Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple reports fourth quarter results

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 324 posts

Re: Apple reports fourth quarter results

#61

Post by FredPret »

aauchter wrote: post #58
FredPret wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate income tax is one of those ideas that are immensely popular politically ("someone who is not me will pay billions to benefit me? yay!") but not supported by economic theory or real economic outcomes. Rent control / other price controls is another one ("No more rent increases for me, yay!"). Personal income taxes are a better choice according to [0] and that makes sense if you think about it. Let companies g…

Correct. Corporate income tax is really a tax on shareholders (alternative to paying tax is paying shareholders a dividend). The corporate tax rate hits all owners regardless of income/wealth. That includes pension funds, 401ks, small investors, etc. Proponents of progressive taxes should be against corporate tax and in favor of income tax, property tax, etc.

It also takes money away from the corporation, when they should be doing one of these:

- spend their profits to try and grow, but fail; thus spreading their capital into the rest of the economy

- spend their profits to try and grow, and succeed; not only spreading capital but creating new wealth that will eventually work its way around to the shareholders

- return it to shareholders, where it gets taxed

Re: Apple reports fourth quarter results

#62

Post by maximus_01 »

smt88 wrote: post #54
alsetmusic wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Make products people want and they buy, ignore them, and they don't. What does this even mean? When I went to my local Apple Store to see the iPhone air in person (to decide if it was right for me, which it was), they had a line out the door for people who wanted to buy new phones. Their Mac business is very healthy since introducing their own silicon. Everyone in the Bay Area (skewed, I know) has AirPods on the tr…

AirPods are certainly super popular, but I can't think of many places that are extreme outliers in almost every category like the Bay Area. A lot of startups have failed assuming their business that worked for Bay Area customers would work elsewhere.

This is true but airpods is a bad example. They are a runaway success. Estimates are they did around $25bn of revenue in the last year. For context the highest annual revenue Bose ever did was $4bn (since declined). Sonos does something like $1.5bn. If Airpods was a standalone company it would be one of the biggest consumer hardware companies in the world.

Re: Apple reports fourth quarter results

#63

Post by wingspar »

madeofpalk wrote: post #43
haunter wrote: post #11

Kind of telling that 1, the iPhone outsells every other category by 5-7x ratio, and the Mac (which includes everything from Macbooks to Mac Minis to iMacs) barely sells more than the iPad. 2, Services (iCloud, apps, music, TV shows etc.) now bigger than every other category, except the iPhone, combined Basically 76% of the sales are iPhones and Services (millions) iPhone $209,586 Mac $33,708 iPad $28,023 Wearables, H…

> Services (iCloud, apps, music, TV shows etc.) now bigger than every other category, except the iPhone, combined This is reputation laundering. 'Services revenue' is undoubtably App Store game microtransactions, bigger than all other services categories combined.

My understanding is Services includes the billions Google pays for Safari search default, reported to be $20 billion a year.

Re: Apple reports fourth quarter results

#64

Post by lotsofpulp »

FredPret wrote: post #49
lapcat wrote: post #2

This stuck out like a sore thumb to me: Q4 2024: Income before provision for income taxes $29.610 billion, Provision for income taxes $14.874 billion Q4 2025: Income before provision for income taxes $32.804 billion, Provision for income taxes $5.338 billion [EDIT:] The 2024 taxes were actually an aberration. "the one-time charge recognized during the fourth quarter of 2024 related to the impact of the reversal of th…

Corporate income tax is one of those ideas that are immensely popular politically ("someone who is not me will pay billions to benefit me? yay!") but not supported by economic theory or real economic outcomes. Rent control / other price controls is another one ("No more rent increases for me, yay!"). Personal income taxes are a better choice according to [0] and that makes sense if you think about it. Let companies g…

Earned income tax makes no sense, it targets the young and hard working, and work should be maximally rewarded. Land value tax is what makes sense, targeting rent seekers and the wealthy. Also consumption taxes, if one is concerned about things like the environment or substance abuse.

Land value tax is a consumption tax too, since defending and servicing and routing around one’s occupied surface area of the earth is very costly for the rest of society.

