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Apple Reports Q1 Loss
Amsterdam Vallon writes "Apple recently reported an $8 million loss, its second straight loss, compared with a $38 million profit a year ago. It seems that upbeat laptop sales weren't enough to get this company out of the Wall Street basement. Hopefully, with increasing Mac OS X and wireless-related sales, we'll see a nice increase come next quarter and after that, perhaps a jaunt toward profitability!" The back was apparently tipped into the red with one-time restructuring losses, else there would have been a modest profit; Apple expects stagnant revenues for the near future.
If only I had enough money to buy a PowerMac. Then Apple would only be down $7,997,000!
Stupid College, no money...
Their worldwide marketshare is now 1.93%. According to IDC, 38.4 million PCs were shipped last quarter, up 4% from the year ago period. Apple shipped 743,000 Macs which is down 2% from the year ago period. This follows a steady trend in declining marketshare over the past 5 years.
fyi, here's the Original Press release from apple and the Quicktime broadcast of the conference call in which the statements are announced.
one should note also that the only reason apple posted a loss was that it had to pay a one-time restructuring fee. without that, it would have actually posted an $11M profit, which would be a drop (from $38M last Q1), but a far less dramatic one than the loss they indicated.
Recursion (n): See recursion
And now it's easier to run Linux software on Macs thanks to Apple's release of X11 for Mac OS X.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Fair enough, they've spent a lot of money to get where they are. But from here on in, they should be able to save a fair bit. While having BSD as the core of MacOSX won't give them billion-dollar profits, it surely helps reduce OS-related software development costs.
And with these savings, they can spend time developing better, easier-to-use-for-the-whole-family apps. For example, their Powerpoint killer (whose name I have momentarily forgotten - argh!) and their iLife range (I think that was the name - I'm not a Mac user (can you tell?)).
Hopefully they can improve even further on the quality of their programs, because that's what the "Apple Experience" is all about.
Hell, I'd buy one except that in Australia, it costs me at least $2,500 to get the Mac-equivalent of my $1,200 home-built rig. Not to mention all of the PC games and stuff. But I digress.
Also, if Apple can work on the X-Windows side of things, perhaps they'll be used by big IT spenders to replace aging *NIX systems - another boon of the BSD lineage. Go MacOSX and go Apple!
This sig intentionally left bla... dammit!
Who's got the whiteout?
... must have really scared away some potential customers. hmmmm
They're a honest established American company. They're not doing so well because of cheap alternatives flooding the market. They still produce quality products, but because of the high appeal of lower-priced alternatives (though not of the same quality) their market share has dropped significantly. Does this sound like Harley Davidson or what? I think that the US of A could lend them a hand and help them get their production costs down and get Apple back in the running for decades to come.
It seems that upbeat laptop sales weren't enough to get this company out of the Wall Street basement.
Hate to break it to you, but "not losing money" is not exclusively a Wall Street concept.
Goddamned egghead analysts, why can't they see? What's wrong with running a company and only losing money?!?!?! Think different!!!!!!!
but nobody wants to buy a PowerMac G4 when they feel a G5 is right around the corner. Unfortunately, anyone who watches the Mac scene knows that "G5s" have been around the corner now for two years.
I predict the largest problem for Apple is that even when the G5 finally ships, it'll be a lets-get-what-we-can-out-the-door-now type system based on the new IBM PowerPC/Altivec chip.
Personally, I hope Apple waits (...and waits...) until they have a box to really thump the x86 side of things again before they attempt to release anything under the title of a new generation.
The first G4 motherboards sucked.
- You do not need to buy apple to run MacOS.
- There ARE PPC motherboards, abeit expensive... but that is because there isn't a big market for them. There is a board designed for Amiga OS4 that works fine with Linux as well as the IBM machines. The importance is that any PPC board that runs linux can run MacOS, quickly too.
- OSX will not come to x86, are you nuts? Apple would not dare lose their superior architecture and try to fight Microsoft in a 1:1 battle. The best that happens from x86 OSX is that a few Windows users will dual-boot or use VMware. Apple doesn't make their money on software.
You are right about one thing, the Xserve is underpowered and over-expensive.
Why not ask why the only PC seller making money is Dell? I'll treat your troll seriously: major PC makers are bleeding and yet Apple, with its high R&D spending, still manages to make money or break even. The PC market is a financial nightmare.
Apple's Q1 results are pretty much what the stock geeks expected. The whole industry is bad shape from the dot-com bubble burst, with sales & prices *way* down from "the good old days".
