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Apple Crushes Expectations, Sees Record Holiday Quarter (axios.com)
Apple on Thursday reported sales and earnings well ahead of projections, and said holiday sales should be a record and ahead of many analysts' expectations. The company sold 46.6 million iPhones last quarter, which came in about 500,000 units ahead of expectations. Axios reports: Going into the earnings report, there were concerns about both iPhone 8 demand and iPhone X supply. Thursday's report should go a long way toward answering those questions. Sales were up in every region expect Japan, where business was down from the prior year, though up sequentially. Notably, the company finally saw a much-needed turnaround in Greater China, where sales of $9.8 billion were up 22% from the prior quarter and 12% from a year ago. The company's business has been weak in China for some time, though the company had predicted improvement this quarter. Apple reported $52.6 billion in revenue (vs $51.2 billion estimated) and per-share earnings of $2.02 (vs $1.87 estimated). In addition to the 46.6 million iPhones sold (vs 46.1 million estimated), the company sold 10.3 million iPads (vs about 10 million expected) and 5.4 million Macs (vs about 5 million expected).
4th of July and Labor Day is all i've got.
Apple is in the business of selling hardware, not selling your data. That plus creating a premium experience translates to a device that people will pay a premium to get.
As history has shown, there is little difference between huge governments run amok and huge corporations run amok. See: East India Company.
I'm an Apple / iPhone hater, but Google and Android desperately need some legit competition. This can only be good for the marketplace.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
The latest news is that third parties can nab face scan data on the new Iphone x
That s completely technically wrong. iOS apps have no access to FaceID data - which remember would include some 30k dots per however many samplings they take as you rotate your face around twice while setting up FaceID.
What developers have access to is a depth map from front and rear cameras - but it is much less detailed, and there's no way to use it to authenticate. Remember Apple themselves created 3D face masks to try and fool FaceID, in order to ensure that approach would not work...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I wonder what type of games they're playing with the books to make this happen.
Cute. I'm an accountant and I've seen zero evidence that Apple is cooking the books. Every indication is that they are simply moving a lot of product and getting very handsome margins on that product.
It's well known that without Jobs Apple has already started going into the meat grinder.
Someone should tell Apple because they are moving more product than ever and profits are UP. People have this bizarre notion that Apple should be releasing some new world changing technology every 18 months. If you look at their history they tend to have about one big idea every 10-15 years or so. The 70s was the Apple II. The 80s was the Mac. The 90s was the Newton (which flopped) and the Powerbook. The 2000s was the iPod and the most recent decade or so was the iPhone/iPad (which are the same device really). What will Apple do next? We should know in the next few years. In the mean time they are doing fine and there is little evidence to suggest they are in any danger of decline. Not to mention that they have a ludicrous amount of cash in the bank - enough to buy both Ford and GM outright in cash if they wanted to.
I have no doubt they can keep this up maybe for decades (Jobs did leave a bank of ideas) but Apple in the end is headed towards the toilet. Just like the last time Jobs left them.
While losing a visionary leader certainly is a big loss, there is no evidence to reflexively assume Apple is going to turn into a dumpster fire without him. Companies don't succeed or fail based on a single person. The question is how well Jobs did in succession planning and in setting up robust management systems. If Jobs did a good job of that then Apple will be fine just like other large successful companies. Part of the reason Apple struggled without him the first time is that they were still a rather young company in a new industry. A lot of the problems Apple had in the 80s and 90s were actually caused by Jobs. Jobs leaving the company probably made him a better leader than he would have been had he stayed.
And yet, I recall the recent story about the engineer who lost his job and possibly his career because his daughter visited him at the office and took a naughty picture of a new iPhone. Seems like a somewhat evil prioritization of profits over people.
The engineer in question should have known that sharing that information was verboten. He almost certainly signed agreements to that effect. That engineer cut his own throat by disclosing trade secrets of his employer. ANY company in a similar position would have to do the same thing and that is the proper and responsible course of action. Otherwise they send a message that they don't really care about whether people disclose company secrets. We're not talking about some sort of toxic waste dump coverup here. We're talking about carelessly hurting the economic well being of the company and the people who depend on that company. He screwed up. He knows he screwed up. And he got fired for cause. You don't share secrets, even with family. He could easily have prevented the problem by not sharing the phone with his daughter who really is blameless. She was just an enthusiastic kid who got her hands on a new toy and behaved predictably like children do. That has nothing to do with prioritizing profits over people. Those profits actually support the livelihoods of many thousands of people and this idiot engineer needlessly endangered that.
