of up arrows. And yet, amid Apple CEO
Tim Cook’s continued embarrassment
that Apple continues to generate
enormous sales and profits at a time
when so much of the world is in
turmoil, there were (as there almost
always are) also some interesting
things we can glean about Apple’s
business left amid the financial
disclosures and coy asides to financial
analysts. Here are a few of them.
iPHONE PRO IS A HIT
Apple executives singled out the
iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 12 Pro Max
for praise, saying it had a “very high
level of interest” from consumers that
led to supply constraints on those
models and helped drive up the
average selling price of the iPhone. (By
how much? We don’t know, because
Apple doesn’t disclose exact unit sales
anymore, but CFO Luca Maestri said
that both unit sales and ASPs were up
during the quarter.)
Recently, fans of the iPhone 12
mini (and I’m one of them) were
disturbed by a report that said Apple
was reducing its sales expectations for
that smaller model. The assumption
at the time was that the iPhone 12
was probably doing as well as the Pro