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Apple Has First Earnings Decline In More Than A Decade (go.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Apple has announced its first-ever decline in revenue in the past 13 years as its iPhone sales have slowed down. Apple posted quarterly revenue of $50.6 billion and quarterly net income of $10.5 billion. Last year, the company posted revenue of $58 billion and net income of $13.6 billion. The reason Apple has been so successful is because of the iPhone, which was first released in 2007. What goes up must come down -- and we're starting to see that now. The success of the iPhone is starting plateau and ultimately decrease now that consumers are finding less of a reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest smartphone. Apple CEO Tim Cook pointed to weakening currencies worldwide as one of the obstacles the company would face as iPhone sales were up less than 1 percent year-over-year last quarter. Gene Munster, managing director and senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray, told ABC News, "This has been anticipated for three months now. The reason is nothing [that] is wrong with the iPhone." Munster said this is not worrisome to Apple and that iPhone sales will likely increase by the end of the year when the next iPhone(s) is released.
A couple years ago, while taking my asian girlfriend shopping at the local mall, I had to take a piss. As I entered the john, Steve Jobs -- the messiah himself -- came out of one of the booths. I stood at the urinal looking at him out of the corner of my eye as he washed his hands. He didn't once look at me. He was busy and in any case I was sure the security guards wouldn't even let me shake his hand.
As soon as he left I darted into the booth he'd vacated, hoping there might be a lingering smell of shit and even a seat still warm from his sturdy ass. I found not only the smell but the shit itself. He'd forgotten to flush. And what a treasure he had left behind. Three or four beautiful specimens floated in the bowl. It apparently had been a fairly dry, constipated shit, for all were fat, stiff, and ruggedly textured. The real prize was a great feast of turd -- a nine inch gastrointestinal triumph as thick as his cock -- or at least as I imagined it!
I knelt before the bowl, inhaling the rich brown fragrance and wondered if I should obey the impulse building up inside me. I'd always been a liberal thinker and had been an Apple customer since 1984. Of course I'd had fantasies of meeting Jobs, sucking his cock and balls, not to mention sucking his asshole clean, but I never imagined I would have the chance. Now, here I was, confronted with the most beautiful five-pound turd I'd ever feasted my eyes on, a sausage fit to star in any fantasy and one I knew to have been hatched from the asshole of Steve Jobs, the chosen one.
Why not? I plucked it from the bowl, holding it with both hands to keep it from breaking. I lifted it to my nose. It smelled like rich, ripe limburger (horrid, but thrilling), yet had the consistency of cheddar. What is cheese anyway but milk turning to shit without the benefit of a digestive tract?
I gave it a lick and found that it tasted better then it smelled.
I hesitated no longer. I shoved the fucking thing as far into my mouth as I could get it and sucked on it like a big half nigger cock, beating my meat like a madman, and thrusting my pink iPod Shuffle into my ass. I wanted to completely engulf it and bit off a large chunk, flooding my mouth with the intense, bittersweet flavor. To my delight I found that while the water in the bowl had chilled the outside of the turd, it was still warm inside. As I chewed I discovered that it was filled with hard little bits of something I soon identified as peanuts. He hadn't chewed them carefully and they'd passed through his body virtually unchanged. I ate it greedily, sending lump after peanutty lump sliding scratchily down my throat. My only regret was that Steve Jobs wasn't there to see my loyalty and wash it down with his piss.
I soon reached a terrific climax. I caught my cum in the cupped palm of my hand and drank it down. Believe me, there is no more delightful combination of flavors than the hot sweetness of cum with the rich bitterness of shit. It's even better than reading an Apple press release!
Afterwards I was sorry that I hadn't made it last longer. But then I realized that I still had a lot of fun in store for me. There was still a clutch of virile turds left in the bowl. I tenderly fished them out, rolled them into my handkerchief, and stashed them in my briefcase. In the week to come I found all kinds of ways to eat the shit without bolting it right down. Once eaten it's gone forever unless you want to filch it third hand out of your own asshole. Not an unreasonable recourse in moments of desperation or simple boredom.
I stored the turds in the refrigerator when I was not using them but within a week they were all gone. The last one I held in my mouth without chewing, letting it slowly dissolve. I had liquid shit trickling down my throat for nearly four hours. I must have had six orgasms in the process.
I often think of Steve Jobs dropping solid gold out of his sweet, pink asshole every day, never knowing what joy it could, and at least once did, bring to a grateful Apple customer.
The MUNSTERS!
Apple is living on borrowed time. They need to come out with something disruptive, but all they can do is incremental upgrades.
