Slashdot Mirror
The Leap Week: Did Apple Really Have a Record Quarter? (lapcatsoftware.com)
An anonymous reader shares a blog post: Apple stated that Q1 FY2017 was an all-time record for quarterly revenue. The media dutifully and mostly uncritically spread this "great" news for Apple. Technically the claim is true, the revenue was an all-time record. True but misleading. Although Apple didn't lie as such, you might say there was a sin of omission, and a definite spin of the facts. Most Apple fiscal quarters are 13 weeks long. Once in a while, however, they need a 14 week quarter. You might call it a "leap quarter". There was a good explanation of this financial practice a few years ago in Slate. Apple's Q1 2017 was a 14 week quarter, for the first time since Q1 2013. John Gruber writes at DaringFireball, "Adjusted for the extra week, Apple actually had another down quarter."
The tech crowd echo chamber had a lot to say about the headphone jack disappearing and the new MacBook Pros being a lousy update, but the unit sales on both of those devices point to the masses simply not caring. Both of them were stated to be setting sales records for Apple even before these financials came out.
I do agree that there is plenty of criticism warranted against Tim Cook's Apple. I feel as if he's fallen into the profits trap that Steve Jobs famously talked about when he was asked in 1995 about why the Mac failed to be a bigger deal. But I also see this whole "no innovation" argument as a bit of a double standard. Under Jobs, they put out evolutionary products (i.e. incremental updates) each year, but only put out revolutionary products (i.e. Mac, iPod, iPhone, and arguably the iPad) once per decade or so. The fact that they haven't had one since his 2011 death is not surprising, though it doesn't bode well for the company either. They clearly thought the Watch would be a revolutionary product, but, as with the iPad, it took them a couple of years before they even realized what it should be used for, let alone to start marketing it so that people would understand the benefits.