iPhone breaks sales records as Apple beats expectations but iPad sales continue to fall

Apple has improved upon its recent quarterly disappointments by posting a strong sales period on the back of a record-breaking iPhone performance.

Earning for the quarter reached $8.5bn and revenue $42.1bn which exceeded both internal and analyst estimates. A total of 39.2m iPhones were sold in the period, the bulk of which were iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

On the flip side, things were less impressive for iPad whose sales reached 12.3m units – down from the 14.1m sold in the same period the year before.

Note that iPad sales are normally traditionally soft in this quarter as it precedes the annual launch of new tablet models. However, sales of Apple’s tablet have now been down year-on-year for three quarters in a row.

I view it as a speed bump, not as a big issue,” boss Tim Cook told investors, as reported by VentureBeat. That said, we want to grow. We don’t like negative numbers. Over the long arc of time, my own judgement is that iPad has a great future.

If you look at it over the long term instead of looking at each 90-day period, you’ll see that we sold 237m iPads in just four years. That’s twice the number of iPhones we sold during the first four years.

We don’t think the market is saturated, and I do look deeply into the numbers. We looked at the country that sold the lowest per cent of iPads to people who had never owned one before, and it was 50 per cent. And the number goes up to 70 in some of the other countries.”

Cook also added that consumers hold on to tablets longer than they do smartphones.