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Apple Plans to Grow to $10 Billion
mattmcal writes "Fred Anderson, CFO of Apple, this week outlined Apple's strategy for returning to its former self as a $10 billion company. He cited portability, digital lifestyle, and music as the three pimary drivers of this new strategy. Anderson announced last month that he plans to retire June 1 of this year."
Fred Anderson is the CFO, NOT CTO...
According to quote.yahoo.com, the current market cap for AAPL is 8.87B, so they're approaching the 9B mark already. I think Apple is well on track with the high profit margins and popularity of the iPod, and all the great things they have been doing with both Mac hardware and MacOS X the last couple of years.
The excitement that has been surrounding Apple the last couple of years reminds me of the Macintosh during the System 7 or PowerPC transitions.
Also, it should be noted that Fred Anderson is the C*F*O of Apple, not the CTO
Any idea of what Apple's current earnings are right now?
l ts .html
...
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/jan/14resu
Apple Reports First Quarter Results
Revenue Increases 36 Percent Year-Over-Year
CUPERTINO, California--January 14, 2004--Apple(R) today announced financial results for its fiscal 2004 first quarter ended December 27, 2003. For the quarter, the Company posted a net profit of $63 million, or $.17 per diluted share. These results compare to a net loss of $8 million, or $.02 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Revenue for the quarter reached a four-year high of $2.006 billion, up 36 percent from the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 26.7 percent, down from 27.6 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 44 percent of the quarter's revenue.
Earnings are pretty small, there aren't too many companies that earn more than 10 billion/year. He was likely refering to revenues, (hit about $6.2 last fiscal year, $6.7 last calendar year).
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
This guy has consistently beat the crap out of Apple management over waste. Order fulfillment has never sunk to (pre-Jobs) bad levels. Their products are competitively priced, and they sure are cool. Innovation abounds. None of this would be possible if Apple were still hemorrhaging money.
Good job, Fred! Good luck with retirement.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
"We'll give it a rest as soon as Mac fixes the iPod battery problem."
First of all, there is no such company as Mac... (its Apple) and there is no battery problem within the iPod... as has been pointed out time and time again in these threads.
In practice, users never need to treat it as "on" or "off", which - if it wasn't for the poor design of most units that are "always on" in some way - really ought to be the way most electronic devices work. It's more intuitive to have the thing just doing what you ask it than to have to examine what mode it's on and react accordingly.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Technically, all the current iBooks can drive an external display at a resolution above 1024 x 768. Apple just turns it off in software (the open firmware). For information on how to easily (without risk of losing warranty) turning this back on, look here:
Rute Moeller's spanning hack for the iBook
And yes, I fully agree that we shouldn't have to resort to this kind of solution, but it is a solution nonetheless, and one that has worked very well for me for the past two years on my 600 Mhz iBook. In fact, I wouldn't have bought my iBook had I not known about this.
Cheers.
"The rather high chance of DESTROYING the iPod (both regular and mini) just by trying to open it to get to the battery is well documented." Perhaps, but this is based on the assumption that the iPod batter is faulty and has a high probability of failure. It does not (this despite reports to the contrary)
"The ludicrously high price of the replacement battery is also also well-documented."
And it is also well documented that you can get a cheaper battery from a different supplier for a fraction of the cost.
"Before there were complaints. Apple's semi-official position was "just throw the iPod away" when the battery died."
That'd not true at all. Before there was a battery replacement program, Apple's semi-official provision was to buy an extended warrenty if your iPod was not already covered under its 1-year warrenty.
It all has to do with getting the record companies to buy into the process, nothing to do with Apple not having a technical reason.
We don't even have it in Canada yet!
And, no, it certainly hasn't been "YEARS" as you complain, it was launched last April, not even 11 months yet.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
"Apple has yet to solve the battery problem."
Again, there is no battery "problem".
The iPod battery lasts as long as any bettery of that type is supposed to last. I forget what the exact specs are... but they are very liberal (although it does vary depending on the number of times you charge the device).
As is to be expected, not all things work as planned... hence the reason for Apple's warenty, Apple's extended warrenty as well as its more recent battery replacement programs. Additionally, iPod batters can be purchased from theird part manufacturers for less than even Apple sells.
If it fails outside of the warranty period, you can have Apple replace it for $99, or buy a replacement from a third party vendor, including tools to safely open your iPod case, for about $50.
The battery was never intended to be a servicable part. Instead it was intended to last the entire lifetime of the machine. Some batteries - a tiny fraction of iPod users overall - have turned out to last only 18 months - that's unfortunate, but as both Apple and third party vendors offer replacement services, it isn't a problem.
Apple's position is not "Throw the iPod away."
