Apple's still selling fewer and fewer iPhones each quarter

Despite finally selling over one billion iPhones earlier this year, an Apple fourth-quarter earnings report today revealed the latest data point in a downward trend for the company’s smartphone.

In the report, covering the period ending September 24 2016, Apple says it only sold 45.51 million iPhones in 2016, 5% less than the 48 million iPhones it sold during the fourth quarter of 2015. 

That’s the third quarter in a row that Apple’s iPhone sales have dropped year-over-year, indicating a possible trend that iPhone purchasing habits are shifting among consumers. 

Though it’s not a giant drop (45 million potential game-playing devices is nothing to sneeze at), it’s a number that game developers may need to keep an eye on, if they’re planning to launch in the crowded mobile market in the near future. 

Elsewhere in the report, Apple states that it earned a profit of $9 billion, and drew in $45 billion in revenue, which is a slight decline of nine percent from last year’s $51 billion from the same quarter.

These numbers appear to loosely correlate with the across-the-board declines in devices sold (it’s a seven percent drop for iPads, and a 16 percent for Mac computers compared to this time last year). 

Thumbnail via #WOCinTech