The iPhone has reached its peak



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Maestri said that iPhone sales "are not necessarily representative of the underlying strength of our business". He then added that "a sale to the unit is less relevant to us today than in the past, given the extent of our portfolio and the greater dispersion selling prices within a given product range ".

Translation: Apple's iPhone range covers a wide range of pricing options, ranging from $ 449 for the cheapest version of the iPhone 7 2016 to $ 1,449 for the iPhone XS Max the most economical. This wide price range means that individual unit sales no longer give a complete picture of the strength of the iPhone market. The fact that Apple has recorded stable iPhone sales and a significant increase in its profitability is the proof.

This does not mean that everything is rosy for Apple. The company also announced slight forecasts ranging from $ 89 billion to $ 93 billion for the holiday quarter, slightly below expectations of $ 93.02 billion on Wall Street. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook told CNBC's Josh Lipton Thursday that the timing of new product launches and exchange rates were all factored into the forecast.

Beyond hardware, Apple will start telling a deeper story around its services business, which generated $ 9.98 billion in the quarter, up 27 percent from a year ago.

The services include items such as Apple Music subscriptions, sales on the App Store and iCloud storage subscriptions. It also includes fees that Google pays Apple to remain the default search engine on the iPhone, which, according to Bernstein analysts, is around $ 3 billion a year. Apple has announced that it will begin to present margins for its service activities, providing more details about its performance.

"With the growing publication of services information (gross margin), we believe that Apple is simply trying to change the orientation towards the overall installed base and per-user services revenue," he said. Piper Jaffray in a research note Friday.

Cook said on Thursday that Apple's installed base registered double-digit growth on all devices. This suggests that a significant number of users of an iPhone for the first time, including Android users, buy used devices. These users do not appear in the new iPhone unit sales, but each new user is an opportunity to generate revenue for new services. In other words, the services grow with the installed base, not just with the sales of brand new phones.

This will be the big story of New Apple from next year. The new Apple is no longer limited to increasing the base of iPhone users, but to prove that the company can generate more revenue for each iPhone, iPad and Mac user by subscriptions, digital services and higher hardware prices.

– Josh Lipton from CNBC contributed to this report.

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