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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.
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.
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
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?