Robust growth of Cloud-based services remained in the shadow, along with Apple's financial results

While the media responses about flatline growth in financial results of Apple have a dominating position, the massive growth of cloud-based services Apple are reportedly remains largely unnoticed.

In 2012, reports iPodNN, the number of iCloud users grew from 85 million to more than 250 million. The number of iTunes users has exceeded 500 million, with a record profit of 2.1 billion dollars for the quarter.

Also very popular was the iMessage service through which users send more than two billion messages per day from more than 500 million devices. Apple CEO Tim Cook drew attention to the Internet and the web services during the conference:

"In terms of other services, we feel fantastic about how we're doing. In Notification Center, we've now sent over 4 trillion notifications, and this is mind-blowing. As Peter mentioned in his opening comment, for iMessage we've now sent over 450 billion and are currently sending those over 2 billion per day. With Game Center, we've got over 200 million registered users. We have 800,000 apps on the App Store with over 40 billion downloads. And so I feel really, really great about it. There is obviously more stuff we can do and you can bet we're thinking about all of it."

Cook repeatedly referred to iCloud as the "strategy for the next decade" for Apple. He also received greater consumer confidence through cloud-based storage and services as "truly profound" and "a fundamental shift" in providing access to the content.