Apple reported its quarterly results, and thanks to the iPhone 4S and the iPad, Apple is putting out bizarre figures – 37 million iPhones, 15.5 million iPads. “The Company sold 37.04 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 128 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 15.43 million iPads during the quarter, a 111 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 5.2 million Macs during the quarter, a 26 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 15.4 million iPods, a 21 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.” Is this the end of Android’s dominance, or just a single uberquarter due to the new iPhone?
Apple Reports Bizarre First Quarter Results
96 Comments
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2012-01-27 11:05 am
Thom HolwerdaWhy begrudge Apple’s success? It seems such an obtuse and pointless thing to do.
Maybe the begrudging has to do with Thom’s tablet prediction that just became a lot less likely scenario:
http://www.osnews.com/thread?485573
We’re now halfway to aug’12 and no signs of android tablets dominating the market.
Uh…
http://www.osnews.com/comments/25546
2012-01-26 1:27 am
unclefester
Why, when Apple just had not just the best quarterly results in the tech industry but the second best quarterly results in American corporate history, so do some people twist themselves into ludicrous knots to try to explain it all away as having nothing to do with Apple actually doing anything clever or innovative or well executed? Why pretend that doing such as thing is easy when it it is actually impossibly hard? Why begrudge Apple’s success? It seems such an obtuse and pointless thing to do.
It is a bit like the myth of the Roman military invincibility. The Romans were very frequently defeated on the battlefield. The eventual Roman victories were almost invariably because their enemies refused to cooperate sufficiently.
Samsung is the only serious hardware competitor for Apple. The rest have been wandering around like lost sheep for the past 5-10 years.
These results are not adjusted for inflation or market size. Standard Oil, Ford and Bethlehem Steel were all larger and far more profitable corporations than Apple in real terms.
JD Rockefeller’s personal wealth ($400-650 billion in inflation adjusted terms) was enough to buy Apple outright.
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2012-01-26 6:54 am
rhavynThese results are not adjusted for inflation or market size. Standard Oil, Ford and Bethlehem Steel were all larger and far more profitable corporations than Apple in real terms.
Sorry, but no. Apple had the 4th largest quarterly corporate earnings of all time, inflation adjusted. They are also the only non-oil company in the top 20: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_corporate_profits_and_…
JD Rockefeller’s personal wealth ($400-650 billion in inflation adjusted terms) was enough to buy Apple outright.
Which seems like a kind of irrelevant. But since we’re tossing around irrelevant statistics, Apple’s cash reserves alone are larger than the value of all but 52 companies in the world.
2012-01-31 10:40 pm
zima
it is actually impossibly hard
Curious how you, of all people, are so quick to claim it didn’t really happen (that’s what ~impossible tends to mean); could it be that you anticipate some revelation of foul play…
2012-01-25 1:59 pm
siki_miki
Actually I don’t think it is driven by 4S itself, but also by the fame of iPhone4. Apple is recognized, the phone is the gadget everyone wwants, and people were also waiting for a new model. So the ‘dominance’ of Android waa in one part a lot of people waiting for the iPhone5.
While Android is more affordable, while also has great high-end devices, the Apple is a kind of fashion and status symbol that everyone wants, and this actually gained steam during the iPhone 4 lifetime. People are even ready to sell a kidney to afford it.
2012-01-25 3:18 pm
siraf72
Firstly, Apple doesn’t need to dominate anything. They just need to keep turning a good profit.
Secondly, Android isn’t the competitor. The other device manufacturers are.
Lastly, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY: Unlike the PC OS wars back in the day, the success of one does not hinder the other. The market is still growing AND a high rate of Android adoption will not put users off buying an apple product. This isn’t the nineties where people asked “If I buy this mac can i still use my work documents and PC applications on it?”. Windows dominance back in the day created a positive feedback loop. The same will not be true for either Apple or Android phones. A bad phone won’t be bought and a good will, regardless of who makes it. The end.
/rant
Edited 2012-01-25 15:18 UTC
2012-01-25 3:28 pm
sgtrock
42 million devices sold in a quarter sounds like a lot until you remember that Google was boasting about 500,000 device activations per day last May. That’s activations, not sales. That means we’re talking about smartphones and tablets in customers’ hands and not sitting on a shelf.
Android sales aren’t slowing down, either. Last I heard, Google was comfortably over 600,000 activations per day.
Do the math, people. Google has at least a six or seven month lead in sales and seems to be adding to it daily.
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2012-01-25 3:46 pm
dukes42 million devices sold in a quarter sounds like a lot until you remember that Google was boasting about 500,000 device activations per day last May. That’s activations, not sales. That means we’re talking about smartphones and tablets in customers’ hands and not sitting on a shelf.
Android sales aren’t slowing down, either. Last I heard, Google was comfortably over 600,000 activations per day.
