Let’s take a little quiz. Which of the following Apple items is out of place here?
IPhone sales: 50.7 million units. Revenue of $33.2 billion.
Mac sales: 4.2 million units. Revenue of $5.84 billion.
IPad sales: 8.9 million units. Revenue of $3.9 billion.
Services sales: $7.04 billion.
Apple Watch sales: Uh…Nothing to see here. Apple Watch revenue: (Insert sound of crickets chirping and video of tumbleweeds rolling through a deserted town.)
OK, it’s not completely like that, but pretty close. You see, when Apple reported its second-quarter results on Tuesday, it gave updates on all of its major product lines. All of them except the Apple Watch.
As Apple has done for some time now, the company lumps Apple Watch sales in with Apple TV, iPods, Beats products and a few other things into a category colorfully called “Other Products.”
Now, taken altogether, sales of Other Products are nothing to make fun of. Apple said sales of all that other stuff totaled $2.87 billion in the quarter that ended April 1. And that was a 31 percent gain over the $2.2 billion in Other Products sales that Apple had a year ago. To put Apple’s Other Products revenue in some perspective: That $2.87 billion was almost three times the $984 million that Advanced Micro Devices reported for everything it sold during its first quarter of this year.
So Apple’s selling a lot of Other Products. And yet it doesn’t want to say how much it’s selling.
When Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook and Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri delivered Apple’s results, and took questions from Wall Street analysts on Tuesday, they, as usual, didn’t give any exact sales figures for the Apple Watch.
Sure, it’s Apple’s right to not say how many Apple Watches it has sold. But, for a product that Apple launched with almost as much hoopla as the Super Bowl, has made part of several ad campaigns, and has touted as a central tool for people keeping track of their health information, you might think that Apple would want to puff out its chest just a bit and say “We sold eleventy bazillions Apple Watches last quarter.”
That is, unless it hasn’t sold anywhere near that number.
It looks like for now, and for the foreseeable future, we’re going to have to live with just what Cook wants to say about Apple Watch sales. When he ran through the highlights of Apple’s second quarter, the only qualifiers he gave about the Apple Watch were generalities such as that sales “nearly doubled from a year ago,” and that the Other Products business is now “well into the Fortune 500” territory.
Whatever territory those Apple Watch sales are in, we’re going to have to keep on guessing. For whatever reason, Cook & Co. don’t want to say. Maybe they’re holding out for when Other Products gets into the Fortune 100 territory? Maybe they’re going to give us all a surprise and tell us with the next Apple Watch update? Maybe they’re waiting until they can say Apple really did sell “eleventy bazillion” Apple Watches?
Or maybe they’re just going to keep their mouths shut.
Photo: Apple Watches on display during an Apple media event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on March 9, 2015. Apple reported second-quarter results on Tuesday, but still didn’t give sales figures for the Apple Watch. (Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)
May 03, 2017 at 09:21PM
from Rex Crum
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