- for first time seeing analysts excited about other products, watch and airpods as being real drivers of bottom line revenue!!!
- interesting note from Bloomberg tech reporter
"Apple’s new revenue strategy isn’t a bad one. It’s, basically, sell the customer an iPhone every three to five years, and make a bunch of money in the years between by selling them a new Apple Watch or AirPods (which only last about three years tops before you need a new pair -- batteries!) and services. If a user subscribes to all of Apple’s services for two years straight, that’s about equal to revenue from a new iPhone. So in those cases, if that user doesn’t buy a new iPhone for a couple years, it’s not a big deal."
- apples done so well lately that the average analysts has a target price 5% below what apple is currently trading at
- they manufacture iphones 400 km from the center of the coronavirus outbreak, see if this is mentioned, also about 18% of apple revenue so China matters
- want to see what their effective tax rate is
Numbers:
- stocks almost back to record highs before reporting, after reporting it shot way past!!
- 1Q Revenue is $91.8B vs estimates of $88.38B!!!!!!
- 1Q EPS is $4.99 vs estimates of$4.56!!!!!
- wearables was $10 vs $7.3 last year( apple just continues to create $10+ billion dollar business every 3-5 years.
Use to be that only MSFT could do that and GOOG spent heavily trying to do that
- iphone revenue for 1Q is $55.97
- service revenue for 1Q is $12.72
- declines in both mac($7.1 vs $7.4 last year) and iPad sales($6 vs %6.7 last year)
- iphone sales up everywhere except Japan
Numbers that really impress
- Cash/Equivalents have doubled from last year,
that funds a lot of money loosing streaming shows
- keeping in mind they bought back $37B in stock this year
$200 sounds a bit insane. Is this across many devices on a multi-device shared plan? AT&T charges me $40-$50 each time I upgrade the device. Anything > $0 still seems silly, but $200!
Why would your carrier charge a fee for phone upgrades? I'm with T-Mobile, and during an upgrade I pop the SIM card out from the old phone and put it in the new phone. Everything works now. The one time I lost the SIM card, I was charged just $10 for a replacement.
That seems outrageous to me. Replacing my device, whether purchased outright or through Apple's upgrade program, shouldn't be of any concern for my provider.
How do you get hit with this fee? I've not done any financing, but I've updated iPhones several times on Tmobile (2013-2016) and Verizon (2018-2019) without even having to tell the carrier...
Maybe I'm wrong about Tmobile, I can't find anything via searching about it, but Verizon and ATT of course charge it. I thought I had heard Sprint and Tmobile do too since the SIM comes with the phone and they have an excuse to charge, but they might be nicer than Verizon and ATT.
If you go into the Apple Store and use the financing option then they will register your phone as a convenience to one of the big 4 carriers. I imagine you could finance and "activate" it later yourself and maybe avoid the fee if you have a physical sim card. But the new phones are eSim so that may play a role. I was told I could not participate in the iphone upgrade program if I wasn't on one of the big 4 carriers. I was on a big 4 but then I went MVNO with no issue. I haven't upgraded since tho.
Just call them when the transaction hits your statement and ask them for a refund. I’ve done this every year they tried to charge me and have been successful. The rep likely also knows it’s a bs fee as well. If not just hang up and speak with another until you get someone who will.
If it's via the Apple Upgrade Program, it's essentially leasing.
You take out a loan with Citizens One, and the phone is paid for (from Apple's perspective) outright. You then pay the loan down. However you can't get another upgrade until you've paid at least half of the installments, and then if you trade in the old phone the remaining balance of the loan is deleted.
There's also a new (similar) program integrated into their Apple Card. Not sure how exactly that works.
The inventory comes from Apple. You do not buy/lease/whatever the phone from any carrier. Once you purchase it, you have the option to activate it with whichever of the big carriers in store. You could also walk out and install your own SIM from elsewhere. AUP phones aren't carrier locked.
