Last year, and precisely during its traditionally strong holiday season, Apple stopped issuing its usual iPhone sales numbers. Not only it missed breaking down the iPhone numbers by model – after all, it never did – but it also recused itself from any unit reporting, replacing it with overall revenue and guidance instead.
If that smelled fishy, it’s because it was. Apple logged the first sales decline ever since the OG iPhone was introduced to the unwashed masses, sales since then have been far from the double digit growth we’ve gotten used to, and the rest is history.