You might just as well complain about the "iPod screen problem". After all, the screen will fail on a number of iPods earlier than expected. People are used to batteries that fail after six months and need replacing because they're only designed to last that long; if other batteries typically were built to last five to ten years, they wouldn't be seen as a user servicable part.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Uberblogger Stephen Den Beste has a post in which he raises doubts that Apple's high margins on hardware (thus, high profits) can continue. He thinks there will be a WinIBM platform in the near future. (WinNT is already running on G5s as an XBox dev platform.) Apple, in his estimation, will be forced to cut margins to compete.
I don't entirely agree with him. Apple has always commanded a premium because its software was good, not its hardware. Plus, I think he underappreciates OSX's BSD underbelly (odd, for an engineer.) But a WinG5 computer would provide an alternative to people who might otherwise make the switch.
(I thought I posted this earlier, but it doesn't seem to be showing up. Sorry if this winds up being a repeat post.)
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
> According to quote.yahoo.com, the current market cap for AAPL is 8.87B, so they're approaching the 9B mark already.
Some random market caps for your amusement, all in 10^9 US$
- General Electric 329
- Microsoft: 284
- Exxon-Mobile: 277
- Wal-Mart: 261
- Intel: 189
- IBM: 166
- Cisco: 156
- Coca-Cola: 120
- Dell: 84
- HP: 70
- Time-Warner: 77
- Disney: 55
- Ebay: 44
- Yahoo: 29
- GM: 27
- Ford: 26
- Amazon: 17
- Sun: 17
- Apple: 8.9
- RedHat: 3.2
- McDonalds: 2.2
- Gateway: 1.9
- SCO: 0.17
Only a small subset of users are finding that their batteries die in 18mo. I purchased my original iPod in November 2001, a week or so after Apple introduced them, and the battery runs perfectly fine over 2 yrs later. Apple's support documents that the battery should be able to with stand 500 charge cycles. Since the average user doesn't totally drain their battery daily, that can work out to a fairly long time. For example, I only have to fully recharge my battery about once a week. Which means I go through 52 recharge cycles per year. If I get a full 500 charges, that's almost 10yrs of battery life.
Apple recommends recharging the battery every 14-18days, which would extend 500 full recharges even longer. Really for what the Neistat brothers went through, they either had faulty batteries, or were draining their batteries daily, for over a year.
I consider myself a mid-range user of the iPod, but that's only because their are so many who use their iPods only for trips, etc. I use mine daily, for 4-8hrs a day. When i purchased, I thought the battery might last 3-5years, and so far it's on target.
That is a logical fallacy. An "appeal to authority" to be precise, IIRC. The press saying something is true does not make it true. MS bought 150,000 shares of non-voting preferred stock at $1000 a share. The deal was a show of good faith as part of a larger deal where they agreed to continue development of Mac MS Office for five years an Apple agreed to drop outstanding legal claims and bundle MS Explorer. MS did not agree to develop Office for OS X (Rhapsody, and Cocoa only at the time). The stock payed a dividend and was convertible to common stock at $16.50 after three years. MS ended up converting and selling at a market price of ~$82,IIRC. I can't remember what the dividend was. At the time, Apple had already issued their convertible debenture, sold most of their plant and some ARM holdings. They had over $6 billion in cash and cash equivalents. That is even more than they hold now. Microsoft's investment was merely window dressing. In fact, I don't see that Apple got much out of it at all. MS clearly had no plans to drop Office. They far exceeded the terms of their agreement by developing an OS X version.
It is cowardly, and a betrayal of whatever it means to be a Jew, to act as a white man
-James Baldwin
From apple.com
If your iPod is out-of-warranty and the battery's ability to hold an electrical charge has diminished 50% or more from its original condition, you can receive a replacement iPod for $99, plus $6.95 shipping. Be sure to follow all of the battery troubleshooting steps before submitting your iPod for battery replacement.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Does this warranty cover opening the thing?
if it is under warranty, Apple will do it for free.
I got my third set of headphones today for my 30gb iPod. I mean, cool - they're free and it just takes a quick call to Apple UK Support, but it's a shame.
Also, my co-workers mock me for having to go to the Apple Support page, because I was saying how great the build quality on Apple kit is.
Join the Free Software Foundation
>MS clearly had no plans to drop Office.
I'm not so sure on this. The Mac version had languished behind at 6.0 (remember how much that sucked? I claim the last good version of MS Word was 5.1a) and MS had made no noise about updating it for a long time when that deal was made.
That said, what Apple primarily got was a public acknowledgment that they were going to be there in 3 years and a new version of office that was *much* improved. It gave the public confidence in Apple, something that isn't precisely measurable in price.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
While there were several problems that were identified with different models, Apple certainly handled them very well. They shipped me a new power supply for free because of my G4. They've swapped out screens on Powerbooks and extended the iBook warrentee to 3 years for time frames where a problem was identified.
A customer isn't always dissatisfied when there is a problem, but is always royally pissed off when the company does nothing to solve his problem. Despite my loud G4, I still purchased a new iBook 4 days ago, and it's a terrific machine.
http://www.rustyrazorblade.com