Apple doesn’t really compete on the low end, low margin side. Lower end laptops and phones have been “good enough” for a while. Yet Apple still sales tons of products.
No.
PS. Because of downvotes: doing it because of competition is a possible reason, not THE reason if the unit sales are starting to drop after 15 years. See whataboutism: https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Not to mention that iPod sales dropped from high of almost 55 million a year in 2008 to less than 10 million before they became basically meaningless and they stopped giving numbers.
So if they were going to not give numbers because a product line was declining in volume. They would have done it years ago.
But more importantly, the only product line that Apple has ever had volume dominance in was the iPod. When has Apple ever cared about volume and market share and not revenue?
It's probably easier to see when going back to the original word, which (for reasons that must have included either weed or a stroke) was replaced by this historical tragedy of naming that is "whataboutism", i. e. "hypocrisy".
They’re surely sensitive to this because Apple has always traded at a low P:E relative to their peers and even the market as a whole. IE. everyone has always tends to bet against Apple and expect them to fall apart “any day now.”
Considering a substantial portion of their compensation to employees is paid in RSUs it makes sense for Apple to try and get out ahead of the narrative and protect their stock price as best they can.
46.89M units last quarter is not that many?
And why they should?
Pretty much everyone has a smartphone now.
Trying to push more and more units is something that only a lousy manufacturer would try.
Apple is trying to make their devices to last longer.