Apple profits soar 70% on record sales of 14.1M iPhones, 3.89M Macs - Page 3

You got it. Commentators? Analysts? Why would they matter? All they do is try to generate content that makes dummy fanboys pay them with ad clicks or for stock tips.

Great insight, Spam.

Jesus, OBVIOUSLY that's true. What I'm saying is that it matters ZERO whether Apple is bigger or smaller than MS. It does matter that it's BIG, but whether its REVENUE is higher or lower than MS, no, it doesn't matter. Seriously, open your eyes and READ. Stop changing the debate to something obvious and then claiming that I'm denying it. I'm not saying revenue doesn't matter, I'm saying as a financial matter, the comparison between MS and Apple is for idiots.

Yeah, the WSJ is full of fanboys. Do you think Microsoft doesn't see Apple as a competitor? I think Microsoft does. Every time Apple releases a product Ballmer chimes in. Here's one:

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/07/...he-transcript/

Does Ballmer do that when Wal-Mart makes the news? Or does Apple make an OS that competes with Windows?

Heh! People who don't have it always say that.

Come to think of it, people who DO have it, and don't want to give any of it away also say it.

Which are you?

They matter. If they didn't, companies and major investors wouldn't be paying thousands for their reports. They also wouldn't be listening.

Don't get me wrong. I keep my own counsel. But what they do is much more than what they release to the public.

Of course they see them as a competitor. But they don't care if Apple has more or less revenue than them. Apple sells hardware, Microsoft sells things that they can make 100,000,000 of for the same cost as it costs them to make 10. Don't worry about it.

It's nice that you take a part of what I say, agree, and forget about all the rest. This was just part of the point. The point is I say you're wrong, as i said before; you don't think that Apple and MS are direct competitors. You've said they aren't. That's simply incorrect.

So they compete but Microsoft doesn't care if Apple has more revenue or not? Does that make any sense to you? It sure doesn't to me. And since you admit they compete, your earlier comparison to Wal-Mart is bunk too, isn't it.

And when Apple prevents them from selling that 100 million? What then? You forget when Ballmer said that the iPhone didn't matter because they would rather license 70% of the phone OS market than sell a few million phones?

Apple took any possibility of that away from them. He acknowledged the other day that Apple, Google and others were "great competitors". Competitors to whom? You say, surely not MS? I say, surely yes, MS.

What about their music software and DRM, "Plays for Sure"? Apple killed that. That wasn't competition? It sure was. That's why MS went into even more dirct competition with the failed Zune.

If you don't think that MS sees Apple as one of their greatest competitors, think again.

So while I'm happy that you now do say that they do compete, it's really a major competition.

And the bigger Apple gets, and the more profitable, the less influence MS will have, because all of these sales will be directly impacting MS's business, which is licensing software.

MS hasn't been happy about netbooks, because they were only getting $15 per XP Starter license per unit. Now they get almost $30 for Win 7. But that's still less than the $40 to $75 they get for other versions. MS would just like the see netbooks go away.

But when Apple sells tablets, and netbook sales suffer as a result, that makes MS cringe, because people aren't buying notebooks instead of netbooks, they're buying an Apple iOS product instead. You think that's not competition?

I don't think your statements make sense. The other hardware makers aren't Apple's real competition, it's MS. And Apple is MS's competition, because they take sales away from them.

Both Hp and Dell have expresses interest over the years in producing computers with OS X. Some day, that could still happen. But I can't see MS selling it.

It's not just about the EPS or revenue numbers.

There are a couple of troublesome items of news for the market: substantially lower operating margins (37% v. 41%), lower-than-forecasted iPod (9M v. 10M) and iPad (4+M v. 5M) sales, and 57% of revenues from abroad (a sizable portion of that is driven by the dramatic depreciation of the dollar in the past quarter). It's very tough to continue to execute at this level, let alone better -- it's like an elastic band that is stretched very thin.

The post-announcement drop is therefore not surprising. But it's probably overdone (and by 9.30 AM EST tomorrow, it'll probably have recouped some of it).*



*If we forecast a forward P/E of 16 (higher than the long run average for US stocks) and an EPS of $19 for 2010-11, the price would be 19*16 = $304, which is just a little higher than where it is now after-hours.

