By Leif Johnson from MacLife

The numbers are in for the iPhone, iPad, the Mac, and yes, the Apple Watch from Apple’s quarterly earnings call, and while those numbers are impressive, Wall Street doesn’t seem too happy. In other news, Apple’s planned announcement of the MTV Video Music Award nominees apparently crashed Beats 1 this morning, along with most of Apple’s other online services.

Apple Reveals Q3 2015 Sales in Quarterly Earnings Call
Apple held its quarterly earnings call today, and as you might have expected, the company’s sitting on a massive pile of cash. Indeed, the Cupertino company made $10.7 billion in operating profit during the last quarter, which means the company now has $202 billion in cash to draw from. Apple had already broken records with last quarter’s report of $194 billion, and it’s worth noting that it achieved this new record even after giving back $13 billion to shareholders in dividends.

As expected, the iPhone did quite well during the quarter. All total, Apple sold 47.5 million units of the popular smartphone, representing a 35 percent increase from the same time last year. That’s down a bit from the jaw-dropping 74.5 billion iPhones Apple sold in Q1 and the 61 million it sold in Q2, but it’s still an impressive figure to achieve in what is typically the slowest period for iPhone sales.

The App Store had its best quarter ever, and Apple CEO Tim Cook noted that it saw a 24 percent increase in revenue and a 19 percent growth in the number of transacting customers. Mac sales were up, too, as Apple sold 4.8 million units during the last quarter, a jump up from the 4.4 million sold in the year-ago quarter. As expected, the iPad continued its slow, sad decline with just 10.9 million sold compared to the 13.3 million sold at this point last year.

Tim Cook also revealed some information about sales for the Apple Watch, although (as expected) he didn’t mention specific numbers. Still, he did claim that it “exceeded expectations” even with the constrained supplies and that “We feel really great about how we did.”

In fact, according to Apple chief financial officer Luca Maestri, the Apple Watch sold more units in its first nine weeks than the iPhone and iPad sold during the same timeframe after their initial release. The original iPhone saw around 1 million units sold in the month after its release, and the iPad saw 3 million sold during the same span of time. Notably, Maestri also claimed that June was the best month for Apple Watch sales, countering earlier market speculation that Apple Watch sales declined sharply during that period.

All this talk of record-breaking quarters might sound impressive, but it apparently didn’t impress Wall Street investors. As of the time of writing, Apple stock had plummeted by 6.76 percent in after-hours trading.

Beats 1 Traffic Seemingly Crashes Many Apple Services
There’s been no official response from Apple itself, but it seems as though the rush of listeners trying to learn the VMA nominees on Beats 1 this morning caused a massive outage affecting multiple Apple services. Apple and MTV had planned to announce this year’s nominees on Beats 1 exclusively, but MTV ended up simply announcing the nominees on its Twitter account at the scheduled time. At least they were good sports about it, as the feed is full of references that suggest that nothing is amiss at all (e.g., “Who’s listening to @Beats1 on @AppleMusic for more nominees?”).

Apple may not have said anything about the event aside from a System Status message that “Users are experiencing a problem with the services listed above,” but the evidence seems strong. The System Status page itself claims that the problems happened right before 10:00 a.m. EST, which is precisely when MTV had announced the nominations were going to take place.

Files stored in iCloud apparently weren’t affected, but almost everything else — from Apple Music (and Beats 1) and both App Stores to Apple TV and iBooks — was down for the count.

If the traffic really was the culprit, it should serve as a wake-up call for Apple. First, it shows that the company’s push for exclusive announcements and interviews for Beats 1 can, in fact, draw massive traffic. Secondly, though, it shows that Apple needs to be better prepared if it intends to make similar announcements in the future. When the VMA announcements can take down an entertainment powerhouse like iTunes, it just looks bad.

For more on this story go to: http://www.maclife.com/article/news/apple_daily_apples_q3_earnings_report_beats_1_traffic_affects_apple_services