Do the math, people. Google has at least a six or seven month lead in sales and seems to be adding to it daily.
I did the math and it came out the same as the financial report:
$13.06 billion profit on revenue of $46 billion for Apple’s December quarter.
In other words, it’s up there with Exxon.
You can sit there colored unimpressed all you want. Are there comparable numbers anywhere else in the tech industry?? Nope.
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rhavyn
42 million devices sold in a quarter sounds like a lot until you remember that Google was boasting about 500,000 device activations per day last May. That’s activations, not sales. That means we’re talking about smartphones and tablets in customers’ hands and not sitting on a shelf.
Android sales aren’t slowing down, either. Last I heard, Google was comfortably over 600,000 activations per day.
Do the math, people. Google has at least a six or seven month lead in sales and seems to be adding to it daily.
Yes, please do the math
37.04MM iPhones
15.5MM iPads
7.7MM iPod Touches (half of the 15.4 million iPods)
= 60.24MM devices in a quarter
Which is approximately 670,000 iOS activations per day.
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2012-01-25 4:28 pm
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2012-01-25 5:14 pm
DrillSgtYes, please do the math
37.04MM iPhones
15.5MM iPads
7.7MM iPod Touches (half of the 15.4 million iPods)
= 60.24MM devices in a quarter
Which is approximately 670,000 iOS activations per day.
Actually not accurate. This is talking about how many devices were sold by Apple. Sold by Apple != Devices in use. These would be sales to retail outlets, like AT&T, Best Buy, etc. Those organizations buy the units from Apple, and then resell them. Apple gets to report those as sales, even though the devices may be sitting in a warehouse at the customers location. It most certainly does not mean that the devices are activated in any way shape or form.
I would be curious to see the activation numbers for iOS devices, as I am guessing they will be close to Androids numbers.
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rhavyn
Actually not accurate. This is talking about how many devices were sold by Apple. Sold by Apple != Devices in use. These would be sales to retail outlets, like AT&T, Best Buy, etc. Those organizations buy the units from Apple, and then resell them. Apple gets to report those as sales, even though the devices may be sitting in a warehouse at the customers location. It most certainly does not mean that the devices are activated in any way shape or form.
I would be curious to see the activation numbers for iOS devices, as I am guessing they will be close to Androids numbers.
Actually it is fairly accurate. Your description of what Apple considers a sale is correct, but you need to correlate that with the inventory data Apple publishes in their quarterly results. Apple maintains incredibly low inventories (and it was below even their low standard this past quarter) which allows them to ensure that every device purchased from them by a reseller will actually be sold to a consumer in a short period of time. Apple does not have warehouses of devices sitting around and their inventory management ensures that resellers can’t stockpile warehouses of devices.
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2012-01-25 6:31 pm
OMRebelActually it is fairly accurate. Your description of what Apple considers a sale is correct, but you need to correlate that with the inventory data Apple publishes in their quarterly results. Apple maintains incredibly low inventories (and it was below even their low standard this past quarter) which allows them to ensure that every device purchased from them by a reseller will actually be sold to a consumer in a short period of time. Apple does not have warehouses of devices sitting around and their inventory management ensures that resellers can’t stockpile warehouses of devices.
You are saying that Apple does not have centralized storage of their products throughout the US in order to ship out to stores that are ordering them, but rather ship directly from the manufacturers overseas to Joe’s Electronic Store in Anywhere, USA? Such a model would be disastrous – as it not only delays the time in which a retailer could actually receive the product (due to shipping time as well as dealing with customs), but added costs in which the manufacturer is now fully in charge of handling shipping and orders (making inventory a huge nightmare) instead of going with a cheaper bulk shipping rate.
You may want to rethink things a bit……
Edited 2012-01-25 18:36 UTC
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rhavyn
You are saying that Apple does not have centralized storage of their products throughout the US in order to ship out to stores that are ordering them, but rather ship directly from the manufacturers overseas to Joe’s Electronic Store in Anywhere, USA? Such a model would be disastrous – as it not only delays the time in which a retailer could actually receive the product (due to shipping time as well as dealing with customs), but added costs in which the manufacturer is now fully in charge of handling shipping and orders (making inventory a huge nightmare) instead of going with a cheaper bulk shipping rate.
You may want to rethink things a bit……
You are aware that Apple ships from their manufacturing facilities directly to consumers, right? It generally takes 2-6 days from order to delivery. They do maintain some inventory (generally around 3-4 weeks worth) for standard configurations of their products, but they do not have massive amounts of product sitting around (their sell through is so high they can’t keep up with manufacturing as it is, they couldn’t have warehouses full of stuff if they wanted to). Since they have so little product sitting around, it’s fairly easy to correlate end user sales. Inventory data is available in their quarterly reports, you can look it up. Apple drop shipping directly from China is also well known information for anyone who has ordered a high demand item or a custom configuration.
