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Apple Posts Earnings, Denies Bid for Universal
Lars T. writes "A number of things: Apple posts Q2 results, and denies it bid for Universial Music. Now a Register article quotes a Reuters article that 'Vivendi Universal director Claude Bebear didn't express his views on the merger talks between Vivendi's Universal Music Group (UMG) and Apple,' which was the claim of the Bloomberg article. Now who needs General Hospital?"
Every quarter that Apple posts a profit is just another nail in the coffin of that dying company.
Oh wait..
Trolling is a art,
Note that Jobs only denies that they made an offer, which may well mean that Apple was/still are in talks with Universal...
But my policy is to comment as egregiously as possible on rumors.
When did the future switch from being a promise to a threat? -C. Palahniuk
I glanced at the headline and thought it said "Apple Posts Earnings, Denies Bid for Universe". Then I realized I read it incorrectly, the article was about Apple, not Microsoft.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
It's common in the light-speed internet news world for one news agency to use another agency's article as the source of a story (and sometimes, without doing any fact/validation checking).
It happens all the time. Journalistic practices have gone way downhill since the web. Many stories on the web are obviously not reviewed by an editor. Heck, some aren't even spell checked. We're talking about major news networks too, like CNN, Fox, etc. CNN is one of the worst. BBC appears to be one of the better ones.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
There's less software on store shelves, but 3/4 of that windows software is crappy clones of better programs, most of which either have mac counterparts, or which exist for the mac as well. There are definitely some programs (and games) for which mac versions are lacking, but most of those are special interest programs, and don't make the platform worthless.
I don't think for most people it's just some sort of compulsive urge to use the mainstream, it's just a belief that the mainstream is not the best choice available.
I don't use a Mac because I dislike windows. I dislike windows because I have used a mac.
Lately, how is making any profit at all bad? For a "dying company", they seem to be one of the few that aren't posting losses. As long as they're at least breaking even, I'd be happy to (and have) buy a piece of Apple.
Happiness is like peeing yourself. Everybody can see it but only you can feel its warmth.
That's not what I heard at all. I have a friend who works at an Apple store. And she said they got a new shipment of boxes... Big boxes! And they don't know what's inside! Her other friend there who knnows the regional manager said it was Universal Music. So there!
Hansel USA - Chut up and read!
That said, I own 2 Macs. A G3 tower (which I popped a G4 CPU into after accidentally cooking the original), and a fairly recent (last August) iBook.
I'm not a Mac Bigot by any stretch of the imagination. I also own a Duron box which I built for Windows gaming, and two Linux servers which are cheerfully humming away in my back closet.
Why do we continue to buy Macs? Well, it's kind of like getting a better S/N ratio on a radio... I have far fewer headaches and glitches per productive activity when working on my Macs than on any other computer. My Windows box is a contant nightmare of driver, library, and registry issues, and my Linux boxen (while very robust) were a major pain in the ass to get set up with all the server apps I wanted. My iBook has taken over as my main computer for 90% of the tasks I do: programming, surfing, writing, etc. It's not even as fast as my desktop Mac, which is a smidge slower than my Duron box, but the lack of raw CPU speed is more than made up for by the fact that the "it just works" meme is not just marketing hype. I get shit done faster on the iBook, it's as simple as that. If you gave me a top-of-the-line Windows laptop for my birthday, I would probably sell it on eBay and continue to use my humble little iBook.
I've had friends insist to me that Windows stability is "not that bad," and claim that I must be doing something wrong, because their system works like a champ... but then I sit in their office for 20 minutes and watch them work, and sure enough they run into a technical glitch that I would never accept on my Mac, and shrug it off like nothing happened, because that's what working with computers is like in their world.
Then there's the tale of the two elderly female relatives. One was given a PC by my father, the other received a Mac from me. Starting out, they were both uncomfortable with technology, but the one who got the PC was generally more adept and motivated to learn. It's now a few years later, and the PC user hardly ever turns it on, and on those rare occations is still as likely to need to call me to get anything done as not. Meanwhile, the Mac user replaced the old hand-me-down Macintosh IIci that I gave her with a brand-new iMac, which she uses every day. She almost never needs my help with anything (the last problem she had was with an Epson printer about a month ago), and she's accomplishing stuff I never would have guessed she would have accomplished.
I would not reccomend Macs to every geek here on Slashdot, but based on my experiences, I would not reccomend anything else to a non-geek, ever... at least not as long as I'm the one they are going to call for help.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
In all three cases, they've actually rewritten their stories to reflect my bitching, at least in some minor ways. Amazing, huh? They responded, and actually rewrote copy, within a few hours.