That program is available only in a limited number of countries (I’m guessing wherever Apple can make it an interest free loan). It may be the one triggering continuous upgrades in countries like the U.S. and adding to the volumes.
I'm constantly reading on HN about the deceiving nature of stock buybacks on earnings. Is this not an example? Net income was down year-over-year on "record" per share earnings.
I wonder. If you're an investor, all you really care about is how much your shares are earning you. If the amount of earnings per share goes up, then the value of that share also goes up.
> all you really care about is how much your shares are earning you
Properly you care about more than that: you want to know how the business is faring; the thing that actually has to support the EPS. You want to know that you're not watching a dwindling scenario, where you're losing the business and the buybacks are getting you just a bit more than treading water. That's where EPS juicing can be a dangerous camouflage.
If juicing EPS with buybacks comes at the cost of longer term growth, it's a disaster for long-term shareholding. Incorrect capital allocation sinks a lot of ships.
IBM, as one infamous example, played (is playing) an aggressive financial engineering game where they were seeing their business contract every quarter for years, yet juiced EPS through buybacks.
It did absolutely nothing for the stock, which hasn't moved in ten years (Adobe is now worth more than IBM + the former Red Hat, ouch). All those profits shoveled into buybacks and it did nothing to drive consequential returns for shareholders. If shareholders are lucky they've yielded three or four percent per year the past decade, with inflation + buybacks + dividends (while a lot of other prominent tech companies have generated epic returns in that time). It could have gone into building a better cloud business which would have provided growth, which would have rewarded them with a PE ratio that isn't a dismal 13 (Apple has a multiple 2x that with very modest growth). In four or five years AWS will be as large as IBM's entire business (it's already nearly as profitable now). Shareholders have seen some EPS boost while the business gradually vanishes out from under them.
Is it more likely that IBM's profits were better spent on buying shares back or driving business growth? You could have rolled up a massive cloud business for $50 billion in acquisitions between 2008-2018 (and ideally not stupidly paid twice what Red Hat was actually worth, near the peak of a stock market bubble).
That’s simply false. You’re assuming a scenario where the company does buybacks because they’re losing market share, and then implying causality.
To put it simply, wherher a company performs buybacks does not tell you what the future growth will be. All it tells you is that the company’s management believes shares are undervalued, or alternatively that they are irrational (to your point, I would characterize most share buybacks as irrational, but _certainly_ not apple’s)
It’s not deceptive to show that they beat the Wall Street estimates for eps because the analysts who guessed were aware that there were buybacks ongoing.
They beat a number that was supposed to have factored in the effects of buybacks.
Blame the tax code for incentivizing buybacks over dividends.
These days, EPS contains a blend of past “dividends” payed out as buybacks.
The math works out so that when you buy the stock, you’re essentially paying the previous shareholder past dividends would have happend if they hadn’t been replaced with buybacks.
Anyway, none of that should change the way you reason about P/E. The main impact is that EPS trends over time aren’t comparable to net income trends, etc.
Longer buying cycles on the phones would be quite beneficial. And Apple has quite a good track record on longevity compare to others, in notebooks for example. They also lead on recycling, and were among the first to reduce and eliminate a bunch of toxins from their processes, and to aggressively cut back on packaging.
In perspective (to Elon Musk‘s products, for example) Airports are completely irrelevant, as long as they are not powered by enriched uranium: they are just too small.
Apples Macbooks are the leading the way for creating mountains of needless waste. We had multiple sent back because of their horrible keyboards failing repeatedly. And unlike on other brands where you could pop off a key and remove the whole keyboard without any tools, Macbooks have the keyboard secured with about 90 rivets so unless you want to spend hours and hours plucking out rivets and then threading the holes, the entire bottom case becomes useless which has glued to it the trackpad, speakers and battery.
How environmentally friendly! Recycling is a corporate greenwashing tactic to make it seem like you can buy endless product and do the planet a favor because someone in china burned off all the non metals and grabbed the remaining aluminum.
