No, you couldn't be more wrong -- Apple's last reported quarter profit was $13.06 billion profit from $46.33 billion revenue:
Apple Reports First Quarter Results Highest Quarterly Revenue and Earnings Ever
All-Time Record iPhone, iPad and Mac Sales
CUPERTINO, California—January 24, 2012—Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2012 first quarter which spanned 14 weeks and ended December 31, 2011. The Company posted record quarterly revenue of $46.33 billion and record quarterly net profit of $13.06 billion, or $13.87 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $26.74 billion and net quarterly profit of $6 billion, or $6.43 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 44.7 percent compared to 38.5 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 58 percent of the quarter’s revenue.
By all accounts over a million (the last number I saw is 1.5m) real iPhones are in use in China, so chances are, yes, they are real.
To the person claiming that the grey market iPhones would be cheaper: if the source is HK, there they sell for 800USD -- then you need to pay the middle man and retailer on top of that. Presumably the official mainland phone will get carrier subsidy -- so yes they will be much cheaper, and that is the point...
I continue to be mystified as to why anyone would seriously consider the Pre over the new iPhone. The iPhone 3.0 http://daringfireball.net/2009/05/the_next_iphone will have twice or four times the capacity as the Pre for the same price (depending on how you wish to count Palm's rebate from the $299 upfront price). The iPhone has a thriving developer community that the will only expand when the iTablet finally gets released, and is unlikely to be duplicated by Palm, even if they stay ion business, which is far from a given.
And finally, the iPhone works worldwide, while the CDMA Pre is a US/Canada only device. That in and of itself decides the choice for me.
Dictionaries are a whole excellent App category that exists on the iPhone, and can be supremely useful when traveling. Microsoft is eliminating them for no discernible reason. Yeah, the MS App store is going to be a HUGE success. Good luck with that.
Some of your points are right -- however: Upscaling -- you obviously have never seen an excellent upscaling player in action, from a top notch DVD transfer (progressive scan Criterion DVDs, WB, Sony Superbit, etc.) The results looked way better to my eyes than the Blu-ray demos at Circuit City (yes, I know their HDTVs aren't properly calibrated -- but do you think Joe Average consumer will calibrate theirs?)
Downloads iTunes/AppleTV have 720P rentals right now. Considering there are way more "HDTVs" out there with resolutions of 720P or lower (as opposed to 1080P), quality is not going to be much of an issue for downloads.
Player pricesSure I paid ~ $300 for my DVD player as an early adopter (and paid way more for a top notch upscaling/SACD/etc. player years later), but most consumers see $50 DVD player & $400+ Blu-ray. Quality, shmolity, they buy the $50 gizmo, end of discussion. It's not like there were a ton of $50 LaserDisc players when DVD Players were expensive -- consumers back then didn't have a choice -- now they do.
I couldn't agree more about AT&T needing to improve their service: however, the vast majority of unlockers are outside the US, where no one, AT&T included, can offer service.
Thus, this show there is a huge pent up demand for iPhones in parts of the world where the iPhone is not (yet) offered, not that people hate AT&T.
There is certainly a good argument to be made at this point that Apple would have been better off selling the iPhone as an unlocked GSM device worldwide -- any money lost from carrier kickbacks would have been more than made up in volume.
More to the point, when Jobs returned to Apple, it was hemorrhaging cash and X days away from bankruptcy.
Apple also was selling a ton of products, some profitable, most not. Jobs' first order of business was to eliminate the vast majority of these products and focus the company on its core competency. Spite had nothing to do with the killing of the Newton. Saving Apple did, and I think we can all agree Jobs succeeded rather well.
Personally I was very upset over the elimination of the LaserWriter, but I realize now it was a very smart move.
As much as we may wish for Ogg Vorbis to succeed, the most likely beneficiary is AAC, simply because of iTunes' default settings. I strongly suspect AAC has already caught up to MP3 in popularity.
Most people just rip their CDs using the defaults, and thanks to the iPod, iTunes is surely the most popular digital audio program out there. I haven't heard with any patent threats to AAC, so I would suspect that more companies and people will move in that direction.
Bonus: AAC sounds better than MP3 at the same bit rate.
This is potentially huge, as Apple inc. now seems to own the trademark and will license it back to Apple Corps Ltd. Unless I am missing something, this means that Apple can sign bands directly, cutting out the record companies which collect 69 cents on every iTunes dollar.
