On Thursday, Apple announced that it sold 46.89 million iPhones in the fourth quarter of 2018.
However, don’t expect to hear the Cupertino, California-based tech giant reveal such numbers going forward.
In a recent investors call, Apple CFO Luca Maestri announced that the company will no longer share sales figures for its iPhone, iPad or Mac product lines.
According to Maestri, sales data isn’t indicative of Apple’s overall financial health because its products are all sold at various prices.
“Our product ranges for all the major product categories have become wider over time and therefore a unit of sale is less relevant for us at this point compared to the past because we’ve got these much wider sales prices dispersion,” Maestri said during the investors call. “So unit of sale per se becomes less relevant.”
Maestri added that some of Apple’s biggest competitors in smartphone and tablet sales, such as Google and Samsung, similarly don’t disclose unit sales.
There is some merit to what Maestri is saying, given that there are significant price differences among some of Apple’s products.
For example, a 64GB model of the new 11-inch iPad Pro will cost $999 CAD, while the highest-end 1TB model is priced at $1,949 CAD. Similarly, Apple has raised the average selling of the iPhone to $618 USD ($808.83 CAD), up from $793 USD ($1037.87 CAD) at this time last year. This was in spite of the fact that the company missed iPhone sales estimates.
It’s currently unclear what Apple may detail in future earnings reports instead of sales figures.
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