Apple will stop announcing total unit numbers for iPad, iPhone, and Mac

If you are one that particularly cares about how many iPhones, iPads, and Macs that Apple sells per quarter, you may be a little upset after yesterday. For the rest of us, well, you might not really care.

At the end of the Q4 earnings call yesterday, chief financial officer Luca Maestri announced that they will no longer announce the total unit numbers of their hardware products which include the iOS and MacOS devices. Shocking as it may seem, Apple currently does not announce sales of other products including Apple TV, AirPods, and Apple Watch; this will just bring the products in to a similar category. Maestri, in making the decision, claims that the actual unit sales mean little in the world today unlike years past, which CEO Tim Cook corroborate in that value means more than units.

The most important thing to take out of all this is that total unit sales are flat or declining as is the case for iPad and Mac. While predictions are often made based on unit sales in terms of the success of a product (such as Xr versus Xs), Apple believes that the unit numbers matter very little to overall market..and they may be right. Despite the decline in unit sales, Apple did record a revenue growth of over 20 percent.

So how is income going up while sales are going down? Easy: prices of devices keep rising. iPhone owners tend to be the most loyal customers so when a new phone goes on sale, they want the new phone. Despite the decrease in unit sales, by increasing the price of devices, Apple has not only made up, but increased the bottom dollar that should be lost by unit numbers. As the cost of flagship devices continues to increase (and carriers offer 30-36 months to pay for them), it is likely that Apple will continue to see a revenue increase.

Apple may be trying to hide the decline in unit numbers from projectors, but it is clear that their sales strategy of simply increasing the cost of devices is working quite successfully.