Apple's got over four billion dollars cash in the bank, good (& stable) leadership, an established (& loyal) market base, and an impressive R&D program. They're getting through the "Gigahertz Gap" and moving away from the chip supplier that caused it (Motorola).
Apple is not a massive-financial-leverage house of cards (Enron, WorldCom, etc.) that needs a high stock price. Apple stockholders are not a fast-buck-happy mob who'll burn the company's future for great numbers for a quarter or few.
Bottom line: Apple is far too healthy a company and far too sober a stock to need to care much about routine quarterly financials.
It's easy to make up & spread cool- and credible-sounding stuff. Finding & checking hard facts is hard work.
Of course, reader #1 has a fundamentally conflicted position... he hates proprietary software, yet he buys a bleeding-edge machine and runs the latest Windoze games on it, thereby supporting proprietary software and the Microsoft monopoly.
If you're going to spend money on proprietary software, you might at least support UNIX, open source, and non-monopoly manufacturers by buying a Mac. There *are* adequate numbers of Mac games, after all.
(Don't try to convince me all those PC gamers are buying 2GHz machines so they can play Nethack really fast... or even GLQuake.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Although not much, Apple's market share actually did a slight INCREASE. Check this out:
"Quoting an IDC report News.com states that Apple remains the US' fifth-largest company and that its market share ticked up to 3.0 percent from 2.9 in Q4"
http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=1542
I think there's a large number of lamenting WinXP/Linux users who don't go out and by a mac because they have a cheap box and they aren't willing to pay that much for the hardware. These same people would drop $200 in a heartbeat for OSX on another platform.
::salivating::
I know I would.
All my coworkers would, I just asked them.
I also have this preverse fantasy of OSX on a Sun workstation. It is a shame to put such good (but expensive) hardware to such poor use under Solaris 8 or 9. I'm not advocating it for server use, but for the Ultras, OSX would be a serious kick in the pants. It'd be a dream.
And the hardware is pretty much comparable.
ATAPI, external SCSI, firewire, USB keyboards, SDRAM, even OpenBoot firmware. The only big difference is the chipset and processor. It's a recompile away (endianness is even the same).
I guess my point is that Apple is sitting on a crazy killer OS platform that at it's core is extremely portable, and they should be exploiting it to it's fullest extent. Their software tools are what defines them. They need to pimp it and make it their new mission. Provide powerful, useable, and unencumbered interfaces to high-end machines!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
To keep things in perspective. After a loss of $431 million last quarter. Revenue was not that much larger than the quarterly loss, at $2.8 billion. Apple loses $8 million after a restructuring charge, adds $125 million to its cash, keeps its r&d spending up and I'm supposed to feel bad?
Looks like, with the introduction of the new sexxy powerbooks, some great brand-new lines of software, and that big hit listed as "one time re-organization costs", Apple is right on schedule.
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You can really save yourself hours of tedious work with a very simple change. Simply replace index.pl of apple.slashdot.org with a script that does print "Location: http://www.apple.com/pr/\n\n";. I mean, if you're just going to regurgitate every apple PR then you may as well remove the middleman - i.e. you.
...
Have you seen Sun's latest quarterly report ?
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Sun Microsystems Inc., saddled with huge acquisition costs, posted a $2.3 billion quarterly loss on Thursday -- its largest ever.
That translated to a loss of 72 cents per share in the fiscal quarter ended Dec. 29, compared with a $431 million loss (13 cents per share) in the year- ago period.
Excluding the one-time charges covering the acquisition and other costs, however, the Santa Clara firm actually turned a modest profit. It earned $10 million (0 cents per share) in the past quarter on revenue of $2.9 million, compared with a loss of $99 million (3 cents) on sales of $3.1 billion in the year-ago period.
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You have a right to say you want this to happen, just like I have a right to say that I want to have Porsche, and they should pay me a salary to drive it. That doesn't mean it has a chance in hell of happening, or even being possible.
Well then an easy solution is to buy old computers on ebay. I often see computers going for much less than the monitor is worth.
IBM has pretty much announced where they are getting their processors. The i970 from IBM released at 1.8ghz (64 bit, dual core...). Veyr nice chip which IBM will have in mass quantities in the 3rd quarter of this year.
Did you ever notice that Bush II is like a retardo version of Bush I? It's like in Multiplicity after he has made a copy of a copy of himself. Now that Bush II is in office, we've returned to all the core policies of Bush I. Somehow, we're going back to war with Iraq, and the economy has gone way down the tubes. But at least Bush I didn't sound like a damn fool when he talked and seemed to have a good amount of experience, education, and intelligence.
