Against the backdrop of the decline of the entire market, Apple's slowdown in growth has become more eye-catching. Two days ago, Google and Microsoft were the first to release their third-quarter financial reports. The former's revenue growth rate was only 6% year-on-year, while

Against the backdrop of the decline of the entire market, the slowdown in Apple 's growth is actually eye-catching.

Two days ago, Google and Microsoft took the lead in releasing third-quarter financial reports. The former's revenue growth rate was only 6% year-on-year, while the latter increased by by 10.6%, and both profits declined by double digits year-on-year. After the financial report was released, both stock prices fell by nearly 8%.

Amazon and Meta are even more dismal. After Amazon's financial report was released, the stock price collapsed at 16%, creating the largest single-day decline since 2006; Meta even plummeted by 24%, and its market value shrank to less than $350 billion, which is far from Amazon's $1.13 trillion, not to mention Apple's $2.4 trillion.

Early this morning, Apple released its fourth quarter report for fiscal year 2022 (i.e., the third quarter financial report for this year), with overall revenue reaching a record $90.1 billion, an increase of 8% year-on-year, and profit of $24.9 billion, a year-on-year increase of 4.7%, slightly exceeding analyst expectations.

Even so, Apple's stock price fell by more than 3% after the financial report was released, and more of them may be a dissatisfaction with the overall environment. Apple's chief financial officer Luca Maestri said in an interview:

This is better than we expected at the beginning of last quarter.

Maestri Further pointed out that exchange rate fluctuations have negative impacts on Apple and all multinational companies. Taking Japan as an example, last month Apple announced that its products will increase prices across the Japanese market, with the price of iPhone 13 increased by 20%.

In fact, this is better than most people think. WSJ also gave two words Apple: Tough.

Mobile phones are the only one in the cold winter, and Apple is the only one in

According to the global and Chinese smartphone market report recently released by market analysis agency Canalys, global market shipments fell by 9% year-on-year, which is equivalent to selling more than 60 million units less, which is also the worst third-quarter performance since 2014; the Chinese market fell by 11% year-on-year, with only 70 million units left overall.

Global Mobile Phone Market Q3 Report, Photo/canalys

Apple obviously withstood the pressure, and its global market share increased from 15% in the same period last year to 18%, making it the fastest growing among the top five mobile phone manufacturers. In the Chinese market, except for Apple's shipments that increased by 36% year-on-year, Xiaomi , OPPO, vivo and Honor all experienced double-digit declines, with OPPO falling the most severely, reaching 27%.

However, the shrinkage of the entire Chinese mobile phone market still affected the global performance of iPhone. The previous fastest-growing Greater China region only recorded a growth of 6.2% in the last quarter. On the contrary, Apple achieved an explosive growth of 22.7% year-on-year in the Asia-Pacific market, and the American market also saw an 8.1% growth.

According to data from the US consumer intelligence research institute, the average selling price of iPhone in June this year has risen from US$783 (approximately RMB 5,664) to US$954 (approximately RMB 6,901) in September 2019. The rise in the price of

and the sales data that outperform the market are all pushing up the revenue brought by the iPhone.

According to the financial report, iPhone sales revenue is still the largest head of the overall revenue of Apple , accounting for as high as 47%. Even on the basis of a 39% increase in the same period last year, iPhone revenue in the third quarter of this year still increased by 9.7% year-on-year to US$42.6 billion.

Apple's revenue structure for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2022, Figure/TidBITS

But iPhone is not without problems. According to multiple reports, the latest iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus performed poorly in sales, and the supply chain also reported concerns about Apple's order cuts. JPMorgan analysts estimate that iPhone 14 Pro/Pro Max will account for 60% of the total sales of the current 14 series. You should know that the starting prices of the two are as high as RMB 7,999 and RMB 9,999 respectively.

is not incomprehensible. In order to open up the difference between the Pro version and the Standard version, Apple not only used the previous generation of A15 chips in the Standard version, but also did not follow the mainstream 120Hz screen refresh rate, and even the appearance changes did not bring them to the Standard version.

Based on past experience, changes in the appearance design of new iPhones are often the key to consumers' decision to buy. Unlike the media, ordinary consumers care more about those more intuitive changes and are more willing to "take my money" for this.

