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Comment by phil | Hacker News Reader

Gross margin was down 1.5% over last quarter. Anyone want to guess what lower margin products they sold more of?

I'd guess Macbook Airs, but there are certainly other contenders.

It's well known the iPhone 4 has the highest margin so selling fewer of those could account for the lower gross margin overall. [edit]Things like exchange rates can factor in as well.[/edit]

I'd also caution against reading too much into "demand waning" for the sales drop. Apple switched a lot of iphone 4 production to iphone 4S production to stockpile millions for the launch.

That makes perfect sense, thanks.

I'd be surprised to learn that the iPhone 4 was supply constrained over the last several months -- keep in mind that they're still selling the thing. I think it's been in stock pretty much the entire time.

(edit: meant to say supply constrained)

You don't compare numbers against the previous quarter, you compare numbers against the same quarter, the previous year.

Apple's gross margin this quarter was 40.3 percent, compared to 36.9 percent in the year-ago quarter

That's true of revenue, but as far as I know there's not as much annual cyclicity for margins.

I don't know much about consumer product sales, but I wouldn't think that it's entirely impossible that different products have somewhat different seasonal sales patterns.

People buy lots of laptops in August/September for back to school. People buy lots of iPods in December for gifts. People buy lots of iPhones in whatever quarter they launch a new iPhone in.

That's not always accurate, Apple's Q4 2011 and Q3 2011 are fine to compare here, the product mix particularly phones and ipads shipped are much closer then Q4 2011 and Q4 2010.

timing of product launches doesn't matter. In finance investors always compare year over year to evaluate the performance of their investments.

He's not evaluating the performance of an investment, he's asking why the margin is different which is generally a product mix question.

same thing applies. year-over-year comparisons are more accurate.

Not always and certainly not in this case.

@phil it's true for all numbers.

Why? Genuinely curious.

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