Apple records biggest quarter ever with $18.4B net income

From iPhones to iPads to Macs to Apple Watches, the number of gadgets syncing with Apple’s services increased by a healthy 25%, year-over-year.

Apple Inc shares fell more than 6.5 percent on Wednesday, the biggest percentage drop in two years, after the company reported its slowest-ever rise in iPhone shipments and forecast that quarterly sales for the current period would post the first drop in 13 years.

Revenue from Mac sales was about $6.7 billion, or $200 million less than the fourth quarter of 2014. CEO Tim Cook mentioned commodities prices and weakening currencies as extreme external conditions affecting sales.

What’s slowing the company’s growth down? iPhone sales have flattened out.

But the growth in the China market, its second-biggest regional market, was still higher than the 1.7 percent expansion globally in the quarter.

All together, Apple said it took in $19.9 billion from services alone in its 2015 fiscal year, up 10 percent from the year before. While now the most valuable publicly traded USA tech company, the decline put it closer to Alphabet Inc, which ended the day worth roughly $486.5 billion. According to Newsweek, the latest available figures from Apple show that the most valuable company in history, ever, draws about 63 percent of its entire revenue from iPhone sales.

The device, thought to be called the “Apple iPhone 5se”, may be launched early in the year – an unorthodox release date window for iPhones – specifically, sometime in March or April 2016. The iPhone maker guided Q2 revenues of $50 – $53 billion, as compared to analysts’ expectations of $55.38 billion.

While Apple critics will undoubtedly be quick to color such claims as excuses, remember that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, with their gargantuan screens and new form factors, marked completely new territory for Apple.

“Our installed base has been growing very fast and has recently reached a major milestone, crossing one billion active devices for the first time”, he said.

Despite the bleak outlook for the year ahead, Apple racked up a record-breaking profit of £12.8 billion for the last three months of 2015.

Not all bets. Long-term prospects are bullish enough that Apple isn’t planning to pull back on investing heavily in China, Cook said. There could be other motives behind a smaller-sized iPhone variant, so let us just wait on an official statement from Apple.

Daniel Ives, managing director at FBR Capital Markets, told ABC News that softness – that’s a saturation in smartphones on the market with fewer buyers – will be a challenge for Apple and its competitors.