This is not the first time Apple has encountered the bad sales of the standard version, especially since Apple decided to start with iPhone X and no longer release only two iPhones a year. When it comes to iPhone 12, four models have been released at once: 12 mini, 12, 12 Pro, and 12 Pro Max.

Everyone knows the story that the mini model was cut off due to poor sales performance.

Mac and iPad: Two flowers bloom, each with one

Another major growth point of Apple in the last quarter was the computer business. Compared with iPhone, Mac and iPad account for Apple's overall revenue, but it also accounts for 21% of the total. However, there are considerable differences in revenue performance between the two.

First of all, the attractiveness of Mac to users. Benefiting from the competitive advantages of the M-series chips, Mac directly brought in $11.5 billion in revenue last quarter, a year-on-year increase of 25%. The other key is that nearly half of them are new Mac users, rather than upgrading from old Mac products. Apple also said another driving growth in the Mac business was the previous backlog of demand and improved supply due to production issues.

In contrast, like the smartphone market, other players in the entire PC market are experiencing continuous fluctuations, including Microsoft warning investors on the earnings call, "Soft demand for computers will continue to affect the performance of the Windows business."

In addition, Apple is expected to release 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro upgrades in the next few weeks.

iPad, picture/Apple

. The iPad business, which released a new product earlier this month, performed poorly, and revenue fell 13.1% year-on-year to US$7.1 billion. Cook said on the conference call that this is mainly a production issue rather than an iPad demand, and the change in the release time of iPad from September to October has also affected sales in the past three months.

At the same time, The Information reported this week that Apple has planned to launch a 16-inch version of iPad Pro, which will be released in the fourth quarter of next year.

This once again confirms Apple's idea of ​​the two product lines of Mac and iPad. Since the launch of iPadOS, it can be clearly seen that Apple wants iPad and Mac to gradually get closer - the unity of chip architecture, convergence in UI and functions, including the recent "pre-stage scheduling" function. In terms of size, in addition to the 16-inch MacBook Pro, the 16-inch iPad is also coming.

This is not the merger of Mac and iPad. I believe that without the unified ecosystem, the two product lines will be parallel for a long time, but the integration between them is what Apple is already doing.

Apple's next growth miracle

Apple has started the process of service transformation since 2016, and to this day, the revenue of the entire service business has been equivalent to that of Mac+iPad, accounting for 21%. However, the year-on-year growth rate of 5% in the last quarter was obviously not ideal, especially considering that the number of paid subscriptions on the Apple platform has exceeded 900 million, Apple's explanation is the increase in content licensing costs, so this week it raised the subscription price of Apple Music and TV+.

Not only that, Apple also added two important advertising spaces to the App Store this week, which immediately attracted a lot of criticism and complaints, mainly targeting gambling advertisements and content that does not meet the age rating.

The next day Apple deleted the relevant advertisement, and an Apple spokesperson also admitted that the situation existed. But due to concerns about Apple's advertising, some people have already worried that the iPhone 14 Pro will also be advertised on Dynamic Island.

The picture is a netizen PS, intended to satirize Apple, picture/@simonbs

In the long run, Apple's next growth miracle will still be found in wearable devices. Cook has publicly expressed interest in AR since at least 2016 and has gradually become "AR's number one fan", viewing AR as "big" as a smartphone.

is the next generation computing platform.

Today, looking back at the history of personal computing platforms, you will find that from PCs to smartphones, Apple has not missed a generation of computing platforms - from Apple I in 1976 to the first generation of iPhones in 2007, it is naturally impossible to miss AR. Jobs When explaining to the outside world that Apple's shift from a computer company to a mobile phone company in 2010, he said:

What is important is that we have to initiate the transformation, just like Christensen proposed the "innovator dilemma" - people who invent something are often the last ones to see the end. We obviously don't want to be left behind.

In fact, Apple has already started layout, AirPods's spatial audio, Apple Watch's health monitoring, and the "useless" LiDAR camera on iPad Pro, as well as the core chip.

is drawn according to the description of Apple's VR product prototype. The picture/@ianzelbo

includes Kuo Mingchi , The Information, Bloomberg and other sources all said that Apple is expected to launch Cook Xinnian's AR device in 2025. Before that, Apple will release a VR product later this year or next year, which is expected to support the MR application, and will be equipped with an M2 chip and 16GB of memory. In addition, it may also be equipped with a secondary chip responsible for processing device sensor data.

This business may be Apple's next growth miracle.