Apple executives speak: On toaster-fridges, financial guidance, and lawsuits

25.04.2012

Finally, we think that--and this is most important--iPhone is the best smartphone in the planet to entice a customer who is currently using a traditional mobile phone to upgrade to a smartphone. This is by far the largest opportunity for Apple, for our carrier partners, and is a great fantastic experience for the customer. So there's a win-win-win there.

I think that all of these factors are--some of these factors are missed in this general discussion on subsidies.

Spain has been weak for us, and probably more broadly for many companies. Our revenues grew in Spain last quarter but materially less than we grew in Europe or worldwide. However, that wasn't cause-and-effect related to the issue you're on, Spain is just in a terrible economic situation and so I look at that as an unusual case.

To be clear about what was done, there's also some noise in the pipe on this one: What the carriers did was they still have subsidies for their existing customers. I don't want to talk about what their existing customer to new customer ratio is, but you can find out numbers from different parts of the world and model that. They pulled subsidies on new customers, and so it wasn't a pull of all subsidies, it was a pull of subsidies from new. All carriers in that market did not do that, a couple of the carriers did. So I wouldn't necessarily use that as a proxy for the world, I guess is my point.