As online music sales surpass physical media, this has the potential of allowing Apple to take over the record industry. I doubt they want to, but it gives them a great deal of opportunity to expand their iTunes business.
First of all Apple is is using H.264 as the compression method, which is more efficient then MPEG4, and orders of magnitude more efficient them MPEG2 (the DVD encoding codec).
Thus the resulting file size has NOTHING to do with the picture quality. Indeed H.264 solves many MPEG2 artifact problems which a present no matter how high the bit rate. (Check out the geometrical pattern on Rosalind Russell's suit in His Girl Friday). Well transferred/compressed/authored DVDs do indeed look better than Apple's downloads on a HDTV or computer, but has to do with the DVDs higher resolution: 720x480 vs. 640x480.
Two points though -- regular TVs have a resolution of 640x480, so most people can't notice the difference. And Apple is in no way tied to their current resolution -- they will no doubt increase it in the future, going higher than DVD if they wish.
As for AAC being better than MP3, while I haven't heard much on the subject (and due to DRM I honestly can't say I'm curious) neither is as good as FLAC, yet you don't see anyone jumping over to use it.
For the 1001st time: AAC encoding in iTunes is NOT DRMed -- it is every bit as free as MP3. Only files bought from the iTunes Music Store have DRM -- you can't rip CDs to a DRMed format in iTunes even if you wanted to. And yes at, the same bit rate AAC sounds better than MP3.
I know that our courts and copyright system are a big mess, but I can't concieve how Disney could claim ownership of Snow White without being laughed out of court. Indeed too many movies to mention have been made under that title by studios other than Disney -- just do a title search on the IMDB.
BS: The article you have linked to says nothing about Apple Lossless -- they haven't even tested AAC!!! This an ancient, out of date and now useless article.
No, they're saying that they MAY not - legally, that is, because they cannot sell the music without DRM, and the only DRM the ipod supports is Apple's Fairplay, and Apple will not permit Microsoft to license their patent for it.
No, what the parent post is saying is that MIcro$oft could write their own iPod OS/firmware and thus wouldn't need to worry about Apple's DRM, as they could use their own. Nothing is preventing them from doing that, though I seriously doubt that it would be popular.
Anything that Safari chokes on (for example some functions on adp.com), Camino handles fine. I can't imagine, short of total browser ignorance, why anyone would still be using IE under OS X.
I don't know about Pogue's past career, but he is a perfect example of WRONG Dvorak is.
Pogue uses Windows regularly -- he does all his writing using Dragon Naturally Speaking on a Windows machine. And I suspect that Pogue know a heck of a lot more about computers than Dvorak does.
If somebody like Pogue says that Macs are better in general, but that there are all kinds of areas where Windows PCs are better (Voice recognition, games, OCR, etc.) his word carries far more weight, than the word of a PC only clown like Dvorak.
It would have to be. Initially content will be Video Podcasts (like NerdTV), music videos, and hopefully TV shows. Also Apple needs to release software that will transcode non-encrypted DVDs or VIDEO_TS forlders, and let "third parties" do the rest.
Me too, although I have never had, nor do I now have TV. My DVD viewing monitor has neither an antenna nor tuner.
Before DVD, I simply didn't watch anything at home -- I listened to music, read books, went to the movies, walked in the park. (Of course I still do all those things along with DVD viewing and internet surfing.)
Bottom line -- nobody needs TV -- rich, poor or otherwise. If they killed the analog spectrum tomorrow, they'd be doing a lot of people a big favor.
I can't compare and contrast because I am yet to try Delicious Library or DVDPedia, but I am a long time ReaderWare user. ReaderWare is great functionality wise, but the UI (Java) is fugly, and it has the slowness of a Java app. as well. ReaderWare's strength include ability to import data (simultaneously) from *many* different sources, including the IMDB for DVDs, cddb, freedb & Tower for CDs, the Library of Congress for books, etc.
It also very flexible, in terms of user definable fields, ability to export in user defined HTML, etc.
I'd love to switch to Delicious library, but I'd need the following to do so: 1) Ability to import my ReaderWare data -- there is NO WAY I'd spend the time re-entering the HUGE number of DVDs, CDs & books I already have in there.
2) Ability to get data from more then just Amazon (btw, is Amazon.fr supported?) -- specifically, at a bare minimum the IMDB, CDDB & Library of Congress.
3) Ability to export to (user definable) HTML.
4) Ability to use my unmodified CueCat to scan barcodes.
