Apple’s historic holiday quarter was better than it looked.

Apple sold ~6 million iPhones per week last quarter. 77.3 million iPhones in 13 weeks. 1 million fewer than a year ago quarter, which was a 14 week quarter.

If this were a 14 week quarter, Apple would have sold ~83 million phones, or 7 million more than a year ago.

At this quarter’s average selling price (ASP) of $796.42 USD, that would be another $5.5b in revenue on one week of iPhone sales. That starts to get Apple awfully close to a $100 billion quarter when you factor in an additional week of sales for the rest of their product and service areas (Apple reported a record $88.3 billion for the 13 week holiday quarter).

This little guy helped bump up the average selling pice of iPhones by over $100.

Yet many outlets and pundits have pointed out that iPhone sales were down from the year ago quarter. Those complaining it wasn’t the best quarter ever are once again glossing over the extra week of sales. Last year’s purported best iPhone sales quarter ever, sold fewer weekly iPhones (5.6m) than even the year prior (5.75m), also a 13 week quarter.

At 5.95m phones per week in the just ended quarter, there’s clearly an uptick this year over the 2015 and 2016 holiday periods, to the tune of $278 million in additional revenue per week over the purported best sales quarter if you multiply the increase by this quarter’s $796.42 ASP.

This lack of attention to detail also holds with Macs, which are showing a downturn from 5.4 million sold during the year ago quarter (385,000 per week over 14 weeks) to 5.1 million this holiday quarter (392,000 per week over 13 weeks).

If this were a 14 week quarter, Apple would have sold 5.5m Macs, ~100,000 more than the year ago quarter, though still not meeting the record 5.7m from Q4 2016 (which was buoyed by the long awaited MacBook Pro refresh).

Update: Horace Dediu shared this 13 vs 14 week chart in a Feb 5, 2018 article.

In any case, I’ll take sell-through and revenue by week (they all have 7 days, except, perhaps, the first and last of the year) as a measure any day over blindly comparing two quarters which, at this scale, have radically different sales periods. And that’s the best way to unequivocally see that it was a record quarter from Apple across almost every area of the business.

Congrats, Apple. Now when do we get HomePod in Canada?