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The scale of this is baffling. They earned the entire value of Tesla or Ford in profit in the past quarter. Apple's market cap has increased almost $400b in the past 18 months.

Holy shit.

I was part of the group that thought it would be impossible to go above flat or even decrease a bit. I don't dream at Apple, but it's still impressive.

See the bigger picture by comparing Q4 2017 to Q4 2015 - that was a blow-out quarter. Sales and EPS have since declined, especially considering the vast buyback amount.

iPhone release vs without. See what Q1 is like.

Profit was 8.7B. Ford has a market cap of 49B.

I actually meant last year, not quarter. Shoot.

Qatar earned less revenue in an entire year (2016). Apple should start buying S400s to defend its offshore accounts. :)

Here's what's nuts:

Apple’s market cap is just under $900 billion dollars[1]; as crazy as it sounds, unless something totally unforeseen happens, they could be at a $1 trillion market cap a little over a year from now, after 2018's holiday quarter with a full year of iPhone 8/8+/X sales, the successor of the iPhone X, plus sales of the iMac Pro starting at $4999 each and the Mac Pro and all of the rest of lineup.

[1]: https://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/market_cap#recessions=fal...

Whether they're a $1T company in that timeframe (one year) mostly depends on the strength of the U.S. dollar, given that the majority of their revenue comes from overseas.

Probably not.

Apple routinely adjusts their pricing based on the strength or weakness of the dollar.

On the quarterly conference call with analysts, Apple talks about their hedging programs against exchange rate fluctuations.

25% increase in macs sold is huge, not sure if this was just a weird spike or not but that really stands out

10% increase in macs sold - 25% increase in revenue from those mac sales.

Is the reverse true for iPhones? Like even with the (granted not that many) $1,000+ iPhone X's, there was only a 2% increase in revenue, so I wonder if Apple is starting to sell more lower-end iPhones as a percentage of its total iPhone sales.

Considering that preorders just started last week and it goes on sale tomorrow, I doubt it had much of an impact. More will probably show up next quarter. I'd guess that less 8 and 8 Plus were sold due to people waiting on X. That's what I'm doing, anyways

Presumably the revenue wouldn't be recognized until the phone was shipped so the direct impact of the iPhone X would be zilch. As you say, to the degree it has an impact at all, it's probably negative as, in the short term, there would be more 8/8+ sales if there weren't an X coming in the relatively near term.

[ADDED: And as others have noted, no iPhone X sales happened anyway before the end of the quarter being reported and only about a week of iPhone 8 sales.]

Quarter ended before they sold any iPhone Xs.

No - iPhone X did not sell in Q4 and is not reflected in these numbers at all.

25% increase in revenue. 10% increase in units.

Must have been due to huge increase in Mac profit margin per unit.

It's Mac revenues. Average selling price hasn't changed much.

If the units have only gone up 10% but revenue has gone up 25% then absolutely, yes, profit per unit has gone up, across the board.

Technically, unit price has gone up for sure. Profits also depend on costs, so it probably went up, but you can't say for sure just from this data.

True, but in the context of the parent post, "average sale price hasn't changed much", then if we assume the following:

unit price remains stable, unit sales have increased 10%, unit revenue has increased 25%, then profit has absolutely increased (and as you say, only due to a decrease in costs).

But revenue is not profit. If units are up 10% and revenue is up 25% then there must have been an increase in average selling price.

That alone doesn’t tell us anything about whether profit went up or down.

I believe you'd could get the same ratios when unit costs go down (e.g., raw materials costs drop, fixed costs such as tooling are amortized, and so forth).

No, you could see those ratios with net income or profit but revenue is simply numUnitsSold*avgSellingPrice. It doesn’t take unit costs into account.

Ack. Yes. This is why my girlfriend is the one on track to become a CPA, not me!

Tim Cook said it was due to China.

This article has a chart of the Mac's average selling price and fairly constant its been: http://www.asymco.com/2017/07/31/how-much-will-the-new-iphon...

It ticked up a bit recently because of the MacBook Pro with TouchBar; the iMac Pro[1] ships next month at a starting price of $4999; we know there will be a revised Mac Pro[2] in 2018 that will be similarly priced for starters but probably go significantly higher depending on the configuration.

[1] https://www.apple.com/imac-pro/specs/

[2] https://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac/new-mac-pro-2018-latest-...

So the average selling price and units will continue to increase due to the pent-up demand for pro-level Macs.

From 2016 to 2017 they increased the price of the latest generation of MacBook Pros by a couple hundred dollars. It wasn’t so noticeable because they also added some lower spec models to the lineup in 2017. For example, a base non-touchbar 8|256 mbp in 2016 was about $1300, but about $1450 in 2017. Yet you could still get a $1300 model in 2017, it just had half the storage of the 2016 $1300 model at 128GB.

Another amazing stat: the Mac will be 34 years old in a couple of months and yet is having its best sales ever.

Except for the iPhone, the Mac generates more revenue than any other single product Apple sells.

"This represents a year-over-year 3% unit growth and 2% revenue growth, suggesting slightly more people are buying higher priced iPhones like the 7 Plus and 8 Plus."

Isn't that the other way around? More units were sold, but at slightly cheaper price. If they were more expensive the revenue growth rate would be greater than 3%.

>- 5.4 million Macs sold

Do you have the units sold YOY?

https://twitter.com/BenedictEvans/status/926189172066418688

It looks in line with what I would expect. I’d bet it’s younger folks.

The interesting part is the fluctuations in the past years. Looks like people are buying when new hardware is released.

The iPad is dead... lol. Only 10.3 millions units sold last quarter.

Most people I know have one, and are not looking at updating ever until it breaks. For browsing/email/facebook, you don't need the latest one. Even the iPad 2 is enough to do those tasks. I feel there's much less urgency to update than on the iPhones and the Mac.

I would've agreed with this except that my parents, who only do exactly that, decided to buy a new one because they said the old one was starting to feel slow. It's exactly as fast as it is the day I gave it to them for that kind of stuff but they went to the Apple Store to get my dad's phone serviced and they played around with one of the demo units. My dad commented on how much faster it felt and BAM, they walked away with a new iPad and a replacement iPhone (out of warranty but cheaper than a new one).

My ipad 2 is certainly much slower tan it used to be. I believe the reason is the new iOS versions. Even switching between apps feels annoying.

Apps are also written / optimized for much newer hardware.

Yep, should never have updated it past iOS 6.

The 120 Hz screen refresh on the latest iPad is a game changer. It has surprised me how noticeable to non-techies it has been when I let them play with it.

They don't know why they like the feel and they use different words to express it, but it's real.

Not to mention iOS multitasking not available on older iPads.

for the Apple Watch, Apple Pay and Apple TV products... The 36% year-over-year growth for this category, meaning Apple Watch and AirPods sales have been strong.

How do you come to that conclusion? Couldn't it simply be that one of those products is selling better than a year ago?