In the wake of a report from the WSJ last week that detailed how low demand for Apple’s latest iPhones was prompting the company to cut orders for the devices, particularly the iPhone XR, an Apple VP is detailing that the XR is the company’s best-selling model available right now.
The disclosure comes from Apple VP Greg Joswiak in an interview with CNET. It’s not a particularly juicy quote, only detailing that the device has “been our most popular iPhone each and every day since the day it became available.”
Joswiak didn’t specifically comment on the WSJ report. The assertion regarding iPhone XR sales relative to other iPhone models doesn’t really tell us a ton either, without some solid numbers.
The fact that the $749 XR is the best-selling of the iPhones available now isn’t wildly surprising. It was introduced as a crowd pleaser with a lower cost build that didn’t actually make many sacrifices in terms of compute power. The company’s iPhone XS retails for $999; they also are continuing to sell last-gen models at lower prices.
What’s interesting about this interview snippet is that this is just a slice of the detail we would generally get in a quarterly earnings report, but Apple recently decided that it’s not going to give that data moving forward and will instead just leave it at the revenues for its iPhone segment. In other words, this is about as good as it’s going to get moving forward in terms of insights about model breakdowns for device sales.
The company’s reasoning for not discussing unit sales moving forward pretty much boiled down to the fact that it wasn’t necessarily reflective of the company’s health, but the timing of this pertinent realization comes as analysts believe demand for the devices could start to slow.
The company’s stock price has taken about a 20 percent dive since it shared its most recent earnings.