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OMRebel
I stand corrected then. Bizarre that Apple does such a thing. My buddy who works at a AT&T store says they always have a large stock of iPhones in their storage area. But, that’s my fault for making an assumption. My apologies, and thank you for the correction.
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rhavyn
I stand corrected then. Bizarre that Apple does such a thing. My buddy who works at a AT&T store says they always have a large stock of iPhones in their storage area. But, that’s my fault for making an assumption. My apologies, and thank you for the correction.
Just to be clear, I’m sure your AT&T buddy does have a “large” stock of phones around, but “large” probably translates to a few weeks of inventory at most. A better question for him wouldn’t be how many but how often do you get a shipment. Which is what Apple strives to do, ensure there is only a few weeks of inventory out in the world at any one time.
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DrillSgt
Actually it is fairly accurate. Your description of what Apple considers a sale is correct, but you need to correlate that with the inventory data Apple publishes in their quarterly results. Apple maintains incredibly low inventories (and it was below even their low standard this past quarter) which allows them to ensure that every device purchased from them by a reseller will actually be sold to a consumer in a short period of time. Apple does not have warehouses of devices sitting around and their inventory management ensures that resellers can’t stockpile warehouses of devices.
Good point. I have not looked at the inventory data at all. I’ll take a look and see if I agree or not
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2012-01-25 7:44 pm
steve_sJeez, don’t be a jerk man.
Sure, there’s going to be some stock in the supply chain, but you don’t see resellers cutting prices of Apple devices to move inventory. There are no indications at all that resellers are sitting on Apple devices they can’t shift.
There will also have been some stock sitting at resellers and in warehouses at the beginning of the quarter too, which they will have sold during the quarter.
If resellers weren’t selling the devices, they wouldn’t be buying more of them from Apple to resell. The difference between Apple’s figures and sales to end-users is going to be minimal – probably well under 1%.
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2012-01-26 12:07 am
mkoneActually not accurate. This is talking about how many devices were sold by Apple. Sold by Apple != Devices in use. These would be sales to retail outlets, like AT&T, Best Buy, etc. Those organizations buy the units from Apple, and then resell them. Apple gets to report those as sales, even though the devices may be sitting in a warehouse at the customers location. It most certainly does not mean that the devices are activated in any way shape or form.
I would be curious to see the activation numbers for iOS devices, as I am guessing they will be close to Androids numbers.
How about the inventory from the previous quarter then. It doesn’t disappear into a black hole you know. If Apple is counting as sales iPhone that have been sold to resellers, then that is OK as long as it doesn’t depress shipments in the next quarter. Companies don’t generally buy inventory they can’t ship, and Apple doesn’t do channel stuffing.
2012-01-25 4:32 pm
friedchicken
So let me get this straight. Apple has success but it’s just lucky. Android has success and it’s because of great products and business?
…..<this is where you get slapped>…..
2012-01-25 5:19 pm
twitterfire
And I fully agree with the statement:
“iPhone4’s are top selling model only because competitors like Samsung offer many different models. Apple’s smartphone market share is about 14% worldwide, 25% in US. Samsung’s market share is about 24% worldwide. Apple making more money with 14% market share than remaining 96% (assuming it’s true) only tells you how hard it “pwns” its customers. It might sound good to you only if you’ve invested in their stocks, but hard too see why anyone would like this fact as a consumer.”
2012-01-25 6:02 pm
Bounty
I personally don’t get why people flock to Apple, but they do. It’s an honest to god fact, just like American Idol is the #1 show in the US 8 years running, a record. I don’t think it’s particularly good, but sort of the default option for many people.
2012-01-26 4:43 am
unclefester
I amazed that anyone can claim that Apple is utterly brilliant company operating in a fiercely competitive industry. This is total BS.
Any industry that is dominated by a single manufacturer (eg coca Cola or Apple) can’t even be considered competitive.
In the consumer electronics business most of the R&D is done by suppliers. Virtually all the manufacturing is farmed out to OEMs. The only thing that really distinguishes one brand from other is superficial styling and the software. In fact you can easily enter the TV, tablet or mobile phone business for a few hundred grand (a back street factory in Guandong will happily design and make a small batch for you).
If Apple are so brilliant at business maybe they should try running supermarkets, processing food, making TVs or refrigerators and discover what a truly competitive industry is like.
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rhavyn
If Apple are so brilliant at business maybe they should try running supermarkets, processing food, making TVs or refrigerators and discover what a truly competitive industry is like.
Apple runs a retail chain that has the highest revenue per square foot of any retail chain in the world (revenue per square foot being the standard for measuring this stuff). Higher than high end jewelry stores like Tiffany’s, higher than large department stores, higher than supermarkets. But I’m sure that doesn’t count either.