I just bought a new Samsung Galaxy s7 (Unlocked & GSM)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
They stopped innovating about ten years ago, once the iPhone was released. Their products have inferior hardware compared to competitors like high-end Android phones and most PC laptops. The iPad is not a viable long-term competitor to the surface because the iPad is so limited in comparison. Software for Macs is generally inferior to anything on the PC, with the exception of the niche markets of video and audio editing. Apple is one giant bubble that's starting to pop. I'm amazed at how many people are totally in love with Apple and are incapable of seeing things objectively. It's like investment decisions are all being made by Apple fanbois.
"The success of the iPhone is starting plateau and ultimately decrease now that consumers are finding less of a reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest smartphone."
That's not even a sentence!
Try it this way:
The success of the iPhone is starting to plateau and will ultimately decrease now that consumers are finding fewer reasons to upgrade to the latest and greatest smartphone.
LUDDITES who refuse to use Apple's appy app apps are causing the app apper to fail at apping apps! We should app all the LUDDITES by forcing them to use AppScript on Apperating Apps like AppOS or Appdows 10!
Apps!
.
Stock buybacks are a red flag for me, indicating that the company may be out of investment ideas.
Two words: Soldered RAM.
For me that's more than enough.
Where the Apple under Jobs succeeded was going into relatively nascant markets (MP3 players, cellphones, tablets), and leapfrogging the pioneers in the field.
The Apple under Cook has made mistakes by trying to enter in markets where people have been there for centuries (watchmakers.)
There are still a lot of markets Apple can take, which the way have been paid for them:
1: Car audio. Even the crackheads won't bust out a car stereo these days. Apple making an actual 1-2 DIN audio head would score big, as car makers would buy it. Car makers would actually be faced with a choice, just like existing CarPlay. Buy Apple's product, or go bankrupt and be replaced by companies that have.
2: NAS hardware. Add some features and apps to the Time Capsule, and people would buy that thing in droves, essentially acting as a home server.
3: Security in general. Make a new type of mechanical, or electro-mechanical key lock like the Medeco CLIQ, and now have tens to hundreds of millions of sales as people and businesses buy better security. The humble deadbolt can easily be improved and made far more secure.
4: Go into the enterprise. Apple has name recognition, so if they made an enterprise desktop Mac, they would sell millions, at Mac prices. Especially with the ability to physically disable the camera/mic, and better AD GPOs.
5: Make a security IoT infrastructure. Special chip on iPhone can run a secure app protocol over Bluetooth (which has encryption in itself), so people can open a safe with just a press of a button on the home button. IoT needs security, and here is where Apple can champion and profit.
6: Sell iOS technologies as an embedded platform, as well as their custom ARM SoC.
7: Get with Intel and VMWare, make an XServe model which has ESXi (upgradable of course) in firmware. Name recognition alone will get these in the door, and Apple was, for a few years, the second biggest storage vendor out there. Maybe it might be profitable to get back in there.
Apple has lost it's advantage; Android phones are selling like hot cakes, Apple's use of proprietary connectors and technologies has alienated many current and potential customers. Apple smart phones and tablets are no longer cutting edge and novel. They created a bubble and now it is popping.
abcnews.com, wsj.com and piperjafery.com? Seriously these twit boxes are only based on financials and whether they are personally making book on the swing they themselves promote. The WSJ is a personal disappointment as I had a 1yr subscription to the paper version. I dropped it because there wasn't a single accurate article (with its funny pin point pictures) about our industries of software and computer technology. Not one. I seriously doubt if they have gotten any better.
This is nerd news. Let's use sources that at least respect us. We care about the technology. Give me more detail about the A9X and its follow on.
Apple buys Compaq.
Or they're sitting on such a huge pile of cash that any investing in anything that would eat a substantial portion of it would fundamentally change their business or attract anti-trust problems
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
>"The success of the iPhone is starting plateau and ultimately decrease now that consumers are finding less of a reason to upgrade to the latest and greatest smartphone"
And because consumers are also finding that there is often less of a reason to buy an iphone when compared to other high-end smartphones.
What is the Obama economic miracle?
I remember those "1984" commercials. I would never want Apple to become a massive corporate bandit, especially one that sells to the dead end of Western Civilization.
What is the Obama Economic Miracle?
I think not. Earnings were well below analysts' expectations. Guidance for future earnings was worse than that. Not news for nerds. Propaganda for morons.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
“Our team executed extremely well in the face of strong macroeconomic headwinds,” Apple CEO Tim Cook, said.
