Apple says 900M iPhones in the wild, 1.4B active devices total at end of December

In its quarterly results call on Tuesday Apple revealed that there are more than 900 million iPhones in its install base, forming the lion's share of active devices.

That number represents an increase of 75 million during 2018, said CFO Luca Maestri. This is the first time Apple has disclosed its iPhone base, and Maestri promised that from now on data will be periodically updated.

Apple's install base includes 1.4 billion units in all. The company didn't break out numbers for Macs, iPads, or the Apple Watch.

Apple was already known to be heavily dependent on iPhone sales. In announcing December-quarter results, it revealed that overall revenue declined year-over-year from $88.3 billion to $84.3 billion, mostly because iPhone sales dropped from $61.1 billion to just under $52 billion.

Earlier this month Cook warned about "lower than anticipated iPhone revenue, primarily in Greater China," saying it accounted for "all of our revenue shortfall to our guidance and for much more than our entire year-over-year revenue decline." Factors affecting last quarter's iPhone sales reportedly included "foreign exchange headwinds," "economic weakness in some emerging markets," and even its discounted battery replacement program, which generated about 11 times more traffic than anticipated.

10 Comments

curtis hannah 12 Years · 1834 comments

About 5 years ago

They will release total active iPhone amount rather than quarterly sales count? That is actually a good thing, as analyst can estimate total deactivated iPhones(obviously much lower than newly activated), and then estimate the total iPhone sales for the quarter anyways.

ericthehalfbee 13 Years · 4489 comments

900 million is a great figure for iPhone users.

If people kept their phone for 4 years Apple can still sell 200 million or-so every year to upgraders. A terrible position to be in.

iOS_Guy80 5 Years · 905 comments

ericthehalfbee said:

900 million is a great figure for iPhone users.

If people kept their phone for 4 years Apple can still sell 200 million or-so every year to upgraders. A terrible position to be in.

900 million is not to shabby. I would have guessed it to be around 950 M. A figure I would like to know is how many people with an Apple ID have more than one Apple device (any product) registered to that same ID. Do they publish records showing the yearly growth of registered users?

tjwolf 12 Years · 423 comments

curtis hannah said:

They will release total active iPhone amount rather than quarterly sales count? That is actually a good thing, as analyst can estimate total deactivated iPhones(obviously much lower than newly activated), and then estimate the total iPhone sales for the quarter anyways.

Where have you been? This change was announced back at the last earnings call - and led directly to the stock declining $20 :-(

How can analysts estimate deactivated devices beyond a WAG?

Kuyangkoh 7 Years · 838 comments

tjwolf said:

curtis hannah said:

They will release total active iPhone amount rather than quarterly sales count? That is actually a good thing, as analyst can estimate total deactivated iPhones(obviously much lower than newly activated), and then estimate the total iPhone sales for the quarter anyways.

Where have you been? This change was announced back at the last earnings call - and led directly to the stock declining $20 :-(

How can analysts estimate deactivated devices beyond a WAG?

I must be sleeping, hahahaha