jhart376

Readers of these results need to stop living in the past. Microsoft is not the arch enemy/competitor of Apple anymore. Google is. The Surface is really a Microsoft PC competing against other PCs like Lenovo Yoga, etc. Their big wins are in cloud computing where Apple does not really play. They still have a huge, but declining legacy OS revenue stream and Office still does well. The interesting business-market story is how far it can go in corporate desktop share leveraging its relationship and data from IBM rollouts (and new partnerships with Deloitte, SAP, etc).

Once CEO Tim Cook starts commenting, he won't be able to stop. Apple said it won't comment on the sales so if he starts tweeting, then there goes the plan. And what if sales are down and someone says they are strong, does he have to correct them to prevent misinformation. Which analysts sales estimates should he choose to correct? They have chosen to focus on developing products and full disclosure happens quarterly. This is what most companies do. While Steve Jobs was CEO, they didn't even give projections for the upcoming quarter, which they do now.

As for copying the dual camera, I believe the advantage of integrated software/hardware keeps on tipping in Apple's favour.  They have a massive team working on photography and it is not just sticking 2 cameras in a phone - it is custom image processing chips that integrate with features in iOS.  So really Google has to really ramp up integration with their OEMs to just try to catch up on the experience and most of them won't want to standardize on the two cameras, etc.   Samsung likely has the ability to copy with their custom software and scale but it won't be as seamless as Apple and by then Apple will be on version 2.