Apple's services business continues monster growth, revenues up 31 percent in record-break...
Apple posted $9.19 billion in services revenue over the course of its second fiscal quarter of 2018, a figure up 31 percent year-over-year. The massive uptick doubles services revenue recorded just four years ago.
The huge jump in services revenue helped fuel Apple's best March quarter ever, and again bucked normal seasonality trends to become the company's only segment to show growth on a sequential basis.
The $9.19 billion number, up from last year's $7 billion, marked the 12th consecutive quarter of double-digit, year-over-year services revenue growth. It also outperformed analyst expectations that services would reach $8.5 billion.
"Q2 was our best quarter ever for services," Tim Cook said during an earnings conference call. "And the momentum there continues to be incredibly strong."
"We had all time record revenue from the App Store, from Apple Music, from iCloud, from Apple Pay and more -- all of which are a powerful illustration of the importance of our huge active installed base of devices and the loyalty and engagement of our customers," he added.
The services category includes Digital Content and Services, AppleCare, Apple Pay, licensing and other services, including iTunes, the App Store, AppleMusic and iCloud.
"Across all our services, paid subscriptions surpassed 270 million, up over 100 million from a year ago and up 30 million in the last 90 days alone, contributing to the overall increase in services revenue," Cook said.
Apple Pay, Cook added, doubled active users and tripled transactions year-over-year, driven by expanded transit access in some Chinese and Japanese markets. Norway, Poland and Ukraine will get Apple Pay next.
The huge jump in services revenue helped fuel Apple's best March quarter ever, and again bucked normal seasonality trends to become the company's only segment to show growth on a sequential basis.
The $9.19 billion number, up from last year's $7 billion, marked the 12th consecutive quarter of double-digit, year-over-year services revenue growth. It also outperformed analyst expectations that services would reach $8.5 billion.
Breaking records
"Q2 was our best quarter ever for services," Tim Cook said during an earnings conference call. "And the momentum there continues to be incredibly strong."
"We had all time record revenue from the App Store, from Apple Music, from iCloud, from Apple Pay and more -- all of which are a powerful illustration of the importance of our huge active installed base of devices and the loyalty and engagement of our customers," he added.
The services category includes Digital Content and Services, AppleCare, Apple Pay, licensing and other services, including iTunes, the App Store, AppleMusic and iCloud.
"Across all our services, paid subscriptions surpassed 270 million, up over 100 million from a year ago and up 30 million in the last 90 days alone, contributing to the overall increase in services revenue," Cook said.
Apple Pay, Cook added, doubled active users and tripled transactions year-over-year, driven by expanded transit access in some Chinese and Japanese markets. Norway, Poland and Ukraine will get Apple Pay next.
Comments
As with so much in life:
Pay for quality or get what you pay for. Evidently people are still paying for Apple quality.
Can Apple improve? Oh yeah... definitely. Don't even get me started... but they're better than the rest, IMHO.
Kudos to Tim Cook and company for continuing Steve Jobs' vision for us Apple Guys.
I think your first point, about Apple dropping the price for Macs, is against the very grain of Apple. They will not do that.
As for making the iPad a serious dev platform, I think they are working towards it. If one could design and develop iOS apps on the iPad, I think Apple will have a major victory.
Side Note: I wonder if the sales of iPads will surge if MS brought Visual Studio and SQL Server to iOS.
I think we will start to see lower cost Macs in the near future. They'll never be the cheapest, but neither will they be exclusively premium priced products that only the pros and well off can afford.
Would off the shelf 'mom + pop' storage and ram, designed in a format that could be user interchangeable allow lower & more cost flexibility ? One can get a 1TB SSD (albeit slower) aftermarket for a fraction of what Apple charges, and that must be done upfront of the total hardware lifecycle of course. PCIe® Gen 3 M2 are also available for less at whopping full speeds and capacities for future repurposing of machines...
Additionally such things as the touch bar keyboard have no opt out with a discrete graphics macbook pro, yet the feature is unavailable on the pro, imac pro or others. How much cost does that build into a macbook pro, take it or leave it... ?
Would an article or analysis on this be of interest to readers...?
I don't see how anyone could use the iPad as a serious development environment. I develop with dual 31" monitors, and I'm sure most developers have at least dual monitors even if only 24".
Simply put, you cannot make the quality of products Apple produces and have a low price. I've said this many times. It just doesn't work. A lot of work goes into designing a Mac. Its not just a bunch of "off the shelf" parts slapped together in a fancy box. Apple is not in a race to the bottom. If you, yourself cannot afford a new Mac today, that doesn't mean Apple needs to produce cheaper Macs and don't start this BS that if prices were lower they would sell more. I'm tired of hearing this and its not always true. Its just a fantasy many have that cheaper means more.
If you want a cheap computer, then go buy a cheap PC, or buy the off the shelf parts (the same ones Apple apparently uses) and build your own.
The original poster mentioned that it would be a good time to "drastically drop" the Mac prices. My comment was that they wouldn't do that. It doesn't mean they cannot make a lower cost Mac.
I understood the OP's comment as dropping the price drastically on the entire Mac line-up. I said that will not happen.