Apple has released financial results for its 13-week fiscal 2013 first quarter ended December 29, 2012. And the data presented by them poses interesting things. First off, these results would be closely scrutinized by analysts and geeks alike owing to recent reports about the decreasing demand for the company’s iPhone – thanks to increasing popularity of competing devices.

That said, even with the so called slowdown in the iPhone sales, Apple in the last quarter managed to sell a record 47.8 million iPhones. This figure was just 37 million during the same quarter, last year. Apple’s popular tablet, the iPad too saw record sales with the company announcing that they sold no less than 22.9 million units of the large screened tablet in the last quarter. Thats roughly the population if the entire Mumbai Metropolitan area. In total, Apple managed to sell a total of 75 million iOS powered devices in the last quarter!

Apple also added that the total number of iOS devices sold have crossed the 500 million mark. This is quite a jump from the figure of 400 million back in June 2012. Apple’s iCloud service also seems to be doing good with the user base of the same seeing a nice jump. As of now, Apple claims that iCloud now has an userbase of 250 million.

All is however not well with the company reporting that sales of the iPod and the Mac have fallen. This is however blamed on the delays in bringing the updated version of the Macs to a few markets.

All said, there is no doubt that Apple would be facing increased challenges in the next few quarters. With competition playing catchup in terms of functionalities, specs and features it seems Apple would have to innovate again and do something totally out of this world to ensure that its reign of supremacy continues

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