Bush II is like some sort of simpleton who wants all the things daddy wants but doesn't understand how or why.
I've considered buying Apple hardware a couple of times. I am a 99% Linux user. Most of what I do with my comp is browsing and writing/tweaking software (mucking with squid, iptables etc etc). I realized that even if I bought Apple hardware (say an ibook for compactness), I would then end up recreating the Linux/x86 environment.
I would end up spending more than on an equivalent x86 solution for the same results.
Only you'd have a box that could run MS-Office reliably if that was what you needed as well as many other software titles unavailable on Linux, you'd also get this very good thing called Cocoa (Objective-C) which gives you system services like OS level spell checking (hey, I added a word to the dictionary in one program and it no longer gets flagged anywhere in the system) pretty much for free.
You'd also a system which would work straight out of the box for most uses so unless you do that tweaking for entertainment, you'd be doing less of it.
If you are happy with Linux as a M$ alternative then great, stay with x86 and Linux. I'm using a Mac as the M$ alternative becuase Mac OS X is what im looking for in a OS. Maybe one day Linux will be more like Mac OS X (from a UI standpoint) and I can go back.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
They've got 4.4 BILLION (that's Billion, with a B) in the bank.
Somehow, I fail to be able to dredge up anything resembling panic for Apple's future.
I think that the x86 market would become viable only when BIOS in that world becomes IEEE-1275 (open firmware) compliant. That's really the last of the major hassles to shift things over.
I can't for the life of me figure out why, at least in their 'legacy free' reference designs, they don't make it an option for x86.
Well, then, at their current burn rate, they'll be out of business in 137 years. I'd better get a PC soon.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The declining profits are due to one thing. Apple is spending more money to sell the same number of computers.
You have the "switch" ads on TV and the not very successful Apple Stores.
Sadly, Apple tried to do what Gateway did with their stores, and so far has failed.
Whenever I go to an Apple Store, there is always a lifelong Mac user in there as well as a few younger PC types checking out the hardware. Not very often I have I seen anyone buy anything.
Gateway stores... lots of PC people, a few looking to buy a new system.
Being a salesperson, I really see the difference between the people that are "just looking" versus the people that have an intent to purchase something.
The stores aren't cheap to run, and if they don't have the effect of increased company sales...
And we all know how cheap TV ads have become...
Apple doesn't profit $3000 just because the computer costs that much. There are component and other costs involved you know. So, if you calculate with Apple's 30% margin on hardware (which is the largest in the whole industry) I'd give:
3000/1,3=2307?$2300
That means Apple profits $300 from this sale, making the loss $7,999,700. The revenue would increase $3000 of course, but not profits :p
D00d, why are you using a computer in AUSTRIALIA!? Not to be flaming you or anything, but it's DAMNED expensive to buy even a pretty old computer down there. Hell, I auctioned off my old TiBook to someone down there. Shipping's a bitch, but then again, I made a hefty profit.
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
- You do not need to buy apple to run MacOS.
Er....
Yes you do.
Mac OS doesn't run on any system without a proprietary Apple-Branded-And-Blessed-By-The-Hand-Of-Steve ROM. Otherwise, it just won't boot. ROM is crucial to the bootage of any Mac OS.
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
I think all of these numbers may be wrong.
Recently, I read an interesting article about Apple's market share. A reporter kept seeing different numbers, so decided to do the calculations for himself.
Turns out it's more like 11.6%.
Don't believe me? You can read his analysis here.
That's more than 10 times the market share that Linux has.
Apple computers are luxury goods compared to you barebones PC. This is not to say apple products are expensive for what you get, actually they are a screaming deal for what you get. It's even arguable that apple's have lower long term costs. But faced with budgetary limits, people will seek short term economies and cheap PC's or NO pc at all is it.
On the otherhand this is leading to a lot of defered purchases. When the economic confidence resumes or companies reach a point where they have to upgrade they will make those purchases. So I think it's important to look not just at apple's sales relative to PC sales, but rather to apple's installed base. Those people are the ones that are defering purchases and will likely be purchasing apples in the future.