5) More pre-defined or user definable fields (example for DVDs: Region code, aspect ratio, anamorphic (y/n), soundtracks, etc.)
Give us the above, and I'd bet the pretty much every Mac based ReaderWare user will switch -- not just me...
The moment a system likes this starts being used, the department of Homeland "Security" or whatever it is called in the future will insist on reading the contents of everyone's account without a warrant.
They do want to spy on your home computer or laptop also of course, but practically speaking it will be much more difficult for them.
This idea will never fly until government's stop spying on their citizens. And I expect that to happen...never.
"So why not join them as one track when you rip them?"
I am not familliar with the album mentioned above, but many classical music albums are essentially one continuous piece of music. It is very anoyning to have 70 minutes of music "joined" into one track.
But wait -- there is an even bigger problem. At least on my second generation, 20GB iPod if a track is longer than 10 minutes, there will be a slight pause in the playback at around the 10 minute mark. They've got to fix that -- it absolutely kills the iPod for classical music playback.
Can anyone confirm/deny if the 10minute bug is there for the current iPods?
People who are not playing their CDs anymore don't care about sound quality; don't listen to classical music or jazz.
I'm no Luddite -- I rip my CDs to AAC & listen to my iPod at work. But I have A/B high bitrate AAC (and MP3) with the CDs playing on my fairly good quality sound system (with excellent speakers) and the contrast is pretty stark. Plus, MP3/AAC rippers (or at least the iTunes & iPod combo) can't deal correctly with tracks longer than 10 minutes or tracks without pauses in between, which rules out listening to classical music.
Double sided/double layer DVDs ("DVD-18s") for your information can hold up to 18 gigs. And considering the audio and video is already compressed, you can't really reduce the size without sacrificing quality. The hard disk large enough to hold my ~800 DVD collection hasn't been invented yet.
Yes, selling music through the iTunes music store and future video equivalents is a great idea. But for anyone who cares about the quality of what they see and hear, media free music/movie distribution/playback is far from ready for prime time.
Without a doubt, ReaderWare , a book, DVD & CD cataloging suite that has absolutely saved my life as I have all too many of all three and until I go ReaderWare and a:Cue:Cat I was helpless in trying to get them in order, keep track of who borrowed what, etc.
It was a little slow on my B&W G3, but it flies on my new DP G4.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you couldn't be more wrong -- Apple's last reported quarter profit was $13.06 billion profit from $46.33 billion revenue:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2012/01/24Apple-Reports-First-Quarter-Results.html
By all accounts over a million (the last number I saw is 1.5m) real iPhones are in use in China, so chances are, yes, they are real.
To the person claiming that the grey market iPhones would be cheaper: if the source is HK, there they sell for 800USD -- then you need to pay the middle man and retailer on top of that. Presumably the official mainland phone will get carrier subsidy -- so yes they will be much cheaper, and that is the point...
I continue to be mystified as to why anyone would seriously consider the Pre over the new iPhone. The iPhone 3.0 http://daringfireball.net/2009/05/the_next_iphone will have twice or four times the capacity as the Pre for the same price (depending on how you wish to count Palm's rebate from the $299 upfront price). The iPhone has a thriving developer community that the will only expand when the iTablet finally gets released, and is unlikely to be duplicated by Palm, even if they stay ion business, which is far from a given.
And finally, the iPhone works worldwide, while the CDMA Pre is a US/Canada only device. That in and of itself decides the choice for me.
Dictionaries are a whole excellent App category that exists on the iPhone, and can be supremely useful when traveling. Microsoft is eliminating them for no discernible reason. Yeah, the MS App store is going to be a HUGE success. Good luck with that.
Some of your points are right -- however:
Upscaling -- you obviously have never seen an excellent upscaling player in action, from a top notch DVD transfer (progressive scan Criterion DVDs, WB, Sony Superbit, etc.) The results looked way better to my eyes than the Blu-ray demos at Circuit City (yes, I know their HDTVs aren't properly calibrated -- but do you think Joe Average consumer will calibrate theirs?)
Downloads iTunes/AppleTV have 720P rentals right now. Considering there are way more "HDTVs" out there with resolutions of 720P or lower (as opposed to 1080P), quality is not going to be much of an issue for downloads.
Player pricesSure I paid ~ $300 for my DVD player as an early adopter (and paid way more for a top notch upscaling/SACD/etc. player years later), but most consumers see $50 DVD player & $400+ Blu-ray. Quality, shmolity, they buy the $50 gizmo, end of discussion. It's not like there were a ton of $50 LaserDisc players when DVD Players were expensive -- consumers back then didn't have a choice -- now they do.
