iPhone And iPad Unit Sales Plateau Again In Apple Q3 2018

In Apple's Q3 2018 earnings report, the company revealed that unit sales of both the iPad and the iPhone were almost identical to last year at this time. Sequentially, iPhone sales revenue and unit sales took a real dip – which is pretty standard for this time of year. Let's compare this quarter's hardware sales data to last year's at this time and see what we make of it.

This year Q3 compared to Q2 saw iPhone unit sales go down 21% and revenue from iPhone go down 21% as well. This same quarter compared to its own Q2 saw iPhone unit sales go down 19% and revenue down 25%. So while Apple's iPhone unit sales sequentially are lower than they were sequentially last year at this time, they're going down a comparatively smaller amount – just barely, but still.

ALSO: iPhone unit sales growth reached ZERO percent in 2016 – That happened!

Year/year change for iPhone unit sales in Q3 2017 were up 2% with revenue up 3%. In 2018 this same quarter, year/year change for iPhone unit sales were up just 1%, but revenue was up a whopping 20%. Almost as if increasing the price of the iPhone in general made slightly fewer people buy iPhones than the same quarter's year/year change last year, but that the iPhones still bought provided Apple with more revenue overall.

In fact in Q3 2017, Apple sold 41,026,000 iPhones for a revenue of $24,846,000,000 (that's over $24-billion USD). This most recent Q3, 2018, Apple sold 41,300,000 iPhones for a revenue of $29,906,000,000. That, again, is a year-over-year change of 1% (positive growth) in the number of iPhones sold, with a positive growth of 20% for revenue. That's intense.

The iPad saw the same amount of unit sales increase year-over-year with 1%. That was 11,424,000 units sold in Q3 2017, and 11,553,000 units sold in Q3 2018. Not too shabby, right? But here, revenue didn't do quite the jump it did with iPhone. Here revenue went down 5% year-over-year.

Also on Q3 2017, Apple saw unit sales of the iPad go up 28% and revenue go up 28% sequentially (compared to Q2 of the same year). In 2018, Q3 iPad unit sales compared sequentially went up 27% while revenue went up 15%. In this case we can see that unit sales are almost identical, which means whatever Apple's doing to transition between Q2 and Q3 probably stayed largely the same.

At the same time, it may just have been that people've begun buying cheaper iPads in general, as revenue didn't go up quite as heartily these 2018 quarters as they did in 2017. Maybe the iPad Pro craze is over? That'd be so very sad, so very sad indeed.