I've read apple has a fair amount of cash in the bank and they have a relatively adaptive production line. Thus they are in a good position to do research and develop strategic products (keynote, iPhoto, OSX, G5 architectures, Xraid) during the economic downturn. If they restructure a bit to minimize cash burn and keep innovating they will win when the market inproves. Some evidence can be seen at the consumer elctronics show where the most innovative ideas were a nerd watch and an ovrsized ipod that cant play DVDs. The collective PC idustry is not spending money on research there are no venture capital to launch new things. Mean while apple chugs out all sort of new stuff single handedly.
it's anyone's guess when this economic downturn will end. By the end of it there's going to be a lot of consolidationa and carnage inthe PC industry. what will emegre will be fewer companies with either the leanest production or the most innovative products. Apple will benefit on both ends. their production costs will go down due to the lower costs of production of electronics and they will have the most uniquely differentiated products. So it's really a question of staying solvent not making money at this point in the game.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
At the cost of a little overhead, you can run MacOS under the MacOnLinux VM. Any PowerPC machine that can run linux can run MacOS 7-10.
If you don't think the fastest apple-branded machine is suitable.. how about a quad-cpu Power4 machine from IBM? They do have some powerful workstations, although the servers could be fine too as you could export the MacOnLinux display via X11 or it's (optional) internal VNC server. It supports the Linux framebuffer too if you don't want the overhead of an X11 server.
From what I've read, Apple relies primarily on hardware for its profits. So your suggestions would essentially take out the largest slice of Apple's revenue stream.
Well, the IDC guy's pissy, to be sure, but he could be right. However, compare...
;-)
"Subnotebooks are clearly a declining category," said IDC analyst Roger Kay. "The subnotes may be revived by Tablet PC, but the PowerBook is not a tablet. Also, at $1,800, the price comparison to Windows products is not favorable to this. I don't think Apple will sell a lot of these."
In the WSJ, Walter Mossberg said precisely the opposite yesterday:
Despite Apple's reputation for costliness, this little laptop is aggressively priced. To match its base configuration, plus Wi-Fi, for $1,899, you'd have to pay a whopping $2,399 for a Portege 4010 at Toshiba's online store.
Taste in computers aside (Mossberg loves Apples), it's pretty hard to call oneself an "analyst" and make a $500 goof. Is Roger Kay a stock analyst?
You're absolutely right, and I can back that statement up with a case in point.
My mother's been using "hand-me-up" Macs for years now; that is, every time I bought a new Mac, I gave her the one it was replacing. This had been working quite well, because as a fairly modest user, she never needed the latest and greatest. She does a bit of word processing, web surfing, and email... A Mac from three or four years ago is more than sufficient.
In recent months, the monitor on her Mac started borking. After about 10 minutes the picture would begin to fade, getting gradually worse until it was impossible to read anything. I suggested a new monitor, but she decided that if she was going to spend the money on a new monitor, she might as well spring for a new computer as well. After several months of putting it off for financial reasons, she did.
This week she went down to the Apple store and bought a brand new iMac with a flat-screen monitor (and a 40 gig HD that she'll never come close to using, sigh!). Point being, she was doing just fine with what she had until extenuating circumstances - the monitor going out - made her upgrade. If it hadn't been for the fact that money's a bit tight, she would have bought the new Mac months ago. On the other hand, if it hadn't been for the bad monitor, she'd have waited until there was a bit more juice in the bank before upgrading.
When the economy gets rolling again, there will be a lot of people in similar situations who buy again when they see their bank balances level out. I'll be one of them. Having to setup and configure OS X to my mom's liking on the new Mac has got me hooked... As soon as I can afford it (yes, I'm literally too broke to spend $129) I'll be buying myself a copy of OS X for my G4. And yes, one day I'll buy another Mac or three.
Apple's far from dead. They're just suffering along with the rest of us until 2004.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Say what you like about how great macs are, but its bound to happen that apple loses money considering they cater to a small population of users that aren't consistantly buying new products all the time.
Apple laptops are effectively unusable for unix users.
I am a long-time Unix user. That means I need to have the Ctrl key to the left of the A key. This is a genuine need, not merely a want; it is based upon ergonomics. The Ctrl key is heavily used in unix, and it must be easily accessable. It cannot be off in the lower left corner of the keyboard where it is difficult to get at, and where it distorts the position of your left hand such that you can't easily type other keys while holding the Ctrl key down.
Apple desktop keyboards are now all USB. They are all OK. The CapsLock key can be re-mapped into a Ctrl key.
Unfortunately, even in this modern age, all Apple laptops have built-in ADB keyboards. The ADB keyboard is broken-by-design. It is, in general, not possible to remap the CapsLock key into a Ctrl key.
There are some exceptions, but they are horrible kludges. They are horrible kludges because the original design of the ADB keyboard was a horrible kludge. The correct solution would be for Apple to re-design their laptop motherboards to use built-in USB keyboards. This hasn't happened yet. If you run Linux, use Debian's solution. For Mac OS X users, uControl works. There are no solutions (that I know of) for either NetBSD or OpenBSD. Please note once again that the "solutions" above are in fact kludges, because of the original bad design of the ADB keyboard.
