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Apple Profit Falls 22% But iPhone Sales Are Up
New submitter marcushoward writes in with news of Apple's quarterly results. From the article: "Apple on Tuesday reported fiscal
third-quarter revenues of $35.3 billion and profits of $6.9 billion, or $7.47 per share. The revenue number is basically even with Apple’s results from a year ago, but its profits were off by almost $2 billion. Revenues were mostly in line with Wall Street’s expectations of $35.09 billion and slightly above its earnings per share expectation of around $7.31. Apple itself had predicted revenues between $33.5 billion and $35.5 billion."
Compared to this quarter last year, sales of Macs are about even, iPad sales dipped slightly (14.6 million vs 16 million), and iPhone sales are up quite a bit (31 million vs 26 million).
Apple (headline) profits fall, just as they are being asked to pay tax.
During the depths of the recession they were able to negotiate really sweet deals on their huge purchases of components. Those contracts expired, and they're now having to pay more, but they certainly can't raise prices. Of course they explained all this and warned investors of the coming drop in margins about a year ago, but much easier for the irrational Apple-haters to ignore the perfectly sensible explanation from Apple itself, and start looking for strange conspiracies instead...
The Samsung Galaxy phone is better and any tablet in the world is better than the iPad.
Nothing against the Galaxy but "better" is a pretty ill defined term. For my Grandmother, who mostly wants to play solitaire and facetime with her grandkids, the Galaxy is a demonstrably worse choice. For your needs or mine it might be the better choice. "Better" depends on what you are doing with it.
As soon as people realize it has no HDMI, no micro-SD port, and no USB port for flash drives, they can go spend 5x less on a tablet that can or get the vastly superior Galaxy tablet for the same price.
There is a market for tablets with those connectors but it is, for better or worse, a minority. My several of my family members have iPads. Most of them would never use any of those ports and in fact most of them don't even know what an HDMI or micro-SD port is. That's not to imply that a tablet with those ports would be pointless. For someone like me they might actually be an attractive feature but I have no illusions that most iPad buyers would need or want them. Furthermore those extra ports add cost, complexity and opportunities for hardware failure. Furthermore there are other ways to accomplish things like file transfer, video display, etc without those ports so it is unclear why they would be necessary in most cases. You don't need HDMI to display video. You don't need USB to store or transfer files. I'm sure some people appreciate those ports but I'd wager a tidy sum that most of the time they go completely unused.
While this article was brought to Slashdot for flame war fodder there is another reason this is news elsewhere. What it comes down to is that businesses, regardless of actual profit, are largely looked on as weak by investors if they're not showing growth.
I'm not one of these people who beat on the idea of capitalism but I do see it as a failing of the perception in that endless growth just isn't possible in the long term. Sadly it's endless growth that drives a majority of today's investors. Most of today's investors don't see their dollars as a building block to better companies with long term goals and good public relations, they see their dollars are something they need to "flip" fast to make it worth their time. That's been a failing of the Wall Street economy for several decades and it only gets worse as time trods on.
Apple will take a hit because of this. It's not because they're technology is weak but because there is enough competition in their field that push investment dollars to the short term gains. And this isn't to say other players in the field aren't really offering anything but their long term outlook is secondary to what they'll offer up in the next quarter or two. Apple hasn't planted itself well enough as a long term solutions company to keep the market interested like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft did. They'll survive and maybe make a bigger comeback some day but they will have to suffer through this lull like every other market leader has to from time to time.
The industry analysts and pundits have been predicting this for ages
Ages huh? 15 years ago Apple was “beleaguered”
that while Apple led for ages
The iPhone went to market only in 2007. *Six* years ago, Apple was late to that game. It was only that the other players were caught with their pants down.
reaped windfall profits as a consequence
Their insane margins were more a testament of Tim Cooks logistics expertise, the reason Steve Jobs hired him.
Google would barge in, turn smartphones into a commodity, and crush Apple's margins
Maybe in bizarro land. Apples only competitor is Samsung. The rest of Android phones replace the feature phones of old.
the PC market, where nowadays, it's impossible to make serious money on PC hardware
Uhm, except for Apple?
What's interesting about this story, at least for me, is that iPad sales have tanked.
Tanked. Yeah, right. Yoy 16 to 14.6 million. With FQ3/12 being the quarter with the brand new retina iPad.
Wish /.mods would cut back on dope.
As much as I dislike Apple's products and philosophy, I absolutely hate Samsung's philosophy. In my experience, it's either copying (much more than would be reasonable) successful products or throwing tons of crap at the wall to see what sticks (the galaxy cameras come to mind). Either way, their products are designed to what seem to be very poor standards with atrocious quality control.
Out of 11 Samsung products:
Two were dead on arrival (Ativ Smart PC Pro, a camcorder whose model I don't recall) - they did turn on, but were not in a condition anyone would call useful (dead touchscreen and autofocus, random stability issues, not to mention the fact that the tablet's replacement, like all other units I've seen, had plastic covering one of the keyboard dock's pins and a misaligned speaker grille).
One (40" LCD) developed some unusual dark areas on the screen.
One (Refrigerator) suffers from an ice dispenser button that gets stuck if operated with a single finger, its shelves' plastic is cracking and there's rust developing on some parts of the outside finish.
One (Monitor, Syncmaster 940BW) has a driver issue (seriously. Google it and wonder how it's possible...) under Windows 7 where a driver is automatically installed that includes a bad color profile that causes White to be displayed as Yellow in color-corrected applications, unless a different profile is manually chosen.
One (Dual-SIM phone with crappy resistive touchscreen) was never a decent phone, but its touchscreen decided to crap out one day, for no apparent reason, making it impossible to use.
Another phone (Wave I think it was called... ) was a phone whose hardware showed potential but was running Bada or whatever that OS was called. Not pleasant to use.
Only 4 / 11 Samsung products never gave any reason for complaint (besides limitations that were obvious when buying it - like a screen that is at a fixed height - those were knwon and expected, so there's no reason to blame Samsung): Two 830 SSDs (one 128GB and one 256GB), another monitor (Syncmaster BX2450) and a Blu-Ray drive.
I'm sure someone can give me a comparable amount of Apple horror stories, but I'd bet that most of them are actually limitations that one knows they're buying - like support for newer versions of OS X / iOS being a gamble. The products themselves don't tend to start failing in unpredictable ways, most failures are predictable, in my experience.
tl;dr I won't be buying Samsung again anytime soon (and I wouldn't buy Apple anyway, so don't bother with that angle)
HDMI == AirPlay
SD-slot / USB == iCloud
That's how Apple handles those issues.
Also, I don't believe any iOS battery is soldered; they all have detachable connectors.
That's a bit like arguing that a computer's a terrible content creation tool because it's no good as a woodworking lathe or sewing machine. No, a tablet's no good for doing multi-track video editing. (Most single-display computers aren't any good at it either.) However it's a remarkable tool for gathering, organising and triaging information. (Papers, the science literature tool, is its killer app in my environment.) It's the swiss army knife of desk references. It's an x-windows client I can pass around at a scientific meeting. It's the world's least annoying way to deal with email.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
This is also the reason why manufacturing industries in America have shipped their jobs overseas. Once a company has reached its peak growth in sales, leadership is under pressure from investors to continue to demonstrate growing profits. So, they look around and quickly seize on their own labor force as ballast.
The American workers are / were thrown overboard to expand profit margins and satiate investors' demand for "growth".
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