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Comment by mythz | Hacker News Reader

On 1 quarter YoY basis, their core iPhone business saw a plateau slowdown of -17.3% ($31B). iPad saw 21.5% growth ($4.9B) and their newest categories Wearables (Watch/Airpods) saw a 30% jump ($5.13B) whilst their Service Revenue increased 16.2% ($11.45B).

Despite their Apple News+, Apple Card, Apple Arcade and Apple TV+ services/subscription revenues not having kicked in yet so I'd expect they'll return to overall revenue/profit growth next year when all their revenue centers are operating on full cylinders.

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> Wearables (Watch/Airpods) saw a 30% jump ($5.13B)

They generate $5 billion in revenue on their Watches and Airpods alone? What a crazy good business they have.

I think it's sales. So their watches sell almost like macs. No wonder they don't really care about computers. No growth potential for computers, but very few people bought watches, so much more potential to grow.

We don't know how well their watches sell. The headphones+watches number is surely dominated by headphones.

I can only support your comment anecdotally (perhaps actual figures have been published somewhere), but the majority of my circle has purchased airpods. They're the only Apple product I love. I don't know any current watch wearers, although many purchased one when initially released.

Multiple people at work have an Apple Watch and I'm starting to see it more and more around the city. Definitely has some market penetration.

But also Apple is a premium products company so not everyone needs to have one, just a decent sized niche. At $400-500 they make a killing off each sale. Same with AirPods at $200 too... other similar bluetooth pod earphones sell for $40-60 on Amazon and they're pretty good products, so it can't be too expensive to produce.

The elephant in the room is that the iphone revenues are down because volumes are down because the price is to high for the iphone X (and not compensating for the reduced volumes). All the other revenue is upselling to people who own iphones. They are doing really well with that. Nevertheless the iphone doing poorly is bad news long term for Apple because it shrinks that market. Long term, their strategy of growing sevice business is tied to keeping people inside the apple ecosystem. Short term it's not an issue because there are lots of people hanging onto their old iphones.

I think it's a fixable problem to come up with a cheaper/more attractive product than the current iphone. Simply dropping the price might do the trick for a lot of people. In the same way the keyboard situation is a fixable problem that might improve their fortunes on the laptop front.

What is a full cylinder?

A metaphor from an internal-combustion engine; a cylinder is said to be firing when the fuel inside it is ignited.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/dictionaries-thesaur...

The idiom (as noted on your link) is firing on all cylinders, not full cylinders.

It also depends on China/US relations.

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