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Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results

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Re: Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results

#161

Post by matwood »

byEngineer wrote: post #57
jacquesm wrote: post #18

Samsung will do their earnings announcements on the 29th, it will be interesting to compare those two side-by-side. Apple is doing extremely well on the margins but they have actually lost ground when going by the numbers (~30% market share now vs ~70% android).

Samsung have been loosing money on their smartphones divisions, haven't they? I went iPhone -> Android -> iPhone For the same reasons I can't imagine myself using Windows again, I can't see myself using android in the near future.

Same here. The larger iPhone got me to switch back. After using Android for the past 2 years, I had forgotten just how polished the iPhone is along with all the apps on the phone.

Admittedly if Google had released a Nexus 5+ at the same $350 price I probably would have stuck with Android. No way I was going to pay a premium price for any of the Android phones I looked at though.

Re: Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results

#162

Post by MBCook »

IBM wrote: post #81
colinbartlett wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do Apple investors care at all about market share if the lion's share of profits are going to them?

I don't know about investors, but Apple clearly doesn't care about market share or they'd be selling under $100 iPhones.

Or the mythical $300 laptop that they had to make or the company would fold for... like a decade now.

Re: Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results

#164

Post by MBCook »

super_sloth wrote: post #99
puranjay wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's lack of oversight in the Play store (which is actually a core philosophy) is really holding back Android. There are countless really, really crappy apps and clones crowding the app store. Plus, since most people pirate, developers can't make money (Monument Valley saw around 95% piracy rate and just $250k in revenue from Android, vs. $5.5M from iOS). This sunk Windows Mobile, which I still believe has the be…

The problem with the Monument Valley numbers is that they expected a hit game on iOS would magically translate in to a hit game on Android and that's really not the case. The two stores are completely separate, your popularity on either will not help you on the latter unless you're bringing a big marketing budget with you or have something truly unique and viral. There are plenty of popular Android games that have vi…

> expected a hit game on iOS would magically translate in to a hit game on Android and that's really not the case.

Why not? Shouldn't a good game sell well on any platform?

> The two stores are completely separate, your popularity on either will not help you on the latter unless you're bringing a big marketing budget with you or have something truly unique and viral.

Perhaps it won't sell as well on Android in relative numbers (attach rate to total devices), but it is a truly unique game that many people talked about.

> There are plenty of popular Android games that have virtually no player base on iOS.

Honestly I would LOVE a list of a few (emulators/clones don't count). With the exception of that AR game that Google made I have never heard of a mobile game (from friends, game sites, etc.) that wasn't available on iOS.

I genuinely don't know of any, but I've wondered about this quite a bit.

Re: Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results

#165

Post by MBCook »

umsm wrote: post #31
pdknsk wrote: post #19

It shows that margin on Apple products is too high. This leaves plenty of room for some company to come into the market and steal their customers. That it hasn't happened shows the strength of Apple. They make products people will pay premium for.

Their costs are controlled at the scale at which they operate at. A competitor may be able to offer something similar, but without the scale, their prices will likely be equal to or greater than apple's.

That's been kicking people for years. Only Apple could make the iPod Mini because they bought the entire production of the little CF sized hard-drives. A few years ago Apple bought a huge chunk of the available Flash production capacity.

Then you get the crazy things where Apple can afford to make special machines to blend the glass and aluminum on their devices or laser-cut holes in the laptops because they're operating at a scale where they can make that work out. No upstart brand could EVER do that.

Re: Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results

#166

Post by slantyyz »

MBCook wrote: post #145
adl wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question, what makes Apple laptops beat the rest of the industry? No docking station, can't change batteries, no touch screens, no spill resistant keyboards, no matte screen option,etc. You also need those dongles for ethernet and video and can't upgrade RAM or hard drives on the retina models. Sure, the OS (if you need/like OSX, there is little choice), and the trackpad (if you like that those) are good, the…

No docking station - Don't really need one. Thunderbolt can handle most everything, and then you just have power. In my experience most people I see use a laptop only use power and maybe a wireless mouse receiver and a monitor. I don't see many people plugging 12 things in. Batteries - Macs get phenomenal battery life, it's not an issue for most people. Much like iPhones there is an argument for swappable batteries b…

>> In general Apple's laptops are just well built and feel solid. Some PCs are like that, many aren't due to cost. If I'm going to use a machine every day for 4 years I want to know it's well built and holds up well.