Cause, you know, Apple just competes with stupid consumer electronics companies. Everyone knows that growing from 10 billion in revenue 5 quarters ago to 40 billion revenue today is totally easy in that market.
Edited 2012-01-26 07:00 UTC
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2012-01-27 3:37 pm
leosI amazed that anyone can claim that Apple is utterly brilliant company operating in a fiercely competitive industry. This is total BS.
Any industry that is dominated by a single manufacturer (eg coca Cola or Apple) can’t even be considered competitive.
You realize that Android is the market leader, right? Many other players trying to get into the market, big and small.
In the consumer electronics business most of the R&D is done by suppliers. Virtually all the manufacturing is farmed out to OEMs. The only thing that really distinguishes one brand from other is superficial styling and the software.
So, the thing that users interact with every single day, everything they see, that’s all superficial? You have exactly zero idea what you’re talking about.
In fact you can easily enter the TV, tablet or mobile phone business for a few hundred grand (a back street factory in Guandong will happily design and make a small batch for you).
Those tablets exist. They are horrible pieces of crap and bear little relation to things like the iPad or Galaxy Tab.
If Apple are so brilliant at business maybe they should try running supermarkets, processing food, making TVs or refrigerators and discover what a truly competitive industry is like.
Uhh… processing food? Making supermarkets? None of those things require any innovation. That’s mostly good supply chain management. Apple needs to continue to innovate to stay on top. Look how fast RIM went from dominance to bankruptcy risk. That is far more competitive than an industry like supermarkets where you sell the same things forever.
2012-01-26 5:19 am
unclefester
Exxon business plan:
– deal with a dozen equally competent competitors
– plan 30 ears ahead
– work in he most hostile environments on Earth
– invest tens of billions of dollars in new oil fields
– operate on tiny margins
– deal with dictators and civil wars
– sell a commodity product
– operate hundreds of thousands of retail outlets all over the world.
– have no idea how much the oil price will be in a weeks time
Apple business plan:
“Dude can you send us like another 10 million more of those rectangle things? The last ones sold real quick. Can you make them exactly the same as the last ones…but just a little bit faster? Maybe call them 4s? You can do that? Cool…thanks dude.”
2012-01-27 4:43 pm
[email protected]
I do not know if I am in the minority or majority here with my OS preferences …
I use Mac OS X / Fedora 14 / Mint / Ubuntu …
and UGH … Windoze 7 for some required work programs
See?
UGH and Windoze have negative connotations that are probably not warranted in the context of this post
I DO object to the use of BIZARRE in the “title” of this news item
The term has negative connotations that are not warranted by the content of the item
Apple has just had a monster of a quarter and year
and you label that as BIZARRE ???
Unexpected maybe
but BIZARRE???
But with customers like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaHUpWuqNHY
they don’t have to worry.
600,000 ibooks author downloads? iPad will dominate…just watch…numbers will grow.
Doesn’t mean anything. It’s free. If I used a Mac I would have grabbed a copy to see what it could do. I’m sure lots of people did the same thing.
And its license pretty much make it useless unless you want to sell iBook.
iBooks file format currently works only on iPad (no! not even beloved iPhone got it! apple customers should feel screwed shouldn’t they?).
If you want to sell it you can only distribute it by Apple service (however this part of Apple authoring tool may not be legal), and Apple still have right to refuse distribution, so you can not sell it after all.
I can not see how new iBooks helps Apple in any regard apart from some possible push for education tax funds, and anti trust investigation.
About 20 million of those iPhones were not the recent model, but the older stocks since they have put the 3GS out on ^aEUR~buy^aEURfor^aEURfree^aEURTM tariffs.
It^aEURTMs a good strategy, but we^aEURTMll see if the next quarter has similar trends.
You have a link for the 20 mill figure?
(not doubting you, just curious).
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-nielsen-iphone-really-ate-into-a…
Fairly wishy washy data, but that is why I used ^aEUR~about^aEURTM
It’s a brilliant strategy. The 3GS is almost identical from a computing power perspective to the iPhone4, so it’s easy for them to have the same features in IOS. They are getting App Store clients for hardware that is incredibly cheap to manufacture (all the components should be almost for free).
It’s a win-win for Apple and for the customers. Some customers can get an iPhone for little cash while Apple gets a lot of App Store customers almost for free.
The strategy wouldn’t work for Android because they can’t get the latest OS version even on the newest terminals, but it’s easy for Apple because they have to worry about only 10 terminals (iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4 CDMA, iPhone 4S, iPad Wifi, iPad 3G, iPad2 Wifi, iPad2 3G, iPod Touch 3, iPod Touch 4).