Stock price is down $6 in early after close trading. I'd hate to see what the result would have been if the team had average performance.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
I don't think that new markets will help them now.
We're finally seeing what a lot of us have been waiting a really long time for: the so-called "Web 2.0" bubble to burst.
This is the bubble that began around 2006. It started with the astronomical (and unjustifiable) hype that built up around Ruby and Ruby on Rails, hence the name "Web 2.0". This hype regarding web sites eventually resulted in what we call social media. Social media, in turn, helped popularize smart phones and tablets. Smart phones and tablets helped enable the so-called "sharing economy".
During this time we saw a repeat of the dot-com bubble. We saw extreme valuations, even for companies that were losing a shitload of money with no hope of profit.
Lately, we've seen it all come crashing down. Apple is merely the latest casualty of this bubble's burst and unraveling.
We first saw the hype around Ruby and Ruby on Rails die off, when people started to realize that it was actually kind of shitty and unpleasant to use, not to mention slow and bloated.
Then we saw the hype around social media die off, when people started to realize that it was invasive, and just another way to get advertised to.
Now we're seeing the smart phones and tablets hype die off, resulting in these poor earnings for Apple.
Soon we will see the "sharing economy" companies start to suffer, too, as the hype around their services dies out.
The important thing to keep in mind is that nothing has come after the "sharing economy". AI (including self-driving cars) has been a bust so far, like it has been for decades now. Virtual realty isn't moving very fast, either. Drones are still just toys.
There's nowhere to go from here on any reasonable timeline. Investors are starting to realize this, and that's why money is flowing out of San Francisco and its area. The innovation there has been squeezed dry.
The Web 2.0 bubble is finally bursting.
Just as the prophecies foretold. My faith in random tech pundits is renewed.
Log in or piss off.
I know I will catch hell for this, but I will say it anyway. The problem is that Tim Cook is by far more interested than being a gay/liberal activist, than being a CEO of an innovative company. If you look at the various stories about him and apple over the last few years, you will see it is alway about the politics, not making "insanely great" doodads.
Many on Slashdot give him a pass, because you like the causes he supports. At the same time, you bemoan the fact that the new iMac mini was actually worse than the old one, computers are not updated nearly enough, computers are not powerful enough for Oculus Rift, or even many games, features such as ram expansion have been downgraded, the new GUI is a backwards step, programs like pages and iMovie are stagnant, programs like Aperture have been cancelled, the iwatch was just plain silly, and the iPhone changes are just plain underwhelming. All this can be now said about a company that a decade ago, saw a world filled with CD players, and figured out how to bring your entire music collection with you at once....all with a slick interface.
Apple used to be about being transformative. Now it is just about being transgendered. I miss insanely great.
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
Remember when they almost owned music production, graphic arts and video editing? Neither do Apple!
From loyal pro users to overpriced bling and Darth Vaders butt-plug for the "high end" model. A machine that would commonly (audio / visual production installs) be rack mounted in a different room to the operator.
EOM
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It's rather convenient they were in a controversy over phone security this year wasn't it? It certainly gives them a new selling point for declining sales. Be ready for obnoxious ads in September about how the new iPhone 7 is unbreakable (which it won't be). As soon as I read the actual court order involved in that San Bernandino case, juxtaposed with the hyperbole in the media, I knew this was just another marketing campaign from a company that knows no shame. Now we have the confirmed motive.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
"FIRST-EVER decline in revenue IN THE PAST 13 YEARS"
- Indicative of a financially illiterate person who cannot be trusted to make objective commentary
Can we start saying "Beleaguered Apple" again, like back in the '90s? That was so much fun!
Tim Cook needs to step down.
He's just Meg Whitman with a penis.
we've hit "peak smartphone".
The people who want one, have one. The only thing that is going to drive smart phone sales now is occasional replacement and hardware upgrades.
Apple's profits will drop a bit and then level off at a sustainable level. Expecting to maintain continual growth in a finite market is just not possible.
Apple's entire selling point is that it's fashionable. Poor people can't afford them, and there's a vestigial status attached to them once appropriately awarded for being a better device. The problem is, the iPhone is neither better, nor cool anymore. They did extraordinarily well being "the" phone for almost a decade. Nightclubs are lucky to get 5 years. They even recycled old Samsung ideas like the large screen, much to the desperately-ignored hypocrisy of their rabid fans that spent years decrying "I don't need a big phone, I can use mine with one hand!". It was truly masterful, but all fashion trends come to an end. Apple does not know how to compete without the "cool" advantage, and they no longer have a visionary, with the will to match, at the helm. So expect this to be the beginning of a trend downwards.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
It's about the fact that apple no longer has the right to command a premium price for hardware that is underpowered. There are lots and lots of other players in the market now, and they have no problems undercutting apple at every turn. Apple is no longer cutting edge anything, and people are beginning to realize it.