On the one hand, how responsive they really are -- very cool, better than traditional papers by far and faster than, oh, a certain source of News for Nerds I can think of... ever try to get a headline changed?
But was there adequate editorial oversight, if one reader is capable of influencing them this much? These weren't even rush stories; they were more like the sort of thing where the "reporting" was largely transcribing chunks of a press release. They're rushing the stories up, even at the BBC.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Heck, I got nothin better to do for the next few minutes, so I'll bite...
:p) and run an upgrade.
:p).
They cost more.
You also get more. Firewire, DVD-R, gigabit ethernet. ON A 15" LAPTOP. THAT WEIGHS LESS THAN 6 LBS, INCLUDING BATTERY.
Audis cost more than Fords.
They are generally slower (I know this is getting better everytime they make the consumer cough up money for a new version Mac OS X).
Apple has been using the same 3D chipsets as PCs for a few years now (ATI, nVidia), and was in fact first with the GeForce 3. Apple doesn't have the benefits (and drawbacks) of the PC parts bin, though in the last few years they've improved this somewhat, by incorporating the aforementioned 3D components, as well as PC-standard RAM, PCI, etc. Therefore, games such as Quake, Warcraft III, et al. run pretty nicely.
The only performance gripes I have relate to DVD ripping. For my needs, anything over 400MHz with a decent 3D accelerator is perfectly adequate.
Oh, and Apple don't play dat DRM garbage (yet), so in theory you could grab an ISO file from a friend who works in a Mac shop, download it over the complimentary ethernet provided by your Vancouver hotel room, burn it on your laptop (after paying the Canadian CD tax
In theory.
There is less software available in the retail markets.
There's more 'shrinkwrap'ware for OSX than there is for Linux. Not that I particularly care, but it's nice to see that games are available within a reasonable timeframe for OSX these days. Linux doesn't have nearly as much in the way of native apps, and you have to hope and pray that the games work with WineX (lessn you have the spare time to hack WineX, which in this economy you may have
BTW, which Linux app did you use to do and file your taxes this year? I used TaxCut for Mac, and it couldn't have been easier. Saved me HOURS. I would have gotten TurboTax, but Intuit's DRM junk turned me off.
I am actually curious.
Hey, I'm curious about this: Why, if the PC world is so 'innovative', do they steal so much from Apple? People building systems these days don't bother with a floppy: Apple took that chance in 1998. Remember when USB was suffering from the 'chicken and egg' problem Bluetooth is now? Apple solved that problem by ditching ADB and serial ports outright (and in the process pissing off LOTS of the faithful, but it was the technically correct thing to do), with PCs eventually catching up. Bluetooth: bastard stepchild of wireless, but I would bet it grows now that Apple has started installing it standard across the line in new systems. GL-rendered, accelerated GUI? Maybe in the next M$OS, maybe someday down the line in XFree (or implemented kludgily per app), included NOW for Jaguar. Rendezvous == Zeroconf, and now that Apple's in the game, look for Linux to start incorporating interesting zeroconf stuff, followed by Microsoft (lessn they try to do their own NetBEUI-equivalent garbage).
Apple innovates in both hardware and software. Microsoft doesn't. Linux to some extent does, but not in any coherent fashion, at least as far as desktops go.
Macheads with the computer world so very Windows focused why do you still buy macs?
Because my time is worth more? Because standard PeeCee junk is an affront to any decent aesthetic? Because I don't want to have to futz with DLLs or LD_LIBRARY_PATHs, macro viruses, flaky windowing systems or schizophrenic hardware driver situations?
I can build a really slick linux box out of odd parts and get it working smoothly. I did so for my most recent job: Mandrake on an NForce1 micro-ATX box. I tilted my lance at NVidia's proprietary X and kernel drivers (to get the ethernet, sound and IDE working properly). I spent several hours on this, but I was paid to do it and the result is a blazingly-fast AMD Linux box.
For my personal life, where I'm not getting PAID for th
My father has been a Mac fan my entire life, and he was disappointed to find that I was a DOS and later Windows user. But it was to be expected; I wanted to play games and I wanted the BBS software of the time.
Once I got into college and started studying computer science, my respect for unix grew. I played with an ancient laptop installed with Linux over the summer and really learned a lot about this exciting area. But due to (in my opinion) poor applications, it would not be a desktop OS to me. All it really took to switch me to the Mac was a few evenings on my dad's Powerbook playing with OS X.
