple went up 3% on Monday & Tuesday, so the 2% drop just brought them down to near where they started the week. And actually, as of this writing, they've now fallen less than 1% from yesterday's close before earnings, so they are currently over 2% higher than Friday's close.

I don't think anyone cared much what Apple reported this time, or will report three months from now, unless the numbers are wildly different than expectations. Wall Street's eyes are fixed on what Apple releases in September.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: you really got to admire apple

You might as well ask a duck what it thinks. The stock market is a bullshit indicator. They are more interested in how many dollars are saved by laying off staff, not how good the products are, or how much they sell or don't. Ask IBM how important the stock market is to their technical products and the next generation thereof? A company that plays to the stock market is a shit company. End of story, DougS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: you really got to admire apple

Who says Apple is playing to the stock market? I just replied to the guy who said they'd dropped 2%.

[Ian Joyner]

Re: you really got to admire apple

>>quite comparable smartphone from any other manufacturer<<

Not comparable at all. If you look at comparable offerings, price difference is usually within $50.

[45RPM]

I would buy an iPad but…

I don't want the base model, I want a Pro (to replace my stalwart iPad 2). I don't want a Pro that's long in the tooth and soon to be retired. I'm sure that other prospective iPad buyers are the same. That's not to say that a new iPad Pro will entirely arrest the slide in iPad sales, of course, just that I suspect a new Pro will do more to shore up the iPad than a new base model.

Similarly, and thinking of a model which will make almost no difference to Apple's sales, I'm not interested in the current generation Mac Pro. My 2011 model will have to soldier on a little longer. I'm in the market for a computer - not objet d'art.

Also, can they please keep the iPhone SE up to date in terms of spec? I love the design - but not the (now) out of date electronics.

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: I would buy an iPad but…

If you want an iPad Pro then look in the pawn brokers and secondhand dealers. You will get a bargain there.

[Sil]

Great title

[Mage]

Other Products group ... boosted revenues by 31 per cent

Other Products group, a category that includes the Apple Watch and Apple TV, boosted revenues by 31 per cent to $2.87bn year-over-year.

What else is in that? It can't be the Apple Watch selling well, and the mis-named Apple TV is just a streaming box. A Roku or Kodi based something is better?

So they are nearly flat on iPhone now.

iPad is dying (if you really want a tablet, there is as good at 1/2 price with easier access to your own files).

I guess Mac sales are up because Win 10 is so awful.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Other Products group ... boosted revenues by 31 per cent

I guess that's where Apple's highly-lucrative dongles division hangs out.

[Sooty]

I'm not surprised iPhone sales are going flat

I'd have upgraded to an iPhone 7 if it worked in a fairly basic use case, listening to music and charging it at the same time.

While I'd have liked a bog standard, present on everything, earphone jack, if they really wanted to go the lightning route they could at least have added 2 ports. Purchasing an additional adapter to do such a basic thing isn't exactly an elegant solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I'm not surprised iPhone sales are going flat

I got a set of Plantronics Bluetooth headphones for US$54. If you can afford an iPhone 7, you can get a pair of these and not break the bank. I am sticking with the 6s+ for a few more years, just to do it, but the kid has a 7s+ and is quite fond of it. The lack of a headphone jack did not stop the purchase for them. And I don't really use the jack very much, other than using headphones at work "so I can listen to my music as a reasonable volume between the hours of 9 and 11."

Speaking of Mac, I just picked up the mid-range Mac Mini to replace an almost fully functioning older Mini, and it's quite a good upgrade. Compared to the old one it is shorter and wider, but it has yet to cast off heat like the old one does. The lack of a Super Drive does not matter, external USB drives are dirt cheap. The only thing is trying to introduce my media library, in the form of a copy of my Kodi library, to iTunes. It was not as smooth as it worked last summer. I think it may be confused by having a cloud backup, then trying to do a local backup over that and before syncing iTunes to the cloud first. Who knows? It should be fine once it syncs locally. My new PS4 is doing much better. The ability to download updates and other junk while playing another game or watching streams is good. The Xbox360 was such a pain in the ass about such things. Many times we were thwarted from playing an already installed game due to not having an OS update, download, reboot, download, reboot again, and then an update for the game, download, wait, why am I playing this thing again? It was pretty easy to pick that over the Xbox One, despite the clever marketing via the South Park Black Friday Trilogy.

[Sooty]

Re: I'm not surprised iPhone sales are going flat

I don't want to have to manage and keep charged, a set of Bluetooth earphones alongside the phone either. I want to be able to use the most basic, everyday, wired earphones

[Ian Joyner]

Non sequitur

>>Cook said, blaming the flat sales instead on anticipation of the not-yet-real iPhone 8.

That's right, Apple blames hype around its iPhones for its sales problems. The irony.<<

That is a non-sequitur. Sales will always drop on products where consumers are waiting for new model to come out. They also wait for price drops on current models. Remember Apple does NOT comment on new products - that is anti-hype. Unlike other companies that talk up what they might release six months down the track.

Cook's observation is quite correct. Register just makes something out of nothing. Nonsense.