Yesterday, Apple’s third quarter 2022 results were announced by its executives, followed by a call to investors. Although this is technically a record quarter, analysts were right to say that this is when Apple’s growth, boosted by the pandemic and therefore teleworking, would run out of steam.
Mac revenue was down 10% year-over-year, iPad revenue was down 2%, and wearables (Apple Watch and AirPods) revenue was down 8%. Services continued to rise, of course, but the only good news on the hardware side was the iPhone…
The iPhone still the number one source of income
iPhone revenues were up 3%, and while that’s a low number, it’s enough to show slight growth from the same quarter in 2021. iPhones are obviously selling in much larger volumes than iPhones. other Apple products, which led to revenue growth of 2% overall.
The fact that the quarter is more or less stable is not really bad news for Apple. The company has benefited from a huge surge in demand during the pandemic, with people working and studying from home buying Macs and iPads in droves. So even a 2% growth from this starting point is impressive, especially when the company could have done even better without the shortage of components.
Six Colors’ Jason Snell updated his data to help us visualize Apple’s Q3 2022 results. Here’s Apple’s revenue from 2018 to date:
A better way to understand what happened during the pandemic is to look at the quarter-by-quarter revenue change.
We can observe that while Apple has previously enjoyed periods of significant year-over-year growth, and product launches of course have quarterly impacts – it was during 2021 that we saw huge increases – up to 54%. This impact gradually faded, reaching 2% growth in the last quarter.
Most hardware revenue was down year over year, with the Mac being the hardest hit. It was the 3% increase in iPhone revenues alone that allowed Apple to technically declare a record quarter, up 2%… Like what, customers are not waiting for the iPhone 14 and continues to rush on the iPhone 13.