I’m a bit concerned about the whole iBooks/iTunesU thing if the file format is not a standard one (something like EPub+HTML5+WebGL+SVG+MathML+ChemML extensions). If it’s a standard one, we will soon see book readers on other platforms and it would truly be a universal platform, but if it’s a closed ecosystem, at least in Europe it won’t catch.
3GS is very RAM-limited with just 256MB. Iphone4 has twice that with 512MB(same as the 4S). The A4 is also a much better SOC running at 1/3 more clock speed. Hardly the same. Just multitask on both and you will see.
Multitask? How does one do that, other than jailbreaking? iOS’s state saving hardly counts in your example since what background tasks the apps can do hook into already-running services which you can’t shut off (without jailbreaking obviously), and apps that are saved to disk aren’t using RAM or CPU cycles while saved and so don’t bog down the system in any case. It’s a fair imitation of multitasking for many, but doesn’t serve your argument.
Having used both a 3GS and a 4 (though I’m an Android user primarily) I can say that, while the 4’s hardware does make some difference in the system’s performance, it’s not as drastic as most people seem to believe. Web content loads faster on the 4 and obviously some graphic-intensive games will run smoother, but the difference between the 3GS and the 4 is nowhere near the difference between the 4 and 4S.
Multitasking happens on iOS, and not just “already-running services which you can’t shut off”.
There are various categories of applications that are allowed to multitask. Media playback, navigation, and voip-type apps, for example. Such multitasking apps are free to do pretty much whatever they want whilst in the background, although if they start wildly chomping up resources the OS may kill them. Given the severe resource constraints of these systems though that’s pretty reasonable, and in practice rarely happens.
But that’s what I’m talking about. Those categories of apps make use of already running services to facilitate those background tasks. They’re not allowed to run their own services in the background to play media, for example, but they may hook into the already-existing background services that will play said media. In effect, they hand off their playback to the service before they close. There are certain, set, tasks that may be backgrounded. Each one of those tasks, when backgrounded, simply hands it off to a system service–that’s why those specific tasks are allowed to continue in the first place. The services also, if need be, have the ability to notify you, the user, of an event and can spawn the proper application upon clicking that event. You’ll notice, however, that they can’t always take you to the specific screen in which the notification appears, because it’s not a native service to the app in question but rather a generic service that, while it can run a designated app attached to that notification event, cannot often go beyond that unless the app is written specifically to treat spawns from the service differently than user spawning. It’s not multitasking in the way the majority of users think of it though, as I said, for the average user it provides a convincing simulation and, for those who don’t want to know the ins and outs of process/task management, that might just be a good thing.
You can not play demanding games on 3S, its too old. And it was situation before lunch of 4. So unless game specifically target 3S, you will not get on pair experience.
But for other usage I quite agree.
BUT I do not agree that Apple can update 3S os any longer. Where is Siri?
As for iBooks, it’s good but not that good. And you can not get iBooks file format opened on ANY iPhone. Its only iPad!
Simple answer: Artificial limitation. Siri is a client/server based system, and all of the heavy lifting is done server-side. In fact, you can enable Siri if you jailbreak a 4 or 3gs and it works fine. It’s there, it’s just hidden in an attempt (and a mostly successful one) to convince the average consumer that it’s time to upgrade. You just have to be able to flip the switch that Apple has hidden. The same goes for FaceTime, although what use FaceTime would be on the 3GS without a front-facing camera I couldn’t say.
It most definitely is not. iBooks works on iPod Touch, iPhone (yes even the 3gs) as well as the iPad. You’re a bit behind the times. This was true at the launch of the first generation iPad, but hasn’t been true now for over a year (as of the release of iOS 4.0, in fact).
iBooks works on all those devices, yes, but the new textbooks only work on the iPad.
This is not too surprising I guess, it wouldn’t be a great user experience on a small screen.
Actually – beyond the silly “habits of consumers by press release”, “futurist” visions & predictions, or short novelty periods of always-underutilized videocall funcionality – it turns out (you know, serious research) that one of the most widespread things for which they are used seems to be… showing the other person your surroundings (which obviously works fine with back-camera – much better, as a matter of fact)
Edited 2012-01-31 23:20 UTC
It^aEURTMs Embracing & Extending ePub by using custom mimetypes, webkit CSS, and JS that is likely to break outside of iBooks.
It should really concern standards people.
Agreed, but are there any relevant standards here? I am concerned by this move but I am also happy that someone other than Microsoft or Adobe came up with this. Imagine such a standard from Microsoft (Silverlight based) and now imagine one from Adobe (Flash based).
At least if it’s Epub+HTML+CSS+JS it’s something that some might be able to implement on other platforms.
ePub _is_ the standard, and its already built from HTML+CSS+JS.