I couldn't agree more about AT&T needing to improve their service: however, the vast majority of unlockers are outside the US, where no one, AT&T included, can offer service.
Thus, this show there is a huge pent up demand for iPhones in parts of the world where the iPhone is not (yet) offered, not that people hate AT&T.
There is certainly a good argument to be made at this point that Apple would have been better off selling the iPhone as an unlocked GSM device worldwide -- any money lost from carrier kickbacks would have been more than made up in volume.
That second or two of airtime cost me $3.00 on my bill.
Who is your carrier?!?
T-Mobile (with whose phones I have travelled quite a bit), charges $1 per minute in most of Europe. AT&T says they charge $1.29 per minute.
The problem with the iPhone is there has to be a way to turn off EDGE without turning off voice and WiFi. Apple, please fix this!
More to the point, when Jobs returned to Apple, it was hemorrhaging cash and X days away from bankruptcy.
Apple also was selling a ton of products, some profitable, most not. Jobs' first order of business was to eliminate the vast majority of these products and focus the company on its core competency. Spite had nothing to do with the killing of the Newton. Saving Apple did, and I think we can all agree Jobs succeeded rather well.
Personally I was very upset over the elimination of the LaserWriter, but I realize now it was a very smart move.
As much as we may wish for Ogg Vorbis to succeed, the most likely beneficiary is AAC, simply because of iTunes' default settings. I strongly suspect AAC has already caught up to MP3 in popularity.
Most people just rip their CDs using the defaults, and thanks to the iPod, iTunes is surely the most popular digital audio program out there. I haven't heard with any patent threats to AAC, so I would suspect that more companies and people will move in that direction.
Bonus: AAC sounds better than MP3 at the same bit rate.
This is potentially huge, as Apple inc. now seems to own the trademark and will license it back to Apple Corps Ltd. Unless I am missing something, this means that Apple can sign bands directly, cutting out the record companies which collect 69 cents on every iTunes dollar.
As online music sales surpass physical media, this has the potential of allowing Apple to take over the record industry. I doubt they want to, but it gives them a great deal of opportunity to expand their iTunes business.
First of all Apple is is using H.264 as the compression method, which is more efficient then MPEG4, and orders of magnitude more efficient them MPEG2 (the DVD encoding codec).
Thus the resulting file size has NOTHING to do with the picture quality. Indeed H.264 solves many MPEG2 artifact problems which a present no matter how high the bit rate. (Check out the geometrical pattern on Rosalind Russell's suit in His Girl Friday). Well transferred/compressed/authored DVDs do indeed look better than Apple's downloads on a HDTV or computer, but has to do with the DVDs higher resolution: 720x480 vs. 640x480.
Two points though -- regular TVs have a resolution of 640x480, so most people can't notice the difference. And Apple is in no way tied to their current resolution -- they will no doubt increase it in the future, going higher than DVD if they wish.
For the 1001st time: AAC encoding in iTunes is NOT DRMed -- it is every bit as free as MP3. Only files bought from the iTunes Music Store have DRM -- you can't rip CDs to a DRMed format in iTunes even if you wanted to. And yes at, the same bit rate AAC sounds better than MP3.
Snow White is an old tale (re)told by the Brothers Grimm. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/grimmtmp/042.txt
I know that our courts and copyright system are a big mess, but I can't concieve how Disney could claim ownership of Snow White without being laughed out of court. Indeed too many movies to mention have been made under that title by studios other than Disney -- just do a title search on the IMDB.
BS: The article you have linked to says nothing about Apple Lossless -- they haven't even tested AAC!!! This an ancient, out of date and now useless article.
No, what the parent post is saying is that MIcro$oft could write their own iPod OS/firmware and thus wouldn't need to worry about Apple's DRM, as they could use their own. Nothing is preventing them from doing that, though I seriously doubt that it would be popular.
Anything that Safari chokes on (for example some functions on adp.com), Camino handles fine. I can't imagine, short of total browser ignorance, why anyone would still be using IE under OS X.
I don't know about Pogue's past career, but he is a perfect example of WRONG Dvorak is.
Pogue uses Windows regularly -- he does all his writing using Dragon Naturally Speaking on a Windows machine. And I suspect that Pogue know a heck of a lot more about computers than Dvorak does.
