In the old days, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL | AAPL Price Prediction) would say how many iPhones it sold in the days after the launch of a new generation. The announcements went on for days and sometimes weeks. They became the primary driver of the stock price during those periods. (These are the biggest product flops of the past decade.)
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Alas, those days are gone. How many iPhones Apple sells is a state secret. Unit sales were once part of Apple’s quarterly earnings report. The only figure given now is iPhone revenue, along with figures on Watch, Mac and Services revenue.
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Investors are left with a difficult problem. How do they handicap iPhone 15 sales? Based on Apple’s history, orders should be about 20 million by now. Apple’s stock is almost overpriced if the number is much below that. If sales are unusually brisk, the share price should be higher. Revenue may be a reasonable proxy, but earnings will not be announced for two months.
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Apple has argued that the iPhone is a less important part of the company’s ecosystem than several years ago. There are about 3 billion Apple hardware products in the market worldwide. About half of those are iPhones. Apple’s software and services business has grown the fastest for over four years.
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The iPhone is Apple’s flagship. The value of its sales goes well beyond dollars. iPhone sales for the first month after launch are as critical as any other metric by which Apple is measured.
Has Apple Sold 20 Million iPhone 15s?
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
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