Nice to know we're back in familiar territory again:

http://forums.appleinsider.com/showp...8&postcount=50

While I was surprised at the iPad numbers; I thought they would be above 4.5 million, the rest was pretty good. I wasn't disappointed at the iPod numbers, because everyone knew that Apple was coming out with new ones in September. And what happens when Apple does that? The numbers drop. So, no biggie to me. Many investors seem to be deers in the headlights though.

As far as the margins went, well they were still notably higher than Apple's guidance. Apple said that iPads have lower margins. they said that 6 months ago, and reiterated it at the last conference, so people should have understood that now, but of course, they didn't.

At the conference, Jobs, in a rare appearance, said that they wanted to "own" the tablet market, and so they priced aggressively. Hey! Isn't this what people here are always grumbling about? Isn't it what investors grumble about? Lower price, get marketshare.

I believe that Jobs thinks that the "desktop wars" aren't over after all, and that the tablet, and perhaps the new Macbook Air, if what we're hearing is correct, will help Apple to come close, maybe pull even, and possibly, down the road, win. 36.5% is still a pretty good number. I remember when analysts wanted it to go from 28 to 32%!

And 14.1 million iPhones was over the top. Like, for real!

3.9 million Macs was a new record as well.

Geeze, $20.4 billion in sales and over $4 billion in profit wasn't enough for them? Give me a break!

Do people understand what this means for next year? I don't think so.

And I can't see Apple relinquishing control over their OS to those junkvendors. Their one and only goal is to build it cheap. Nothing else really matters.

OS X runs blazingly fast on an HP, but as long as their future is tied to MS, their growth potential is limited to convincing the market their printer ink is worth its excessive price:


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/te...19hewlett.html

It's not that simple anymore. When Apple was Still Apple Computer, and had little other in major businesses, they tried it once, when sales were dropping. The main problem is that it wasn't done well. but Apple was at a disadvantage. The idea of clones was to increase sales and marketshare when it was shrinking, and fewer people wanted Macs.

The story is considerably different now. It's no longer Apple computer, it's just Apple. They have several major product categories that outshine their computer business, which is still growing very well.

But the point is that as these other businesses grow faster than the computer business, Apple may look around and decide that it's much more profitable to license the OS. If the computer business gets down to 20% of the total sales, they may believe that licensing out the OS under strict conditions would be worth losing 25% of their computer hardware sales.

Now that their OS is worth a lot to other companies, Apple would be able to set the rules. how many people, and businesses would be willing to buy a legally obtainable "hackintosh from Dell or Hp? I'll bet it would be a lot.

Don't forget that with all the areas in which MS is losing money big time, they still have a 78% gross margin. Adobe has over 90%. That's from licensing software. At one time, doing that would have made Apple a much smaller company, but not in a couple of years.

I'm not saying they would do it, of course, but I'll bet they have a plan for that, should there be an opportunity.

Yeah, I guess. But this result is actually more the exception than the rule. Last week GOOG beat the street by 15% and rose 10%. Good luck making sense of the markets on any given day.

It's always amazing how the stock drops after an earnings report. Yeah, so the iPad numbers were a little low - heck they're supposed to be. The iPad isn't established enough to be a back-to-school purchase yet. However, it's positioned to be a holiday hit, especially with it now being sold at Walmart, Target, Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sam's Club, RadioShack (not sure on that one), etc. Plus, with iOS 4.2 on it, they'll be able to advertise it as having the same features as the current iPhone and iPod Touch, along with the new printing features, AirPlay, and more.

Or... maybe it would. He'll never know. ...er, sorry.

A Donald Trump, who is what I would call one of the "faux rich", flaunts it. The very wealthy have no need to flaunt it.

Everyone knows the very wealthy are very wealthy. They don't have to flaunt it. but they do in their own way.

For some reason the BBC feel the need to knock Apple on these results!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11570631

Specifically :

"iPads flat
The after-hours selloff may also have been influenced by underwhelming sales of Apple's new tablet computer - the iPad, which came it at just 4.2 million.