Don’t you think Apple will recycle every MacBook top case that is sent back? Whether as refurbished or in material, either way it’s probably very efficient or they would lose so much more on all these free repairs
What are you talking about? Apple has been caught making their products slower and unusable as they get older. They are designed not to last in every aspect.
> Apple has been caught making their products slower and unusable as they get older.
That's FUD.
Apple was indeed "caught" doing that, in one very specific and generally customer-friendly sense.
Apple throttled the phone CPU as the battery aged to avoid spikes that could cause the phone to die. When people complained about it, they introduced a toggle to allow that behavior to be disabled.
Broadly speaking, Apple has had an excellent record relative to the rest of the industry. They provide day of release OS updates for years-old devices, they have shipped major new releases which have actually improved performance on older devices, and they will often block new features on older devices when those features are likely to cause severe performance degradation.
Nobody notices and nobody cares. Notice they downvote you and your text gets harder and harder to read and washes away. I wonder what it will take for iPhone sales to crash? Is it people starving in the streets? How many dead bodies will it take? Lots of interesting questions.
> which only last about three years tops before you need a new pair -- batteries!which only last about three years tops before you need a new pair -- batteries!
Needing a new battery should be the absolute LAST reason you would want to replace your electronic device, not only in the sense that the customer is getting screwed this way through planned obsolescence, but also because this only makes the problem of electronic waste so much worse.
You should be able to replace the battery in your phone, watch, remote, electric car, and really every single device. I don't care said device would be slightly thicker because of it, the companies will innovate around that eventually. It's far from a good enough reason to create devices without replaceable batteries. I find this to be one of the most anti-consumer features a company can add to their products.
A lot of these were expected? Still good to see it now as fact. I have jokingly made the prediction on in 2016 that Apple will reach 1B iPhone User by 2020, turns out we are very close judging from the 1.5B Active Base.
iPhone in Japan - For those not aware iPhone has 80%+ Market Share in Japan ( Usage, not Sales ). And majority of iPhone user prefer smaller handset, that is the iPhone 4.7" or smaller like the iPhone SE size. So Apple hasn't really had any update for that market in 2019. Another point was Japan has passed a law that ban the subsidise phone selling with carriers. Making the cost of iPhone higher. Face ID is also not as well liked comparatively speaking, so replacement cycle are longer.
But Mac not so Good. I only posted this yesterday[1].
Basically more Mac users are leaving the platform. The Churn rate is possibly the highest in the past 10 years. I am not sure if this is because casual users are generally leaving the PC platform as a whole, or they are leaving to Windows or Linux.
You are probably right. The thing is, if Apple wants to drive more iPad sales, they really need to open up what it is allowed to do. iPads from 5+ years ago are still great for almost anything but the most intense games.
I have the 9.7" iPad Pro, which is something like 3 years old by now. I have no reason to upgrade. Swift Playgrounds is a great app and has a built-in compiler. It's very nearly an IDE at this point. On my iPad, it compiles slowly and really eats the battery. But I don't really care; it's just a toy app. If Apple were to allow things compiled in Swift Playgrounds to be run, say, via the Shortcuts app (in any shortcut I created), I'd be excited to start really developing code on the iPad, and I'd want to buy a new iPad to enable that.
It might. I'd argue that the original success of iPhone is very symbiotic with the developer community it grabbed. There was a latent hunger from software creators to make mobile software, but no decent platform to develop for. Making techno-geeks happy can move the needle for the whole ecosystem (it can also be a huge waste of time, depending on what you hope to achieve...Oculus is a great example of the masses not following the energy despite massive excitement and development efforts by techno-geeks).
The only thing that the iPhone captured was a latent hunger to make more money.
If companies saw the chance to make money on the Oculus they would jump aboard regardless.