Customers get it for the illusion of little cash. 3GS is not anywhere near inexpensive when, say, one wants to actually own it, without contract – and this costs doesn’t go away with it, it’s just hidden (also, 3GS doesn’t have the same features; and best of all: Siri was removed from being available, for free, so that 4S can have more marketing tricks)
But overall, it is really quite hilarious how you mention a problematic OS support of androids, in a post where you also cherish how Apple actively pushes, for mass sales, a handset which will be essentially dropped quite soon (with its age, it’s unavoidable; hardly anybody actively dumps on consumers single handset models for so long – there was some hoopla about periods of support from the start of sales of a given handset, but maybe more revealing would be: from the moment when mass sales end)
lol dude; their dumping?!? with a 47% profit!
Whether or not they make profit, they are dumping in the legal sense of the term. Go find a wikipedia.
I read at Ars Technica that the avg. iPhone selling price went up to $660 this quarter, so the iPhone 4s was a huge player in the results.
Apple sold more iPhones in 2011 than in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 COMBINED! And, the China market is about to explode for Apple…..incredible stuff.
I think this has nothing to do with Android. The smartphone market is young, and there is still huge growth potential. There is just so much utility in smart phones that all the top manufacturers will continue to gain for a couple years yet.
Next quarter Apple will continue to have huge sales due to the 4s, which is released in stages around the world.
Then the next quarter will be huge sales on the iPad3, assuming it is not a dud.
Then they will likely have another comparative lull while people wait for the iPhone 5. They will have to be really deliver with that if they want the success to continue. I think the 4s is quite competitive at the moment, but in 8 months it might look quite long in the tooth and if they don’t make drastic changes I would be inclined to sell my shares. I’m not confident in apple without jobs, so they would really have to prove themselves with new products.
Every techsavy thinks that Apple need to deliver wonders.
Its not how it works!
Its more socjological/pr work, rather than technological breakthrough’s.
Yes Apple make good improvements in tech, but they are just that! Even Apple bizarre profit margins can not make miracles in tech R&D.
iPhone 5 will have unique features, but I guess that it will be “take any wish list for iPhone5 and divide it by 5”.
Those numbers are just mind boggling. 47% profit for a hardware company is un-fucking-believable.
As a consumer I am outraged!
As a shareholder I am ridiculously ecstatic!
13/46 = 28%, not 47%.
I’ll leave it to play out for a few days and will short AAPL.
Out of the total number of mobile phones in the world less then 1/3 are smartphones. The market is growing crazy fast. Even given this there seems to be a constant need by the media to say things like ‘Apple Reports Bizarre First Quarter Results”. It isn’t bizzare. They kicked ass and in a fast growing market. The interesting point in time is when these things are not new, new features are not seen as must haves, and manufacturers need to compete based on margin.
Margins? The only definite thing that you could get from these results is that: ecosystem matters and differentiation is the key factor.
In short, WP7 manufacturers are in a lot of hot water… Nokia is in a good position though.
So much for OSAlert’s predictions about Apple’s demise due to the closed nature of its systems. Apple must license its OS now or face certain doom! Maybe next year.
Demise? When?
In fairness to this poster Thom did at one point say that the iPhone would be marginalized to 10% market share RSN.
It hit something like 18% at the lowest point. It’s back up now, but not for long. Coming quarters, it will slide back again. That’s the usual Apple release cycle.
Apple already putout the next Q guidance at 32bn in revenue. That is 5bn less than guidance for this one. (Their guidance for 2012Q1 was 37bn).
So even Apple does not expect that their sales will stay the same. Estimated Android smartphone sales are 63mil, iOS device sales are about 60mil (including the seasonal surge of iPod Touch’es).
In addition, their 2012Q1(financial results for calendar Q4, last 3 months of, 2011) included additional week of 2012.(Didn’t verify the last statement)
This is just seasonal. If you look at their numbers historically you’ll se Q1 is their strongest.
Seasonal == unsustainable.
You’re really spending a lot of time trying to rationalize this aren’t you? Apple always provides lower guidance for q2, its the quarter after Christmas, nearly all consumer goods manufactures and retailers do this. And their quarterly report indicates their quarter ended on Dec 31, 2011.
Am I rationalizing lies? Please feel free to point out non factual information in my post. Or even speculation on my part.
And maybe you missed the fact that I and many more research where their money is invested?
That is one addition week:
… Company^aEURTMs Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 24, 2011 and its Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended December 31, 2011…
vs
…Company^aEURTMs Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 25, 2010 and its Form 10-Q for the quarter ended December 25, 2010…
There are no miracles here. All that happened is that Apple had a lot of luck (Xmas, 4s, Samsung lawsuits) and the competition was in disarray.
All that luck is about to end very soon. Apple has lost nearly every lawsuit on appeal. ICS will be standard, WP7 is getting traction, RIM is reorganising, Nokia is cashed up and more focused and 4G networks are taking off. All these will provide serious competition over the next 6-12 months.