If somebody like Pogue says that Macs are better in general, but that there are all kinds of areas where Windows PCs are better (Voice recognition, games, OCR, etc.) his word carries far more weight, than the word of a PC only clown like Dvorak.
It would have to be. Initially content will be Video Podcasts (like NerdTV), music videos, and hopefully TV shows. Also Apple needs to release software that will transcode non-encrypted DVDs or VIDEO_TS forlders, and let "third parties" do the rest.
We will know more later today.
Me too, although I have never had, nor do I now have TV. My DVD viewing monitor has neither an antenna nor tuner.
Before DVD, I simply didn't watch anything at home -- I listened to music, read books, went to the movies, walked in the park. (Of course I still do all those things along with DVD viewing and internet surfing.)
Bottom line -- nobody needs TV -- rich, poor or otherwise. If they killed the analog spectrum tomorrow, they'd be doing a lot of people a big favor.
I can't compare and contrast because I am yet to try Delicious Library or DVDPedia, but I am a long time ReaderWare user. ReaderWare is great functionality wise, but the UI (Java) is fugly, and it has the slowness of a Java app. as well.
ReaderWare's strength include ability to import data (simultaneously) from *many* different sources, including the IMDB for DVDs, cddb, freedb & Tower for CDs, the Library of Congress for books, etc.
It also very flexible, in terms of user definable fields, ability to export in user defined HTML, etc.
I'd love to switch to Delicious library, but I'd need the following to do so:
1) Ability to import my ReaderWare data -- there is NO WAY I'd spend the time re-entering the HUGE number of DVDs, CDs & books I already have in there.
2) Ability to get data from more then just Amazon (btw, is Amazon.fr supported?) -- specifically, at a bare minimum the IMDB, CDDB & Library of Congress.
3) Ability to export to (user definable) HTML.
4) Ability to use my unmodified CueCat to scan barcodes.
5) More pre-defined or user definable fields (example for DVDs: Region code, aspect ratio, anamorphic (y/n), soundtracks, etc.)
Give us the above, and I'd bet the pretty much every Mac based ReaderWare user will switch -- not just me...
Ted
The moment a system likes this starts being used, the department of Homeland "Security" or whatever it is called in the future will insist on reading the contents of everyone's account without a warrant.
They do want to spy on your home computer or laptop also of course, but practically speaking it will be much more difficult for them.
This idea will never fly until government's stop spying on their citizens. And I expect that to happen...never.
Ted
The optical out is great news, especially IF it works with the Mac OS X Apple DVD Player and 5.1 audio.
Combine that with an Apple Cinema HD display, and any ADC equiped PowerBook or PowerMac becomes a pretty cool Home Theater PC (HTPC).
Does anyone know if this does/or will work?
Ted
"So why not join them as one track when you rip them?"
I am not familliar with the album mentioned above, but many classical music albums are essentially one continuous piece of music. It is very anoyning to have 70 minutes of music "joined" into one track.
But wait -- there is an even bigger problem. At least on my second generation, 20GB iPod if a track is longer than 10 minutes, there will be a slight pause in the playback at around the 10 minute mark. They've got to fix that -- it absolutely kills the iPod for classical music playback.
Can anyone confirm/deny if the 10minute bug is there for the current iPods?
Ted
People who are not playing their CDs anymore don't care about sound quality; don't listen to classical music or jazz.
I'm no Luddite -- I rip my CDs to AAC & listen to my iPod at work. But I have A/B high bitrate AAC (and MP3) with the CDs playing on my fairly good quality sound system (with excellent speakers) and the contrast is pretty stark. Plus, MP3/AAC rippers (or at least the iTunes & iPod combo) can't deal correctly with tracks longer than 10 minutes or tracks without pauses in between, which rules out listening to classical music.
Double sided/double layer DVDs ("DVD-18s") for your information can hold up to 18 gigs. And considering the audio and video is already compressed, you can't really reduce the size without sacrificing quality. The hard disk large enough to hold my ~800 DVD collection hasn't been invented yet.
Yes, selling music through the iTunes music store and future video equivalents is a great idea. But for anyone who cares about the quality of what they see and hear, media free music/movie distribution/playback is far from ready for prime time.
Ted
Without a doubt, ReaderWare , a book, DVD & CD cataloging suite that has absolutely saved my life as I have all too many of all three and until I go ReaderWare and a :Cue:Cat I was helpless in trying to get them in order, keep track of who borrowed what, etc.
It was a little slow on my B&W G3, but it flies on my new DP G4.
Ted