Apple CEO Tim Cook reported this week that the company ended December 2015 with blockbuster earnings, describing the period as the iPhone maker's "biggest quarter ever." The rock-solid performance was further highlighted by the activation of more than one billion devices that rolled out from Apple's production lines, Cook said.
"Our installed base recently crossed a major milestone of one billion active devices," the Apple chief was reported by BGR as saying. These devices include the Apple Watch, iPhones, iPads, Macs, iPods and the Apple TV that have been monitored to access Apple services from October through December of 2015.
In the December 2015 quarter alone, Cook revealed that an additional 25% of Apple devices have been freshly activated, indicating that the tech giant remains the dominant device maker in the world amidst suggestions of peaking iPhone sales and the resurgence of the Windows computing platform.
Apple cleared a total of 74.8 million iPhones in the last three months of 2015, which is a record by itself but slightly fell short of expectations. Market analysts have predicted that on back of the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus, the company will at least push out more than 75 million new smartphones during the holiday quarter of 2016.
And the same declining story was seen with Apple's tablet and conventional computing business. The Mac sales figures saw downtrend of 4%, managing only to lure 5.31 million buyers in the past holiday rush.
But most worrisome is the iPad quarterly sales that Apple reported at 16.12 million units by the end of December 2015. Not only that the numbers missed the 17 million plus unit sales projection but they also painted a grim picture - the consistently sliding iPad sales now peg the decline to an alarming 25%.
Notwithstanding the not-so-rosy Mac and iPad sales figures and the weakening iPhone numbers (per analysts), Apple made its shareholders quite happy. The company chalked up revenues of $75.9 billion, from which $18.4 billion in profits have been realized.
Thanks to the Q4 2015 push, earnings per share or EPS checked in at $3.28, which easily beat the market projections.
Apple, however, appears to hint that the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus will not repeat the mighty showings of their predecessors as the company has forecasted maximum revenue of only 453 billion by end of March 2016.