Jason Snell, writing for Tom’s Guide:
The answers to the mistaken reports of weak sales could be a fairly simple one, based on analysis of the average sales price (ASP) of an iPhone. As Apple pointed out, the ASP was higher this quarter than it was a year ago. But it’s important to keep in mind that not only does the iPhone X exist, at a base price higher than any Apple’s ever asked, but the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus released last fall also cost more than the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus did the year before. So while the iPhone X helps boost iPhone ASP, so do the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus.
Nice summary, read the rest. Apple has done an incredible job keeping their numbers up. Unbelievable, really, when you consider how easy it is to grow 10% when you are a tiny company, and how much harder, massively so, to keep up that growth as you become a large company. To do so when you’ve become one of the largest companies in the world is, to me, a mind boggling accomplishment.
It will be interesting to see if Apple tries to push the ceiling even higher this year. Will people pay an extra $100-150 for an iPhone XI+?
And what else is mind-boggling is that idiots at Wall Street and the analytical publications all seem to not understand that the population of earth is a slowly growing number compared to the expansion of phone sales, and that there are no other planets to export phones to, so the number of phones that sell inevitably slows because there simply aren’t enough people to sell to. So when that slow-down occurs, they lose their minds, and punish Apple for being bound by the reality of math.
There’s money to be made from plausible but wrong stories predicting a company’s performance: if the market as a whole can be misled and then surprised, someone trading stock against the general consensus will make a windfall profit. Therefore there will always be “surprisingly” wrong stories out there.