Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, explained the rationale with an analogy: “If you go to the market and you push your cart up to the cashier — and she says or he says, ‘How many units do you have in there?’ — it doesn’t matter a lot how many units there are in there in terms of the overall value of what’s in the cart.”

Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein, said Apple was trying to shift investors’ attention away from the number of devices it sold. “Companies always try to put their best foot forward,” he said. “Their best foot doesn’t appear to be iPhone unit growth.”

Another wildly profitable quarter for Apple showed its business has mostly avoided the turbulence that has roiled its Silicon Valley peers. Facebook, Google and Twitter have faced questions about their influence in the spread of disinformation and the proliferation of hate speech.

Apple has tried to separate itself from other tech giants by trumpeting that it values its customers’ privacy and hires people to curate its services rather than relying on computer algorithms. The company responded to criticism about the addictive nature of its smartphones by adding tools for people to track their time spent on them.

Last month, Apple released its most expensive iPhone ever, the XS Max, which starts at $1,100. On Tuesday, it raised the starting price of its iPad Pro to $800 from $650 and of its MacBook Air to $1,200 from $1,000, while also making the devices faster and more powerful.