The iPhone helped Apple to another quarter of record-breaking sales
Apple just announced its Q4 2015 financial results, and as usual it's another big quarter for the iPhone. The company sold just over 48 million iPhones in Q4, up from 39.3 million one year ago. That's despite the fact that the new iPhone 6s was only on sale for about one week of the quarter. The company says it also had the biggest quarter of Mac sales ever, with 5.7 million units sold -- that's up from 5.5 million in the year-ago quarter.
The iPad continues to struggle, however: the 9.9 million iPads sold in the quarter is the first time less than 10 million iPads were moved in a single quarter since 2011. The company just refreshed its iPad lineup in late September -- we'll have to see if the new iPad mini 4 and the upcoming iPad Pro are enough to help reverse the undeniable downward trend iPad sales have been on since peaking late in 2013.
From a pure numbers perspective, Apple pulled in revenues of $51.5 billion and a quarterly net profit of $11.1 billion. The iPhone counted for a whopping $32.2 billion of that revenue, nearly two-thirds of revenue for the entire company. As expected, continued growth in China plays a big role in Apple's overall success. The company earned revenues of $12.5 billion in China, up a whopping 99 percent from a year ago. It's down slightly from one quarter ago, but the overall trend is undeniable -- the country remains Apple's second-biggest market, behind the US.
Apple's "other products" category saw big growth, largely because of increased Apple Watch availability -- revenues increased to $3 billion, up 61 percent from a year ago. There's still no sales data available, but Cook did say on Apple's earnings call that sales were up sequentially and ahead of the company's expectations. The call is happening now, and we'll be listening in to update this post with any details the company has to share about the future of the iPad business, Apple Music, the Apple Watch, and anything else that might come up.
