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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.
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.
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!
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Who's got the whiteout?
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.)
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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 $125 million to its cash, keeps its r&d spending up and I'm supposed to feel bad?
Well, then, at their current burn rate, they'll be out of business in 137 years. I'd better get a PC soon.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Mr. Anderson noted that the retail stores generated $23 million in manufacturing profit. "[They're] already beginning to pay off," Anderson said, responding to naysayers.
Source: http://www.macnn.com/feature.php?id=373
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