jony0

chasm said:

Every single one of these figures are guesses, not actual facts. I’m sure iPhone sales were down a fair amount, but judging from the actual results it can’t logically be as much as Omdia (whoever the hell they are) and Strategy Guessers (check their track record) make out. I doubt the drop was as bad as the rest of the industry suffered. That’s the real story here.

Exactly. And AGAIN we have these nitwits and their useless Unit Sales crap. I thought we were finally over this when Apple, the last standout, finally ceased to release units sold. It only has meaning in a commodity market, like the Android market by itself. It is meaningless comparing different platforms when one of them has almost an order of magnitude better margins and profit share. I don't understand Wall $treet's incessant obsession on unit sales when they are usually all about money.
For years W$ has always been concerned about the iPhone's all too prominent share in Apple's revenues. Yet now that Apple managed to diversify and be less reliant on iPhone and still have a record quarter in difficult circumstances, they're concerned that the iPhone is less prominent. Just as they always singled out one or more product's unit sales number they didn't like to downgrade the stock, they'll always find something else, even if it satisfies one of their past grievances. Go figure. 

GeorgeBMac said:

boxcatcher said:

Probably mean Q1, seeing as we’re *in* Q2

The difference may be reporting fiscal versus calendar quarters.

To Apple's accountants the "First Quarter" ended December 28th, 2019 and, as of today, they are in their 3rd quarter..

It always made me wonder if an accountant felt they could make up their own calendar would they also believe they could make up their own numbers.   That isn't to single out Apple because many/most companies do the same.   But, personally, I prefer reality -- particularly in accounting.

I'm not an accountant but I think you can choose whenever you want. I also think most would probably set it to when they start the company or after a merger or acquisition ro realign a common start date. I consulted for a company for a dozen years and lived through 3 different fiscal year dates, a pain in the ass writing yearly reports. Our family business was a ski resort and it made a lot more sense to have the fiscal year start in July and have the same ski season as a whole in the same fiscal year, particularly for season pass revenue and other stuff. There must be many other use cases for picking a fiscal starting point.

gatorguy said:

The only way it could have any chance at all for success is for both the Apple and Google teams to work together on a unified code-sharing solution. It won't matter if someone is carrying an Android or iOS smartphone, the owner would be notified of a potential exposure from users of either OS. Kudos to them both. 

Indeed a platform agnostic implementation is the only viable solution. Although I am not privy to the cooperation methodology, I doubt very much there would be any code-sharing whatsoever. I rather would imagine that both projects came to some common agreement to develop respective tweaks to produce a protocol-sharing solution to be implemented on the phones and servers. Such a protocol could also presumably be implemented in other Chinese forks of Android.

jdb8167 said:

>It wasn't until 1983 and the Apple IIe that it shipped with the ability to show lowercase too.

Accurate but there lots of third-party 80-column terminal cards that allowed upper and lower case that were available before the IIe in 1983. They generally went into slot #3 and were kind of standardized. Doing a brief search, it looks like the availability started around 1980.

Indeed, I bought a third-party 80-column terminal card around 82-83, it was required to be able to use Pascal at the time.

eriamjh said:

Don’t forget that Steve wanted to call it something else.   Something awful.   

Yeah, pretty awful, IIRC I think it was MacMan, a take on the Walkman for its portability and perhaps a nudge to the popular game of the time Pacman with some sonic semblance. Thank you Ken Segall.