Apple is in the business of selling hardware, not selling your data.
While it is undeniable that Apple does make money selling hardware, they aren't really a hardware company. They are a software company and this is something Steve Jobs understood a long time ago. They really make their money selling software. The hardware is simply the means by which they sell their software. The hardware on a Mac is in reality barely different from a Dell or HP computer. The iPhone hardware is barely different from numerous Android phones. Put Windows on a Mac or Android on an iPhone and customers would leave Apple faster than you can say "shareholder lawsuit". The hardware is what facilitates the sale but what people really are buying is the software and that is what they pay a premium for.
Think of it this way. Companies keep the valuable parts of the business. Apple doesn't not manufacture hardware so hardware is obviously not the core of their business. They functions they kept in house are software development and hardware design. The hardware design is simply to facilitate selling the software by putting it in a pretty and well designed box.
And at least so far you are right that Apple does appear to in general be responsible with customer data and privacy. So far... And the reason they can do that is that they haven't needed to get into the ad business to maintain their margins. It's actually one of the reasons I have an iPhone instead of Android. It's not that I think the Android system is bad (it's better in many ways) but Google develops Android specifically so that they can continue to make money with their core advertising business which does not and cannot respect my privacy and data. It's a built in conflict of interest that is not in my favor. I'm actually willing to pay Apple a more to avoid that issue. Your mileage may vary of course.
That plus creating a premium experience translates to a device that people will pay a premium to get.
Correct. And the basis of that experience is software. If Apple sold their software through others they would probably look a lot like Microsoft in a best case scenario. Instead they are a little more vertically integrated to differentiate their products because operating systems tends to be a winner take all sort of business. Had they taken Microsoft's playbook probably one or the other of them would have died years ago. Had they taken the approach of selling hardware with someone else's software they would be nothing more than another me-too vendor of PCs even in the best case scenario and their margins would be a LOT thinner.
Unless you are a (very) high level accountant at Apple, I don't see how you could possibly know whether they are cooking the books or not. They're not going to publish anything egregiously wrong like claiming sales of 5 million iPhones in the Principality of Liechtenstein (pop. 37,000).
The simple fact is that it is plainly obvious that they are selling a LOT of iPhones and selling them at price points that are higher than most Android devices. Since they don't cost more to make then it's a pretty simple logical leap that their business model simply works.
No one predicted the collapse of Enron or RBS by looking at their published accounts.
Did you actually look at the financial statements of Enron? I did. They were the most (intentionally as it turned out) incomprehensible mountain of obfuscation you've ever read. They were written to be effectively incomprehensible even to experts at reading such financial statements. The signs were there and there were people pointing out the concerns even prior to the revelation that it was a huge fraud. Apple's financial statements (which I have also read) are NOTHING like Enron's. While they don't provide unlimited detail, they are pretty straight forward as these things go.
Sure Apple could in theory be covering up a fraud but you could say that about any company. The simple fact is that you have ZERO evidence to suggest Apple is doing anything other than selling a lot of product for a good margin. People love their products and it is clear that they are selling millions of them. Furthermore we can see their supply chain with reasonable clarity and all the evidence there backs up the thesis that they are moving a huge amount of product. If that strains your credulity then by all means provide us with a thesis and evidence with anything to back it up. Otherwise you are simply wasting our time.
I wonder what type of games they're playing with the books to make this happen. It's well known that without Jobs Apple has already started going into the meat grinder.
I have no doubt they can keep this up maybe for decades (Jobs did leave a bank of ideas) but Apple in the end is headed towards the toilet. Just like the last time Jobs left them.
Jobs has been gone over 4 years now. To give you an idea how long in "Apple Years" that is, the iPhone 4s came out JUST as Jobs died. That's like EIGHT iPhone generations ago...
I kinda doubt that any amount of "book-juggling" would hide "the truth" from EVERYONE for that long.
No "meat grinder". Just stellar products that everyone but Haters seem to really like...
I'm sure the denizens of /. are horrified that pr0n sites can use FaceID to track your O face across their platforms...with their consent.
Ahh, no worries. Not only have other phones had face id years before the iPhone, but nobody uses it because it doesn't work, so nobody will put it into phones but stupid Apple.
That's because nobody but (not so) "stupid" Apple put enough R&D into Face Recognition to actually make it WORK.
Fuck, Samsung's Facial Recognition was instantly fooled by a PHOTOGRAPH. That's exactly how much effort THEY put into it...