charlesn

Key takeaways from this report:

1) The genius of Cook's leadership and vision in successfully guiding Apple to a place where it no longer lives or dies on the performance of iPhone. Phone sales were down over 11% in China and somewhat soft overall, and the stock went up 3%. Why? One word: Services.

2) Cook's Services Division continues its explosive growth: revenue up 15% for the quarter, YOY, to a stunning $26.34 billion for Q1. Did I mention this is a business with nearly 80% margins? With Services, Cook is about as close as legally possible to a business that prints money.  

3) Solid performance all around. The continued iterations and evolution across the product lines continue to drive robust sales.

4) Strong growth in iPad sales reveals stupidity of much tech commentary and rumors. "The new iPad Mini is a worthless upgrade!" "Nobody's buying the iPad Pros." Blah, blah blah. Turns out the Mini and Air were prime drivers of growth (no surprise, they're two key mainstream models) and you simply don't post this kind of revenue growth if your two most expensive, top-of-the-line models are tanking. Even better was that half of all iPad purchases were made by new buyers. 

Again (and again), you have to take any "data" reported by CIRP and other companies like it with a boulder-size grain of salt. Think of how ridiculous this is: with no hard sales data from Apple--which, even if they have spot checks at other retailers, means it is totally blind to whatever is sold in Apple stores or via Apple.com--CIRP is claiming that it can accurately track a 4% drop in demand for storage from one year to the next. They don't even claim a margin of error for their figures! No, they're perfect. And how can they possibly do this? Oh, that's a secret. Give me a break. 

Is it possible they're right? Sure. Even a broken clock tells precisely the right time twice a day. 

JamesCude said:

Tik-tok has zero inherent value. 

Wrong. The crown jewel of Tiktok is its secret and proprietary algorithm. How much is that worth? With the algorithm, TikTok's price tag has been pegged at numbers ranging from $100-200 BILLION. Minus the algorithm--and it's believed that the Chinese will refuse to give that up in a sale--the price for a U.S. buyer of Tiktok is estimated at $40-50 billion. 

This is why Vision Pro is such an important product for Apple and one of the best uses for the Everest-sized mountain of cash on which Apple is sitting. It may take a while, but it's a certainty that technology will evolve to give us some future "Vision Pro" in a smart glasses form factor. But that only solves the hardware part of the equation. You still need an OS that's capable of leveraging a vision driven computer and the smart glasses form factor in the most useful, creative and intelligent ways. You need an OS that will have worked out a lot of the potential problems. Or you just end up with another Google Glass. Or you end up like Meta, with over a decade and countless billions of dollars invested in headsets, without a single penny of profit ever to show for it. And I have no doubt that the smart glasses it drops in 2027 (or 2037, considering the Zuck's usual over optimism about delivery) will continue Meta's history of manufacturing loss leader hardware. The Vision Pro product will continue to be the ever-evolving real-time laboratory in which Apple works out its smart glasses. A mass market hit product was never the point of Vision Pro, nor does Apple need it to be that. With a user base of a half million and counting, Apple has the benefit of feedback and innovations from actual users that it never would have had without releasing VP 1.0. 

Samsung will be first to market with a slim phone in the form of its new S25 Galaxy Edge, scheduled for release in June. Here are the actual mockups on display at Samsung's recent S25 announcement showing the Edge in comparison to the other phones in the Galaxy lineup. Have a look for yourself here: DFKEbRus1WD

Thinner? Yes. Impressively so, in a "wow" kind of way? Not a chance. Worth the long list of compromises, battery life a likely chief amongst them, to cut a millimeter or so from the thickness of a phone? Certainly not for me. People seem to think this is going to be another "pull a laptop from an envelope" moment and it's not going to be that at all. This will be like seeing a familiar friend who just lost 5 pounds. Sorta, kinda noticeable, but hardly a game changer. That said, the hunger that's out there for something, anything new in an iPhone form factor might make this a success after all. 

Note to Macolm: comparisons to thickness of the new iPad Pro models are totally irrelevant as a guide to iPhone Slim. The square inches real estate of even the small iPad Pro body is roughly four times larger than that of iPhone. This provides MUCH greater opportunity to reduce depth.