tundraboy

What to expect from Apple's September quarter earnings call on Thursday

tundraboy

October 2021

AppleZulu said:

Quarterly earnings calls highlight so much of what’s wrong with modern capitalism. All the analysts are predicting what the numbers will be. They really want “guidance” from Apple on what the next report will be.

That way, when the actual report comes out, the company’s stock price will move based not on actual performance, but based on performance as compared to the predictions. A wildly profitable company that falls short of the predictions will lose value.

Then there’s the foolishness of quarterly reporting itself. Statistically, for a company the size and complexity of Apple, earnings fluctuations over three months or even year-to-year are almost indecipherable from noise.

Apple’s management plays the game because the law requires it, but it’s pretty easy to see that internally they stay focused on the long term, as they should.

We all know about these 'defects' that you pointed out so there is no problem of deception. A wildly profitable company that falls short of the predictions will of course lose value if investors believed the predictions and invested accordingly. In the situation you described, the company never really lost value because it was overvalued to start with due to the over-optimistic predictions.

Quarterly reporting is not foolish. As an investor buying shares in the stock market, I sure want publicly held companies to report their earnings regularly. How other people interpret those results is not the company's problem, if people overreact and make investing mistakes due to the information, that's their problem. What is your preferred alternative to quarterly reporting? More frequent, less frequent, or no reporting at all? You cannot ever get rid of people making investing mistakes, I'd rather they make little mistakes every quarter than big mistakes, say, every year. The latter would result in more volatility not only in the stock markets but the economy in general.

Sure, publicly held companies play games with their quarterly reporting. But the extent of their game playing is restrained by the legal requirements with respect to financial reporting standards (and smart investors take the game playing into account). That is still better than less or zero reporting requirements because it reduces uncertainty in the stock markets.

Is iPhone still cool? Maybe Apple should flip the script

tundraboy

October 2021

mjtomlin said:

I honestly couldn’t care less whether Apple makes a foldable phone or not...

Props for saying "couldn't" and not "could".

Is iPhone still cool? Maybe Apple should flip the script

tundraboy

October 2021

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

iPhones would be extremely cool if Apple could find a way to allow creativity back into the app ecosystem. The iPhone was exciting in the first few years because every day there would be new amazing apps that did things no one had expected a smart device to do. There were apps that could listen to music and tell you what song it was. Another app looked at signs in different languages and turned them into English. There were highly addictive new games to play. Now all of that creative explosion is pretty much dead. The reason is that as soon as some new and exciting app becomes popular, like iDos for example, Apple kills it. Never mind that it had been in the App Store for years and got popular because it could run an extremely early version of Windows, it had violated the rules that Apple made up out of thin air and so had to die. Who is going to risk wasting years of their lives to produce an exciting new app in an ecosystem like that? No one that's who.

If Apple could carve out a space on the iPhone for risky apps to do risky things without access to the rest of the phone's data or iCloud, excitement could return to iOS. Oculus does this with the Quest. It has a separate app store for apps that are not quite ready to appear on the main app store or do things that Facebook is not yet comfortable with. The user takes the risk but the apps are there and some of them are wonderful. This will not happen on the iPhone because Apple's rules have very little to do with user safety. They are almost all about preserving Apple's control over the iPhone. The need for control is a kind of addiction for Apple's executives. Like other addictions, they are very harmful for both the addict and anyone around them. In this case, it is systematically killing the iPhone platform. Yes the new iPhones have nice new hardware features but when was the last time you bought an iPhone to get access to some amazing new app?

You lost all credibility when you praised Facebook.