During the earnings announcement for its fiscal fourth quarter of 2013, Apple revealed that it sold 33.8 million iPhones and 14.1 million iPads. According to those figures, the company’s iPhone sales were up 25.7 percent year-over-year while its iPad sales were up 0.7 percent year-over-year.
Last quarter, Apple sold 31.2 million iPhones and 14.6 million iPads, but of course the only fair comparison worth making is year-over-year. In Q4 2012, Apple sold fewer phones and fewer tablets than this quarter: 26.9 million iPhones and 14 million iPads.
Q4 2013 industry estimates for iPhones ranged between 32.67 million and 34.22 million while estimates for iPads ranged between 14.51 million and 13.26 million. Apple thus easily beat estimates for iPhones but failed to do the same for iPads.
More specifically, Apple managed to beat both the institutional consensus and the independent one when it comes to its hottest gadget, but its tablets were somewhere in the middle. While this isn’t an ideal result, it’s certainly a positive one: the iPhone line is definitely more important than the iPad one for the company, and it did just get refreshed with the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c.
Many tablet consumers meanwhile were likely waiting for the company’s October iPad event. Now that the iPad Air and the iPad mini with Retina have been announced, the real test for Apple will be this current quarter.
Overall, Apple is still impressively selling more devices than the comparable quarter last year, despite increased competition from the likes of Google and Microsoft. Unfortunately, the company as always didn’t offer numbers for specific types of devices (iPhone 5 versus iPhone 4S or iPad versus iPad mini), so it’s impossible to see which ones are performing better or worse.
See also – iPad Air vs. iPad 4: What has Apple changed? and iPad mini with Retina vs. iPad mini: What has Apple changed?
Top Image Credit: Wang Zhao/Getty Images
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