Be glad you're not like me and are stuck with a lemon like the 2011 Macbook Pro. It's a well built (chassis-wise, at least) and solid brick with a well known design defect that Apple refuses to acknowledge exists.

I have since left Apple, mainly the unibody Macbook Pros that I love so much have been discontinued in favor of models with soldered on RAM, expensive to replace SSDs. I'm not a fan of how Apple is "closing up" the expandability of their hardware.

With the current Macbooks, I wouldn't have been able to upgrade from 4GB to 8GB to 16GB of RAM as the prices came down (and without paying Apple's exorbitant prices for RAM), or upgrade their hard drive to a hybrid drive, and to growing sizes of SSDs as the prices came down. Damn, I miss those unibodies.

Re: Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results

#167

Post by MBCook »

mcphage wrote: post #135
robryan wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally it seems like ipads have a longer lifespan than a phone as well. Those with an ipad 1 will probably have to upgrade and those with a 2 might want to for the retina display. The 3 though have been out for nearly 3 years and is still fine. Whereas someone who bought a phone at the same time may have already upgraded.

I've got a 3, and want to upgrade, but... it's not super urgent. I use my iPad pretty often, but the iPad 3 has the feature I care about most (retina screen), and there haven't been many major changes since.

I've got a 3 but there is nothing wrong with it. The Air 2 is thinner and MUCH lighter, but enough to spend $500+?

If they release a new version with some really big new feature like real stylus support for drawing they might get me, but as it is my iPad 3 works very well and I see no actual need to upgrade.

Re: Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results

#168

Post by Mistake_not »

ykl wrote: post #9

Sometimes just to wrap my head around really large numbers like this, I like to put things in units of aircraft carriers. The US Navy's last finished carrier cost $6.2 billion[1], meaning that $74.6 billion[2] is enough to buy Apple 12 nuclear carriers, a.k.a. a nuclear carrier fleet larger than that of the US Navy. Of course this is an inaccurate and very silly comparison[3], but at least for me it does give some se…

I apologize, I'm going to do that crass thing about high-jacking the top response.

>Mistake Not My Current State Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My Vast Oceans Of Wrath

That's the name, but it didn't fit (oh, and Elron loves the Culture, he's actually a SC agent, but I digress).

Apple has currently ~$170 billion in cash / structured investments through its hedge fund.

This says three things:

1) Apple is very successful

2) Apple has massive tax issues it's trying to dodge

3) Apple has no clue what to do with itself beyond making toys

4) It now has a >>cashUnless you're going to pull a Bond Movie[1], there's only one rational outcome to this:

When the bubble is that big, and you can't even invest your profits / shareholder dividends / know what to do with it:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell And the profit and loss.

A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool.

Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Apple won the battle of the 20th Century tech fashion: it lost the war in that it didn't know how to evolve. And no, darlings, a shiny building doesn't count.

Capitalism, literally, forgot how to invest: even Google threw $10 to Musk. Apple has... done nothing with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEJ8lpCQbyw

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonraker_%28film%29

Re: Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results

#169

Post by zak_mc_kracken »

sigzero wrote: post #142
zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite impression. Regardless of the bug aspect, I find that Windows 8 looks much more advanced, polished and sophisticated than Mac OS, which has been stagnating for several years now and is still riddled with mindboggling inconsistencies (e.g. why can I rename a file in the Finder but not in an open file dialog, which looks exactly like a Finder?).

The open file dialog is exactly that to "open" a file. I find the fact that you can do that on Windows stupid and inconsistent.

You find it normal that two windows that look exactly the same don't behave the same way depending on how they were invoked?

This violates a concept at the core of basic GUI design called "The principle of least surprise".

I regularly want to do file operations when I open file dialogs, like noticing some garbage file I forgot to delete or wanting to rename things. Having to launch a separate Finder just to do that on Mac OS is a constant reminder how it's an operating system stuck in the early 2000s.

Re: Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results

#170

Post by TaylorAlexander »

MaysonL wrote: post #152
ykl wrote: post #9

Sometimes just to wrap my head around really large numbers like this, I like to put things in units of aircraft carriers. The US Navy's last finished carrier cost $6.2 billion[1], meaning that $74.6 billion[2] is enough to buy Apple 12 nuclear carriers, a.k.a. a nuclear carrier fleet larger than that of the US Navy. Of course this is an inaccurate and very silly comparison[3], but at least for me it does give some se…

Just think of it as 9.4 iPhones per second.

Or to flip it around, an iPhone every 106 milliSeconds.
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