Apple sales graphs and the iPhone 7
November 5, 2017 at 8:53 PM by Dr. Drang
Last week Apple released its 2017 Q4 (which everyone else’s calendar says is 2017 Q3) sales and revenue figures, which means a boatload of graphs from all your fave rave Apple-oriented bloggers. I’m a few days late, as usual, despite having long ago written scripts to generate these graphs.
I don’t make as many graphs as everyone else, partly because I’m lazy, but mainly because don’t care about revenue. My concern is the popularity of the devices I use, not how expensive they are. I want third-party developers to keep writing apps for them, and that means there has to be a market for them out there.
Here’s the summary graph, with the sales figures for the three main Apple products. The dots are the quarterly sales and the lines are the four-quarter moving averages.
The iPhone dominates the scale of this graphs, so it’s helpful to also see the iPad and Mac on their own graphs.
The good news is the second straight quarter of year-over-year increase in iPad sales after its long, well-documented slide since 2013. Additional good news is the Mac’s slow but consistent rise over the past year—four straight quarters of year-over-year sales increases. Imagine how much better the figures would be if people really liked the Touch Bar.
I think its fair to say, though, that the iPhone 7 was something of a dud. It had a good start, but its non-intro quarters had almost exactly the same sales as the 6S had. Look at the final three quarters of each.
As I’ve argued before, the iPhone 6S sales looked lackluster only in comparison to the gangbusters popularity of the iPhone 6. If one ignored the year of the 6, the 6S’s sales were more or less on the same upward trend as the previous three editions. The iPhone 7 was on that same trend for its first quarter but went dead flat after that.
Apple’s report in January will be very interesting.