That represents a rise of just 28% on the previous quarter, which was when the company first launched the new product."

Idiots!

What if Microsoft where a smaller company? Might they have been a little less cock sure of themselves and made a more cost effective product? From what I see the 360 is winning the console wars with the 10 and over crowd. But, if they were a smaller company, might they have contracted out the design of the mother board on the 360 that was causing the red ring of death? Looking back I can see many mistakes that they made but suffered very little consequence because of their size and cash position. Perhaps, if they were a smaller company, they might have followed the same road map but achieved it via a smarter routing.

I think that Apple's strength is that despite their size they maintain a focus and drive that is indicative of a much smaller, leaner company. If/when they lose that focus is when they risk becoming the next Sony. It's easy to forget that Apple has achieved great success with a relatively small, simple product portfolio. Using Apple as an example it can be demonstrated that people will pay a premium price for a good, well designed product. I would argue that if Apple were a smaller company without the ability to leverage the supply chain they still would be able to charge a premium price for their product and rapidly build a large cash cushion.

Those iPad numbers are very low. Just about 1.3 million a month. Quite bizzare.

However, there were more iPads sold in just 26 countries than Macs sold in the whole world.

I think Apple focused on iPhone 4 and just slamming the heck out of that. 5 million units a month, it will probably do 6 million a month this Oct-Dec quarter with more countries launching and demanding more stock for the holidays.

They are being cautious with iPad, not trying to roll out as aggressively as iPhone and gearing up for the long run. As I mentioned it's already bigger than Macs, no doubt about that going into 2011.

As for RIM, Steve is saying, "Let's officially say bye bye to RIM. iPhone is bigger than Blackberry, game over, it's just Android and us". And with even the most vocal WindowsPhone7 supporters placing WP7 behind Android, iOS and RIM at third or fourth place, 2011 is going to be iOS vs Android from the looks of it.

Of course, there are always surprises and Steve ain't the Oracle on all things. We shall see...

LOL. The real secret is that Apple could have made and sold twice that number of iPads. They're gearing up for the big race in 2011, which they are already ahead in anyways.

26 countries only. And bigger selling than the best selling Mac quarter.

That's all we need to know about the iPad for now.

Anyone that can't read between the numbers ain't going to see the big picture of what tablet computing is and going to become.

I wouldn't attempt to - leave that to the day traders. AAPL isn't off much from yesterday's close anyway, an insignificant change considering the overall market.

Agreed, on both points. It's far too easy to get worked up by what the markets do on any given day, even if you know better than to worry about (or celebrate) short-term swings. That's why I was disappointed when AI added the AAPL stock ticker to every page.

Apple may be positioned as a leader in mobile connectivity (or whatever you want to call it - the market is so new it defies classification), but I don't see that as a reason to neglect its computer market. It may represent a smaller component of total revenue, but that doesn't mean it's any less significant. It's growing at a healthy rate. Some 90% of the world's computers aren't Apple's, so the potential for growth is still enormous.

I'm all in favor of profitability. I don't care how Apple gets it. I hope they're considering all possible avenues for success, but I really don't see them forfeiting one iota of control over their user experience. This means complete monopolistic control over the hardware that runs OS X or iOS. It's been a key component of their success.

Of course this is just my opinion. I admit I'm biased, having had miserable experiences with HP and Dell's quality control and outright hostile customer service. OS X might run great on an HP, but that won't help when 1. the graphics chip overheats, 2. the display cable frays, 3. EFI shields bend and short out the motherboard, 4. the speakers fail, 5. status LEDs burn out, 6. the computer spends more time in repair than in actual use until 7. the warranty finally runs out... all problems I've had with HP and Dell junk.

Maybe it was the Apple stickers I put on 'em

The point I was trying to make there was the relative size between the companies, and also, noting which MS products made money, and which were supported by that money.