I wonder if apple is beginning to sweat now that they're being shown just how important jobs was to the apple hype machine. I predict a long string of failures ahead of apple. The won't go down fast, but they will go down hard.
MEMRISTORS... mark my words.
APK
P.S.=> Let's put it THIS way - I know, pretty much FOR SURE... apk
Just look at the Mac compare page, it's like John Sculley in the early 90s. What market segment does the Air serve awkwardly between the plain and Pro models?
Not to mention the iPad Pro has, arguably, a 'better' screen than any Macbook, for those who prefer vertical pixels.
Apple's earnings came with the line: " The company currently holds $233 billion in cash and marketable securities ".
Holy hell, that's a stupid amount of cash in hand to have at your disposal.
What's Tesla worth right now?
I'd love to see Musk team up with Cook as he's the closest living thing to Jobs.
Sure there's a lot of Tesla lovers who hate Apple but I'll bet there's a shit load more Apple fans who'd buy a Tesla if it had an Apple on it's ass.
It's not just the cars, I love Tesla's entry into the home power market with their wall mounted batteries.
If you want disruption you need to get into some new markets. 10 years ago Apple didn't sell phones.
Computing devices have almost reached commodity stagnation. The App market has been and gone.
There's so much going on in power, renewables and the changing global weather patterns.
Believe in global warming or not this area provides a huge marketing opportunity.
Bubble pop in 3... 2...
bring in Fassbender. He can play Jobs convincingly /lol...
Time for the 2.0 mess to dissolve ...
I bought a 6S as I love photography and it was a nice upgrade for my 4S finally. The fucking thing couldn't play music and take a photo which is what I do I walk an hour a day listening to music and taking photos. This s a basic fucking design concept every other iPhone had.
It took phone calls to Apple, Genius Bar visits etc all to get different info eventually being to,d it's a big that will be fixed. It still hasn't been fixed. I bought the 6 which in Australia with currency movements was actually about $500 cheaper and actually fucking works.
I emailed Tim Cook but they obviously don't take issues like this seriously. Steve Jobs would have fucking destroyed someone's life for this if we was alive. That's what made Apple products so damn good.
Also don't get me started on the fetish of ever thin phones. Give me a battery that lasts 12 hours please! Fuck me I have to charge it hair way through or I'm in low power mode at 20% and I've set as many things as I can to low power use as I can without making the phone a dumb phone.
Come on Tim Cook wake up and sort your quality and value offering.
Also 16GB? Fuck you. Move to 32GB at that price don't insult us consumers.
...Apple crumble.
Apple has already blown half that pile by taking out $100B in combined bonds and 'special' debt in order to buy back stock and pay dividends. By the time they are finished with this buy back program nearly all of that cash will have been spent.
They never innovated since they steal innovations from other companies, once DOS then Windoze was released. Their products have inferior hardware compared to competitors like high-end Android phones and most MAC laptops. The $urface is not a viable long-term competitor to the surface because the $urface is so limited in comparison. Software for Windoze PCs are generally inferior to GNU/Linux PCs or anything on the MAC, without the niche markets due to stability and security issues. M$ is one giant bubble that's starting to pop. I'm amazed at how many people are totally in love with M$ and are incapable of seeing things objectively. It's like investment decisions are all being made by M$ fanbois.
--
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Friends do assist M$ addicted friends in committing suicide.
Apple has already blown half that pile by taking out $100B in combined bonds and 'special' debt in order to buy back stock and pay dividends. By the time they are finished with this buy back program nearly all of that cash will have been spent.
And yet the pile is higher than before. Must be blowing up the pile.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Let's prop them up like Tesla, with the indirect and direct government help (and like GM).
What if Android is overtaking iOS in phones, in the same way that Windows overtook MacOS in PCs? For those who don't remember: Apple nearly went bankrupt in the 1990s.
Apple had the same philosophy with PCs in the 1990s that Apple has now with smart phones: super high margins, everything proprietary. Apple expects to be worshiped to the point that Apple does not need to have a better value.
From what I have been reading, the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge beats the iPhone in several respects.
It is my understand that Samsung beat Apple to the punch in the following:
higher resolution camera
heart rate monitor
big display
amoled display
water resistant
wireless charging
1080p display
answer by waving
wirelessly sharing photos
controlling a TV
When AT&T and verizon stopped offering the subsidy, sales started to decline..