The interface was intuitive and clever. The whole thing looked professional and yet beautiful at the same time, not much like the previous Mac OS I'd remembered. The apps worked together, had really cool features, and were generally more pleasant to use and look at than on Windows; plus, most of them actually came with the machine as standard. Mail's junk mail filtering and simple interface had me entranced. The way iTunes automatically sorted and managed all of your mp3s based on their id3, while providing ripping and burning support, amazed me (I can stick an audio CD in my computer, it'll rip it in iTunes, add it to the library appropriately, and eject it automatically). For some reason, even Microsoft apps such as Office and IE look and feel much nicer, and even have added functionality! And, of course, I could access a unix terminal at any time.
On the unix side, there's plenty to be done. You can load an entire KDE installation and run it on top of Aqua. While in Cocoa-based apps such as Safari -- where I type this -- I can use emacs-style keys like ctrl-a, ctrl-e, ctrl-k, ctrl-y in this comment field. And I was finally free of the registry.
And it's all packaged. It's all so easy. It removes a huge portion of the headaches, the real currency of computers. There are a huge number of "little things" I could say I prefer about the Mac that add up to a really pleasant overall experience. If I was a gamer or multimedia expert I might be disappointed with the recent hardware speed issues, but don't be mistaken. The 1 Ghz G4 is fast as hell, and I can play Warcraft III (and many other mainstream games) or use Photoshop very smoothly.
I don't think it's perfect. I've had crashes and have been frustrated by a lack of some Windows app I wanted. But I will say I do think it is better. At this point, I'm fairly certain my next machine will be a Mac. Ideologically, it appeals to me more than Microsoft. I genuinely feel that Apple is out to make good stuff and change things for the better, while Microsoft seems more purely capitalist.
OK, this has way too long, but it's helped me put off studying for a test ;)
You're missing the way the financial world works. A company is not required to post record-breaking profits each quarter in order to be a fiscally "successful" company (though they will certainly be successful if they can pull this off!). The most important thing is that a company meets its projections. A company that gives low projections but meets them is much better off than a company that gives high projections but misses them even if the latter company still rakes in more profit that the former. Why? Because the former company has a business plan it's sticking to and the latter is just out of control.
Now I ask you to recall Jobs's last keynote when he said Apple expected to be hit hard by the downturn in the economy, but felt they had enough in the bank to weather the storm and they planned to invest in evolving the company's technology so that they could hit the ground running when the market came back.
IIRC, Apple posted three quarters of successively lesser losses mostly due to "internal investment" and "one-time restructuring" costs. And now they've started turning profit in this, the year of the notebook, which was another thing Jobs forecasted as being a major direction he wanted to take the company in. They met that goal too, having shipped more laptops this quarter than in any other quarter of the company's history.
Apple definitely seems to be a company with a plan -- and more importantly a company that sticks to its plan. Unless you honestly believe that plan is "to burn Apple to the ground and salt the earth," any report which shows Apple sticking to the plan is a good report.
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It's not so much how much profit they're making, it's where that profit is coming from that's a concern.
Everyone makes a big deal out of Apple's cash horde ($4b? $5b?), and about how the "market" isn't valuing Apple at much more than its cash value per share. I haven't looked at the numbers in a long time, but we can safley assume that Apple isn't keeping its $4b in cash under the mattress. That means that they put it somewhere where they expect it to make some return, even if they only put it into the equivalent of your savings account.
How much money do you think Apple is making on their cash horde in interest alone? Again, I don't have those numbers, but I suspect that they made more in interest than the $14m they reported in profit. That means that they are actually losing money from operations, and using their interest income to make up the difference.
Apple IMHO has been using that cash wisely, without that interest income they would be posting losses every quarter and really in danger of dying. That cash is keeping the company afloat. Now they're thinking of spending it all (and then some). All I have to say is that, as a shareholder, the return they get on that investment needs to be better than their current interest income, or else I'm bailing out.
It is true that the Universal music label is a profitable concern (bringing in >$200m per year IIRC), but everyone predicts that the entire music industry is going down the toilet. If Jobs can figure out a way to keep the music label profitable in the long term, then this purchase makes sense.
We'll have to see what Apple's much-hyped music service is all about. If it convinces me to buy music again, than I will assume it will convince others too, and then maybe the unit will be profitable long-term and this deal will make sense...