Apple earns more money with the iPhone than ever

Apple has a very good quarter. The company announced its fourth-quarter results in 2018, outperforming estimates on Wall Street, largely thanks to the iPhone's high average selling price.

While Apple sold about as many iPhones as in the fourth quarter of 2017, the iPhones it sold were more expensive, which basically means that the company has made much more than with the same number of units last year. The average selling price of the iPhone reached $ 793, up 28% from the fourth quarter of 2017. The company sold 46.89 million iPhones in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018, which has not yet reached the expected 47.5 million units.

Interestingly, Apple also announced that it would stop providing data on the number of units sold. That is, he will not announce the number of iPhones he has sold, although he will say how much he made from the iPhone. Apple may have chosen to discontinue unit sales due to slower sales in some market segments. Apple, however, explained that this decision was due to the fact that profits were anyway larger than unit sales.

The iPhone is not the only contributor to such high results for Apple. Along with the new iPhone series, Apple has also unveiled the new Apple Watch Series 4, which has received excellent reviews since its release. Apple's gadget category, which includes the AirPods and the Apple Watch, reached $ 4.23 billion, an increase of 31 percent over last year.

Services is another segment in which Apple is doing well. Services include solutions such as Apple Pay, Apple Music, iCloud and the App Store, and reached $ 9.98 billion, an increase of 17% over last year. It's not quite as high as Wall Street's estimate of $ 10.2 billion. In total, Apple's revenue reached $ 62.9 billion, more than the $ 61.57 billion forecast.

Despite excellent financial results, there is cause for concern. The rise in prices of Apple devices only offset the slowdown in sales: if Apple has been able to earn more money than in previous years in many segments, it has not sold so many devices. Because of this, at the time of writing these lines, Apple's shares had dropped by 4%.

It is likely that Apple's first quarter of fiscal year 2019 will also be quite bright. The company recently unveiled the new MacBook Air and Mac Mini, both of which were long-awaited updates, and will likely perform well in the holiday season, as will the new iPhone and Apple Watch. Apple is expected to generate between $ 89 and $ 93 billion over the holiday season, up from $ 88.3 billion in the first quarter of 2018.