Re: Apple reports fourth quarter results

#65

Post by jeffbee »

ghaff wrote: post #56
MrGilbert wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We keep hearing that the next generation is "true computer" illiterate. We had that development with cars. 40 years ago, it was common to fix your own car. Nowadays, we have a subscription for seat warmers. The manual tells you to visit the dealer to get your brakes checked. Makes me sad, somehow. But people have choosen this path as a collective.

People choose what to outsource and, as cars have become more complicated and require more diagnostic equipment, they go to a dealer/mechanic. Personally, I've never done a lot of personal car mechanic work. On the other hand, I've done my own cooking more than not. You make choices about what you do yourself and what you have others do for you.

Cars are both more complicated and way more reliable. You used to spend a Sunday changing your plugs and points. Now your car lacks points and if the plugs last less than 100000km it's a disappointment. You used to need new clutch plates on the regular, now nobody ever needs them or if they do need them the car is a total loss because good luck getting to the clutches. On my current car the closest I ever came to working on it was replacing the wiper blades.

Re: Apple reports fourth quarter results

#66

Post by larkost »

reaperducer wrote: post #51
andy_ppp wrote: post #44

Apple could substantially eat into Nvidia’s AI lunch if they really tried, honestly Macs are fast enough… my guess is by the time M6 is coming out they will have external GPUs available for both the data centre and home use. If I was them I’d already be taking orders, power requirements alone even if they aren’t as fast 2 nodes ahead would make their offering sensational.

by the time M6 is coming out they will have external GPUs available for both the data centre and home use. I thought there were already external GPUs for Macs. Since before COVID, IIRC.

There were eGPUs for Macs, but only the Intel ones. To my knowledge there are no drivers for eGPUs for Apple Silicon. My guess is that without Apple's involvement it would be near-impossible to get graphics accelerators working.

In theory you could make things work for some sort of computational acceleration (e.g.: AI, or some OpenCL work), but I am not sure that that market is really worth all of the work it would take. For those sorts of things it is probably a lot easier to setup an external (Linux) box, and send the work over.

Re: Apple reports fourth quarter results

#68

Post by willtemperley »

827a wrote: post #35
haunter wrote: post #11

Kind of telling that 1, the iPhone outsells every other category by 5-7x ratio, and the Mac (which includes everything from Macbooks to Mac Minis to iMacs) barely sells more than the iPad. 2, Services (iCloud, apps, music, TV shows etc.) now bigger than every other category, except the iPhone, combined Basically 76% of the sales are iPhones and Services (millions) iPhone $209,586 Mac $33,708 iPad $28,023 Wearables, H…

> Next 5 years or so (or even less) both the iPad and the Wearables, Home and Accessories category will overtake the sales of Macs. Are we reading the same quarterly report? Wearables/Home/Accessories is slightly higher than the Mac, yes, but its a category that has been trending poorly for Apple for ~18 months now IIRC, and that hasn't gotten better this quarter (9.04B->9.01B 3mo YoY). There's no foreseeable future…

I wonder how much the Windows 11 debacle will increase Mac sales by.

Re: Apple reports fourth quarter results

#70

Post by tsimionescu »

haunter wrote: post #11

Kind of telling that 1, the iPhone outsells every other category by 5-7x ratio, and the Mac (which includes everything from Macbooks to Mac Minis to iMacs) barely sells more than the iPad. 2, Services (iCloud, apps, music, TV shows etc.) now bigger than every other category, except the iPhone, combined Basically 76% of the sales are iPhones and Services (millions) iPhone $209,586 Mac $33,708 iPad $28,023 Wearables, H…

> Next 5 years or so (or even less) both the iPad and the Wearables, Home and Accessories category will overtake the sales of Macs.

I view this the exact opposite way. The death of the laptop in favor of tablets has been touted for about a decade now, and it has still failed to materialize. Wearables have even surpassed the iPad.

Not to mention, the Mac laptops have seen a recent surge of popularity last few years, due to still being the only realistic ARM-based laptop, with the battery life / weight vs performance you get from this. This is still likely to remain the reality for at least a few years, and thus they're likely to snowball even more based on this reputation.

Post reply on HN