Apple has Good Reasons not to Publish Hardware Sales

There has been a lot of discussion about Apple’s decision not to reveal hardware unit sales following its earning’s call on Thursday. Investors certainly did not like it and we saw Apple’s stock price tumble by as much as 7% in the aftermath. There is an interesting—if sometimes snarky—piece of analysis on Yahoo! Finance that discusses Apple’s attempts to project itself as a services company, less reliant on hardware sales than it has ever been.  It concludes that this is a transition phase for Apple. Here’s a snippet:
Apple may want to project itself as a services company and want to direct investor attention to the services story and also, how it is a great place for customer satisfaction and security.
But it’s a little hard to sell that story when the services business contributed just 16% of revenue — yes even if that 16% represents a 27% increase from last year after one-time items, and even if that growth rate was substantially higher than the rest of the business.