Apple Says It Now Has 1 Billion Active Devices

We can see, for instance, that iPhone sales were indeed the primary revenue driver, but it’s hard to determine the success of the Apple Watch and new Apple TV. Over the past several years, Apple could be relied upon to post massive iPhone sales that passed the preceding year’s handily.

Apple on Tuesday reported the slowest growth ever of its iconic iPhone, leading the gadget maker to brace for a decline in smartphone sales in the current quarter, the first in its history.

Analysts estimated that iPhone sales would be hurt by the lack of innovations in the 6s and 6s Plus, but it appears that market performance remained strong, possibly driven by previous models too.

Apple revenue from iPhones touched $51,635 million (+1 percent), $7,084 million (-21 percent) from iPad and $6,746 million (-3 percent) from Mac computers.

Revenue is also still up very slightly from the same period in 2014, in the neighborhood of 1% – contrary to some naysayers predictions.

As is now customary, there’s no indication of how the Apple Watch has performed with Apple citing “competitive reasons”. According to CNET, this would be Apple’s first year-over-year quarterly decline in a decade.

Breaking down sales figures for its key product lines, Apple revealed that it sold 74.8 million iPhones in the three months ending December 26, 2015 – and any way you slice it, that’s a huge number of handsets.

The launch of the iPad Pro helped Apple reporting 63 percent growth from the last quarter.

Ernest Doku, technology expert at uSwitch.com, said: “Most companies would do cartwheels with those kind of numbers but i t’s Apple, so anything that’s not astronomical growth is looked at with some fear and trepidation”.

Apple highlighted the growing contribution from its services business, which grew revenues by 15.5 percent year-on-year to Dollars 5.5 billion in the quarter.

The slight decrease can likely be attributed to falling iPhone sales, which have been predicted for some time now.

The company also said that the revenue for its next quarter is expected to be between $50bn and $53bn, both of which lie below the $58bn figure reported in Q2 2015.