I mention the XBox, because so far, MS has lost about $8 billion on its entertainment division since the XBox first came out. This includes profits from game licensing and such. If MS didn't make so much money from its monopolies, it would never have been able to continue that losing line of products. The XBox has been a failure, if measured the way any normal product would be measured. No other company would have continued that product line after the first couple of years, where it lost MS at least $1.3 billion each year.

now, my point abut Apple and games vs MS. If Apple, with the iOS line, sells enough games, and those games cut into XBox games sales, as they're expected to do, then that directly impacts MS's pocketbook. If it does that enough, even MS may be forced to reconsider the product line. I'm not saying it will, but that it could.

MS is not a hardware manufacturer, or designer. It's likely they do some of the design of their mice and keyboards, but that's much simpler, and very different. They don't do their Zunes, or XBox.

A smaller company would have folded the entire operation long ago.

That wouldn't be neglecting that market at all. It would be expanding it at a rate that Apple can't do by themselves. We all seem to cry about Apple not building a mini tower. What if Apple allowed Hp and Dell to do so? Many business people I speak to say that they would be more interested in Macs if they had a $1,000 tower and a separate monitor, as they upgrade them on different schedules.

These days, Apple would be in much greater control of what would be allowed. I think it would work, even if they eventually got out of the market of regular computers altogether, and concentrated on touchscreen devices of all sorts.

As I say, this would be at least a couple of years out, possibly more, but it's possible.

I like repeating Jobs's statement when he was away from Apple, and Apple was in trouble. When he was asked what he would do if he were back in charge, he said:

"I would milk the Mac for all it was worth, and then go on to the next big thing."

I think that indicates he's open to any number of things, and we can see that Apple is certainly on to "the next big thing".

I think there's a lot more milk in that cow.

I'd hesitate to read too much into the statement. He said it a lifetime ago, with knowledge that the Mac as it then existed had a finite lifespan. They indeed became obsolete, but they were far cry from the Macs of today. These too will have a finite life, but if anything I think it will be coincident with the life cycle of what we conceive to be computers in general (his truck analogy).

He certainly hasn't waited for it to end before working on the "next big thing". Or things. Nor should he. If not for the iPod and its descendants the Mac would be a boutique product, more likely gone altogether. I'd speculate that Apple would spin off a more or less autonomous computer division before licensing its OS to run on competing hardware. That might not be a bad thing - with an emphasis on the enterprise market, who knows how far it could reach.

Oh, I don't think anyone can wait for the demise of their big product line before moving on to another one. But we can all see that he's expanded Apple well beyond what they used to be in products. While today, they showed that the Mac is 33% of their business, not long ago, like a year, it was almost 50%. It's shrinking.

With their other businesses growing much faster than their Mac business, I wouldn't be surprised if next year it might be 25%. The year after, less than 20%, and unless they meld the tablet and Mac lines, as they seem to be coming closer to doing, at some point, I think it would be viable for them to be considering what I said.

Sure, I understand the Mac's share of Apple's overall revenue is growing smaller, but that's an indication of the iPhone's and iPad's success.

Mac unit sales by fiscal year (in thousands):

2007: 7,051
2008: 9,715
2009: 10,396
2010: 13,660

By any measure... not shrinking

Apple's quarterly results for 2010 reported Mac unit sales increases of 33%, 33%, 33%, and 27% over the previous fiscal year's quarters. This is approximately double HP's growth for 2009. Dell, the previous market leader, experienced an 11% decline for the year.

The Wintel box makers would kill for this kind of growth.

The reason the Mac's overall revenue contribution went from 50% to 33% is easy to understand, given the fact the iPhone unit sales for those quarters grew 100%, 131%, 61%, and 91% respectively. Obviously the iPad's sales increases can't be calculated yet, but given its phenomenal success its growth could be even more impressive.

At that point, the Mac's total revenue contribution may be 20%; it might be 10%. Who cares, if they continue to grow at twice the rate of HP/Dell/Lenovo, or even close to it?

Why not? That appears to be MSFT's strategy

Ouch! Painful, but true.

The Mac's unit sales growth is approximately triple that of the PC boxmakers.

I haven't calculated the actual number, but given Apple generally enjoys greater margin on its computers, I would conclude the Mac's revenue growth is more than triple the PC's.

Apple: Mac sales could sustain a Fortune 500 company by itself


Those are impressive numbers.