Luck.. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
It’s not enough, that I must succeed,…. …but all of my enemies must fail!
Genghis Khan
Is Apple responsible for HP abandoning WebOS?
Is Apple responsible for the incorrect judgements made in the anti-Samsung lawsuits (since overturned)?
Is Apple responsible for ICS not being widely released well before Xmas?
Is Apple responsible for RIM’s mismanagement?
Is Apple responsible for Nokia’s mismanagement?
Is Apple responsible for WP7 development problems?
The answer to each and every one of these is a resounding no. Therefore Apple has been very, very lucky.
Next Xmas Apple won’t have any of these misadventures to capitalise on.
You’re lucky if you win the lottery. No lottery winner has ever had almost 100 billion in the bank.
Actually, you could make a case that Apple’s influence had an impact on each one of those line items. So, the answer isn’t a “resounding no”. Apple has clearly disrupted the market all around causing problems for many companies trying to get a bite of those profits.
A resounding yes to that one, since Apple were the ones to start the damned legal battles in the first place rather than actually compete with their products. No lawsuits, no bad judgements. I agree with you that Apple’s not to blame for the other events in your posts, but they’re sure as hell responsible for the Samsung judgements. I’d say that both Apple and the moronic judges the courts used have an equal share in blame for that mess.
More or less. Do you think WebOS would have been a complete failure in the absence of the iPad? It was a good product, just too late, too little.
Of course! They started the lawsuits!
Why does this matter? It matters because ICS was needed to compete with Apple. If there was no Apple, people would be happy with previous versions of Android.
So is it luck that Apple had fewer management and development problems? No of course not. They are apparently well managed, and have their development sorted out. Turning it around and claiming that because the other players are not as good means they are lucky is crazy.
Funny how they have had this luck for a very long time now. They must have some kind of rabbit’s foot.
Despite his size the basketball player Dennis Rodman led the league in rebounds for seven years straight. But I think he was just very lucky to be standing where the ball fell and the other hundreds of NBA players just were unlucky… for seven years in a row.
In any team sport success depends on the skill of colleagues and the strength of opponents. Much of Rodman’s success can be credited directly to his team mates.
Which included 3 different teams in that 7 year span, so he was on a very lucky streak regarding both rebounds and team mates.
1st off, it’s laughable that osnews has one article called “Why People Troll and How to Stop Them” and a second news item called “Apple Reports Bizarre First Quarter Results” visible on the home page at the same time. Thom may want to talk to Howard. BTW that’s a blog statement, not ‘news’.
Secondly, yep, Rodman got lucky just like Jordan. Think about the odds of the basket always moving itself into position at the end of his shots and other players just letting him shoot or go to the hoop! What luck as well!
As for ‘bizarre’ first quarter – take the sales, multiple by how much they sell items for, subtract expenses, and you’ll find it’s not bizarre at all. Or is it supposed to be bizarre that people like it better than the second rate Android knockoffs, RIM misfires, and Win7 Phone strange ‘make you scroll horizontally‘ mess?
Apple just released an excellent phone, and almost a year into its lifecycle the iPad2 is still extremely competitive hardware, and iOS is generally nicer to use than the competition. Assuming the iPad3 shows up with faster GPU, CPU and retina display, will it be bizarre if that sells well too?
A world full of luck and bizarreness. (???)
You do realise bizarre doesn’t mean negative, right? I’m just expressing the results are bizarre – which they are, with it being one of the best quarters of all time of any company.
I think it’s just your turn of phrase that’s a bit odd. If I say ‘Thom is a bit of a bizarre guy’ that would always be takes as some sort of slight against you (in the US at least).
Dude, honestly, one to two quarters is luck, this is fucking execution genius (and yep the lawsuits are part of that).
That said, I personally have no doubt that Android will maintain and possibly even grow in dominance (unless Microsoft makes a dent in it).
Apple is just never going to be able to compete across the market spectrum because that’s just not their MO (and as a shareholder I am totally cool with that).
Henry Ford managed 20 years of spectacular growth that made Apple look like underperforming amateurs in comparison. By the late 1920s Ford suddenly found itself overtaken by General Motors and on the verge of bankruptcy.
Yes, most businesses grow and shrink and most eventually fail because they could not adapt. I don’t see why we should associate your observations on infant automobile industry of a century ago to the current small consumer electronics market/competition?
Is there any evidence anywhere in Apple’s actual results that supports the statement “Apple is just never going to be able to compete across the market spectrum”?
They were lucky Christmas arrived?
I don’t want to claim any inside knowledge, but I’m pretty sure they saw that coming.
That made me laugh so much! Luck!
