The company recently admitted iPhone sales are down

Jan 3, 2019 12:33 GMT  ·  By

While Apple no longer discloses how many iPhones it sells, the latest few months brought us an impressive number of reports from third-party sources and analysts indicating that the 2018 generation is far from reaching Cupertino’s expectations.

In fact, sales of 2018 iPhones are so weak that Apple itself had to turn to a series of cost-saving measures, including lowered production and bigger trade-in discounts for customers buying the new models.

Earlier this week, Apple took everyone by surprise with a revision to the Q1 2019 earnings guidance, explaining that it now expects to reach $84 billion in revenue, down from a maximum of $93 billion originally.

While this itself is a confirmation that iPhone sales aren’t going exactly as planned, Apple CEO Tim Cook explained in an interview with CNBC that partly to blame for this poor performance of the 2018 generation is the trade tension between the United States and China.

“What I believe to be the case is the trade tensions between the United States and China put additional pressure on their economy. We saw, as the quarter went on, things like traffic in our retail stores, traffic in our channel partner stores going down, the reports of the smartphone industry contracting,” he said.

Apple still doesn’t think iPhones are too expensive

Then, it’s the battery replacing program for the iPhone that’s slowing down new purchases. Apple allowed iPhone users to replace their device batteries for $29, down from $79, until December 31 as part of a special discount program released after acknowledging intentional slowdowns of models with degraded batteries.

“We’ve started a program worldwide where we dramatically lower the battery replacement price. We had sort of a collection of items going on, some that are macroeconomic, some that are Apple-specific. We’re not going to sit around waiting for the macro to change. I hope that it does, and I’m actually optimistic, but we’re going to focus deeply on the things we can control,” Cook said.

In other words, iPhone owners stick with their devices for a longer period of time after replacing the battery and do not see any reason to spend thousands of dollars on a new iPhone.

Surprisingly, Tim Cook still doesn’t consider the high price of the 2018 models as a reason people stay away from these phones, despite all the criticism that happened lately in the largest markets.