As expected, Apple on Tuesday announced first-quarter 2019 results that were decidedly lower than the initial guidance of $89 billion to $93 billion. For the holiday quarter, Apple posted revenue of $84.3 billion and a net profit of $19.9 billion, a 5 percent drop over last year and the clearest sign yet sign that iPhone sales are slowing.
We don’t know how much iPhone unit sales fell, of course, since Apple has stopped providing those numbers. (Apple CFO Luca Maestri did state that the iPhone XR is Apple’s best-selling phone, and the there are 900 million iPhones in use.) But we do know how much revenue the iPhone brought in. For the holiday quarter, Apple made $52 billion on iPhone sales, compared to $61 billion in the year-ago quarter, a 15 percent drop. Assuming Apple sold fewer iPhones than last year, it’s hard to extrapolate what that means for models and sales.