Apple provides a technical note on how to remap the keyboard, but provides no solution to the hardware problems caused by the design of the ADB keyboard. This tech note helps foreign language users, but does nothing for the CapsLock/Ctrl problem.
Apple is (currently) ignoring Unix users! This is not merely speculation on my part. In an on-going email exchange I am having with an Apple employee (whom I won't name) in their marketing department, the Apple marketing person directly stated to me that Apple was catering to their historic Mac customers, and is purposely ignoring the Unix market. He also claimed that Apple would soon start paying more attention to the Unix market. I won't hold my breath. Apple has been ignoring Unix users for more than 12 years. I expect that trend to continue. (Also note that my Apple contact indicated that Macs would never ship with a 3-button mouse, even though Apple intended to port almost all X-window software and deliver it either on a CD/DVD or installed directly on each Mac's hard drive. How Unix friendly is a 1-button mouse with X programs that often require 3 buttons?)
Apple has now lost two opportunities to sell me hardware. I really wanted an Apple laptop for their superior battery life, and for the PowerPC with Altivec CPU. (The Altivec is vastly superior to the x86 line for DSP.) Because I can't live with the broken-by-design built-in ADB keyboard in all Apple laptops, Sony and IBM sold me laptops instead. If Apple fixes this problem, they will sell me a PowerBook next year; if they don't, I'll still be running OpenBSD on x86 hardware, and wishing I could use a Mac.
will you shut the fuck up already ? we're tired of your shit post repeated 1,000 times. don't buy a mac. we don't give a shit.
That is the saddest thing I have ever read.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Agreed! The PC BIOS is really lame compared to Open Firmware. Someone oughtta release an OF x86 system and see how the market takes it. I think it would be a boon in the server and workstation markets.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Somebody has got to be Intel/Microsoft. Until OF makes one of their reference designs, nobody else is going to touch it. Why put OF in if the OS isn't going to support it or the biggest hardware player in x86 isn't going to support it?
. . . if Apple would spend a little bit less money suing/threatening to sue their customers, they might be in the black.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
troll
"In an ecomonic downturn or uncertainty people defer the puchase of luxury goods. It's also well known that while they economize on the big items, they also splurge on cheap luxuries like cheesburgers or movies.
Apple computers are luxury goods compared to you barebones PC."
Hmmm, no, not exactly.
During economic downturns, people tend to buy luxury items because it is the only way to preserve their money from deflation (the bucks they've got in the bank are less valuable over the years), while that Cartier watch or golden necklace still represent the same value, because their price follows the inflation, and their second-hand real price (including inflation) is equal, if not higher, than the original price (collectioners, auctions, etc?)
Therefore this logic does not apply to computers; in 2, 3, 4 or 5 years your machine, even the top-notch powermac, will be obsolete; so it was a stupid investment if your goal was to preserve your money from inflation.
I was thinking more along the lines of no software overhead. Like running it normally.
I mean, sure, you can run windows on apple-branded products, but when you say that it doesn't sound like an emulated environment.
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
Sure, it is in a VM.. but a pretty fast vm... not to mention that with the right machine you can run MacOS in a VM faster than any apple machine can.
An $8-million loss? That's Awesome. Let me get this right...
A couple days after rolling out upgrades of iCal, iSynch, introducing the totally new products Safari, Keynote, a 17" PowerBook without peer and a 12" PowerBook without peer -- during a deep and protracted recession -- and Apple announced that they lost only $8-million?
Considering their business volume, that's basically a wash. Plus, that's got to be the best $8-million dollars spent last quarter and there are dozens of high-tech CEO's that would give their right nut to have done as well.
Look at the big picture, everyone.
--Richard
Austin, Texas
hmm - Sun - overpriced computer company that couldn't keep up with market demands - there is no need for a computer that is far too overpriced for what it gives you.
interesting that you compare it to Apple.
I am a homosexual. I bought an Apple computer because of its well earned reputation for being "the" gay computer. Since I have become an Apple owner, I have been exposed to a whole new world of gay friends. It is really a pleasure to meet and compute with other homos such as myself. I plan on using my new Apple computer as a way to entice and recruit young schoolboys into the homosexual lifestyle; it would be so helpful if you could produce more software which would appeal to young boys. Thanks in advance.
with much gayness,
Father Randy "Pudge" O'Day, S.J.