[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.