[706f6f70]

There seem to be many unique things to this year though:

* Apple announces it will no longer report unit sales. This is a clear shift in strategy.

* Orders have been cut not once, but twice.

* Suppliers have been slaughtered in earnings reports.

* Suppliers have cut staff and are trying to control costs.

I agree there is a "cry wolf" element to this, but sometimes the wolf really does show up.

[reaperducer]

Apple announces it will no longer report unit sales. This is a clear shift in strategy.

I thought that at first, too. Then I read that Apple was an outlier in reporting these figures. I'm OK with Apple not reporting these kinds of numbers if it allows the company to focus on quality of product instead of satiating the salivating stockholders (of which I am one).

Orders have been cut not once, but twice.

We don't actually know this as a fact. It is pure conjecture.

It is what a bunch of so-called supply chain "analysts" say, but they say it all the time, and are almost always wrong.

I wish I could be wrong as often as these Wall Street types and still keep my job.

The only people who whiff more often than Wall Street supply chain analysts are five-year-old softball players.

[kllrnohj]

> I'm OK with Apple not reporting these kinds of numbers if it allows the company to focus on quality of product instead of satiating the salivating stockholders

There's no possibility of any kind that not reporting these numbers will do anything to the quality of the product.

They still are doing all the exact same amount of work to actually gather the numbers, since they internally need to know. They are only skipping the last step of putting that number in the report they give to investors. Nothing changes about how Apple is operating by not reporting that number.

That doesn't automatically mean it was a bad number, either, it could have just been a shift to avoid providing more information than necessary similar to the rest of their industry. But it's not going to do squat for anyone's day job at Apple, either. The people that would actually worry about that number still have that number.

[Skunkleton]

The point is that by not reporting the number, they can let the number slip without pissing off investors. I am not sure how letting that number slip will lead to higher quality though.

[dwaite]

My speculation is that Apple believes that people are lengthening their purchase interval on new phones not primarily because of cost but because they don't see the value. So, Apple is focusing on higher cost "1st year" phones which provide more differentiation on value to the old phones.

They also may stop just discounting the phones as they become "2nd year" phones, similar to the setup they have with the iPad and iPad Pros.

This both means more profit per phone to account for the decrease in sales due to lengthening time between phone purchases, and a bit more motivation to update to the next sexy 1st year phone rather than the cheaper models due to explicit feature differentiation.

[lozenge]

Make iPhones last longer or battery replacements cheaper - sales go down, quality goes up.

[wlesieutre]

Apple went on record as making their next environmental push for longer lived devices, now that they hit the 100% renewable energy goal. Given that goal and the performance boost that iOS 12 brought for older devices, lower unit sales are inevitable.

On the plus side, we might get a break from the annual IS APPLE DELIBERATELY MAKING IOS SLOW SO YOU'LL BUY A NEW PHONE??? stories, so it's a trade-off.

Their plan seems to be making it up on services and pushing app subscriptions over 1-time purchases.

[achompas]

> * Apple announces it will no longer report unit sales. This is a clear shift in strategy.

Yeah, this is interesting. I wonder if higher prices (to increase device ASP) for better devices (breaking the two year upgrade cycle) mean that we have now seen peak iPhone growth. For the first time in years, I have recommended old/used iPhones to multiple people over new phones.

On the other hand, Apple has increasingly emphasized services and complimentary devices in recent years. AirPods, Apple Watch, and Apple Music (to name a few) lock folks into the ecosystem and replace non-Apple alternatives.

https://stratechery.com/2017/apple-at-its-best/

[matwood]

> Apple announces it will no longer report unit sales. This is a clear shift in strategy.

It's literally the shift every analyst has been clamoring for - revenue from something other than the iPhone. So while that is slowly happening, all anyone seems to look at is the top line iPhone unit number. A number that has become less and less meaningful over time because of the growing range of iPhone models.

Apple's guidance is always conservative, and their guidance next quarter is 89-93B in revenue. If you're keeping score at home, that would be another record quarter.

[dangoor]

Yes, totally true. Apple did face a relative drop in the iPhone 6s year (2015) because iPhone 6 demand was so insane. It's possible that this year's results will be soft.

[partiallypro]

Apple also missed their unit sale numbers virtually every quarter this fiscal year. I don't know why people don't acknowledge that.

[Twisell]

Because that is simply not true and you just made this up?

What they does miss sometimes are Wall Street unreachable predictions. But Apple always reach they’re own guidance range for years now.

[partiallypro]

Which is exactly what I was talking about, and it is 100% true that they missed unit sales virtually every quarter this year. They weren't "unattainable numbers." They had beaten those numbers consistently over the years, but now somehow it's "unattainable." Ok. Despite what you think analysts don't pull these numbers out of thin air. They talk to insiders, they talk to suppliers.

Don't let EPS beats fool you, some of that comes from share buybacks or write-offs. Apple is/was buying $100B in shares back. For every share not in float, that raises EPS. Generally analysts account for this, but if a company has been aggressive one quarter on the buy back desk, they could get it wrong.

Apple is a great company, I don't get why people are so in denial that sales are slowing (that doesn't mean they aren't growing.) It's a natural part of the cycle. Get over it, it's something Microsoft went through too. There always reaches a point of market saturation. No need to fan boy over it.

[microtherion]

It's not "their" numbers. Apple never provided unit sale guidance. Why is it their problem if analysts were bad at unit number forecasting? They beat EPS and Revenue projections 4 out of 4 quarters.