You actually think a company can double its turnover several years running based on luck? That a company can go from 6 billion in profits per quarter to 12 billion per quarterin a year based on luck? How did luck form any part of the iOS, iPhone, iPad, App Store, retail store ecosystem initiatives?
And then to top of the ridiculous statement about luck with the fantasmagorical resurrection of the age old ‘Apple is Doomed’ meme is really taking idiocy into a whole new realm. Seek help.
It almost seems as though it could be the combination of vision, execution, and focus on usability, ecosystem integration, and fit & finish applied over the past decade+.
Since some people are apparently confusing the above with luck, luck is defined as: “success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions”
That’s a pretty difficult position to back when a company gets ‘lucky’ over that period of time with a number of often industry shaking new products. An iPod was just a more expensive media player, iPhone was Apple getting into a space they “don’t understand”, and the iPad was going to fail like all tablets before it. Oh, and the Mac line has died too.
Bizarre? Bizarre? Hahaha! That’s hilarious. What if you find nothing bizarre about this data at all?
Christmas are always good season to buy presents. Kids are more likely to manage expensive presents from parents. Adults are more likely to “award” them-self or their family. PR/ads are in full blossom.
So we have good Apple results (and yes they exploit opportunities very good).
But so we have good Android results ALSO grow in absolute unites.
So yes Apple did good. But deciding solely on their sales if iOS is overtaking Android is silly at best.
In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus
Much of the recent success of Apple is due to the fact they have very little serious competition for most of the last decade. It can’t be hard to make money when nearly all your opponents including Sony, HP, Dell, MS, Motorola, RIM and Nokia are unfocused and performing badly.
When Apple faced very serious competition in the past it was much less successful.
It can’t be hard to make money when nearly all your opponents including Sony, HP, Dell, MS, Motorola, RIM and Nokia are unfocused and performing badly.
So, how many billions did you earned? It is not hard, isn’t it?
Exactly my sentiment. Apple’s success is due to their business prowess. Having great products, combining it with good marketing and operational excellence. Easy to fanthom, hard to master…
What a deeply silly thing to say. The tech industry, and the exploding market for digital devices in particular, is one of the most intensely completive products sectors.
Why, when Apple just had not just the best quarterly results in the tech industry but the second best quarterly results in American corporate history, so do some people twist themselves into ludicrous knots to try to explain it all away as having nothing to do with Apple actually doing anything clever or innovative or well executed? Why pretend that doing such as thing is easy when it it is actually impossibly hard? Why begrudge Apple’s success? It seems such an obtuse and pointless thing to do.
This is just so incredibly ironic coming from you I don’t know what to say.
You’re still right though. Wonder why you don’t extend the same courtesy to companies other than Apple, but alas.
I don’t begrudge the success of other companies – I just argue for clarity and honesty about their business strategies, goals and models. And the impact of those business strategies, goals and models.
I have agued that when it comes to devices that compete with Apple devices Samsung took the deliberate approach of copying Apple designs, sometimes very closely. One may or may not think that is good or bad, ethical or unethical, good for the industry, the consumer or innovation or not. One may think Apple deserves it, that Apple in turn copied the design of others. But what is mendacious is to pretend it’s not happening.
Similarly one may think that Google’s free offerings are great or not, that Google is a force for good or not. One may think that Google deserves every penny of what it makes (which I do as it happens) but to pretend that, for example, Google it is not at the moment promoting it’s own services by artificially altering search results in a way that reduces the usefulness of it’s search for most users and that that is a bad thing for most people, is mendacious .
I personally I very much like Apple’s business strategies, goals and models because it is founded upon the concept of making a few great products, because as a company it tries to excel in product design, innovation, customer service and opening the power of technology through ease of use to the maximum number of people and that that is a very good set of principals for what is arguably the biggest and most influential tech company to pursue. So I defend that business model and those business practices. Someone has to
Paraphrasing (because you probably didn’t quite realize what you wrote):
you defend & like business strategies, goals and models of an entity which openly aims to neglect billions of “lesser people”* around the world (openly states targeting them is not part of its goals) and at the same time strives to limit any supposed innovation (yeah, we can easily assume this, which you wrote yourself, and carry it further, for the sake of argument) that it brings from reaching those billions via other paths (other entities).
An entity which doesn’t want to license it, or anything – but outright block (again, it stated this openly numerous times regarding its supposed IP).
Which aims to prevent real levels of this supposed innovation from reaching the world (and not just “maximum number of premium people”, some few %, unaware how much random their position is).
Really classy. And telling.
(*those who actually really work their asses off so that you can ignore them in comfort; every person in western world effectively has few slaves, we basically just outsource it for a long time now)
Maybe the begrudging has to do with Thom’s tablet prediction that just became a lot less likely scenario:
http://www.osnews.com/thread?485573“