CRACKS RACK UP

Apple iPhone angst gives stock a 7% shower

It’s official: Wall Street has iPhone anxiety.

Apple delivered unexpectedly strong sales and profits for its latest quarter, but its shares tanked as a weak holiday forecast stoked worries that shoppers are hesitant to shell out big bucks for a new crop of extra-pricey iPhones.

The Silicon Valley juggernaut posted the strongest fiscal fourth-quarter results in its history — with $62.9 billion in revenue, handily beating the $61.4 billion analysts had forecast.

But Apple also revealed that it moved only 46.9 million iPhones, missing Wall Street’s forecast 48.4 million and growing only 0.4 percent year-over-year.

Apple shares fell 7.1 percent in after-hours trading, to $206.46 — robbing Apple of its trillion-dollar valuation and leaving its market cap at $999.7 billion.

The concern is that the new iPhones — whose price tags start at $999 and can stretch to more than $1,400 for a tricked-out XS Max — are scaring users into sticking with the model they already have.

Apple execs went on the defensive during a Thursday earnings call, with financial chief Luca Maestri announcing that beginning this quarter, Apple will no longer break out unit sales for iPhones, iPads and Macs.

“The number of units sold in any 90-day period is not necessarily representative of the underlying strength of our business,” Maestri said. “If you look at our top competitors, they do not provide quarterly numbers.”

“When we believe that providing qualitative quantity of unit sales provides additional relevancy for investors, we will do so,” he added.

CEO Tim Cook went farther, comparing Apple’s decision to a customer shopping at the supermarket and the cashier asking how many units they have in their cart.

“It doesn’t matter how many units you have in there,” Cook said, “in terms of the overall value of what’s in the cart.”

The change comes even as Apple blew past expectations for the average selling price of the iPhone, with the average handset running consumers $793 against an expectation of $729 — a 28 percent jump from last year.

Cook said on the call that the new, more expensive phones were off to a “great start.”

But “in looking at the sales data for the XS and XS Max, there is not obvious evidence of that,” Cook said.