The iPhone had two major advantages that attracted developers - there were already iPhones on the market before the App Store opened and at the time, Apple had an easy payment system via iTunes and millions of credit cards on file. It was estimated that Apple had more credit cards on files than Amazon or it was a close second thanks to iTunes.
It also had a proven customer base of people willing and able to spend money on digital goods.
Surprising (concerning?) that Mac sales didn't go up, given the release of the Mac Pro and the MBP 16", both of which were poised to inject new life into the line.
Mac Pro was released too late for the quarter, also it starts at $6000.
The 16" MBP is also the top tier in the notebooks, and despite complaints, the previous gen TouchBars are working decently for most people. Not surprised the 16" didn't have a huge impact.
Updating the 13" line would have a bigger impact. iMac/iMac Pro also haven't seen notable updates in a while.
The pricing/features can be (have been) debated ad infinitum, but no matter which way you slice it, it represents a huge new direction for the Mac line and at least at the high-end, industry professionals are excited about it. It's a big deal, and it's not a flop, so it should have an impact (next quarter, it seems).
> and despite complaints, the previous gen TouchBars are working decently for most people
Most people probably won't be trading in their 2018 MBPs for the new 16-inch, but given the strong feelings out there about the keyboard and airflow I'd bet some people will.
And more importantly there are people like me, who were holding off on a long-coming upgrade for a moment exactly like this, when Apple's solved the biggest issues with the design. It should've registered as some kind of sales bump, even if not a massive one.
I was expecting some pent up MBP demand to buy, so I am surprised sales declined. I still do expect that pent up demand to buy, though I am less confident.
Now I am just guessing while the new 16" made people more willing to buy a new MBP it wasn't getting them to rush and buy one. That is my case, I will likely buy this year, without the new 16" I think it was under 50% chance I bought a MBP (and a bit more likely I got some laptop I could run Ubuntu on).
While I wouldn't trade in a 2018 MBP, I'm definitely considering trading in my 2016 MacBook to either the 13" or the Air once they update them.
I suspect both of these new models came in too late to appreciably affect the Mac quarter results, though, as the OP mentioned -- and I also suspect that the number of people who were holding off on upgrades, like you, has been steadily rising. And I know I'm not alone in looking at the 16" one and thinking it was neat but just too big. So maybe the acid test is going to be seeing what happens to sales when they update the smaller models with the new keyboard.
I pointed out in another comment that the 16" is actually slightly smaller on every dimension than the 15" 2015 MBP, even with the extra diagonal-inch of screen space:
358.9 mm × 247.1 mm × 18.0 mm
vs
357.9 mm x 245.9 mm x 16.2 mm
Although I do believe it is slightly bigger than the 2016-2018 15"
I am also excited about the Mac Pro. However, at a $10k average configuration, it would need to sell several tens of thousands to comprise 20% of Mac line revenue, which would be at least half of the video editors in the US.
Except that $6000 Mac Pro could have been like $3000 if Apple had used similar consumer Ryzen processors instead of Intel Xeons. I imagine that would've opened up the professional market a bit more for Apple, while it's still way above what most consumers would want to pay.
I really don't know how Apple justifies using Xeons instead of AMD Ryzen in Mac Pros. Every way you look at it - whether it's cheaper for buyers, or higher profit margin for Apple - it would seem to be the smart way to go about it.
Sometimes (often?), company relationships really stand in the way of progress.
Just to give a counter point about Touchbar macbooks being 'good enough' - my experience with recent macbooks has been so bad that I'm just never buying a macbook again. Next laptop will be a thinkpad and it's very possible I'll be selling my current Macbook Pro 13inch on ebay because I'm so pissed off with it.
You can't produce crap products for 5 years and expect people to use that as a reason to rush to upgrade to the latest and greatest.
16" pros are not popular. Nobody wants to lug that thing around. The Mac Pro is just too expensive. I know people who used to buy Mac Pros and were forced to get iMacs.
The mac pro is somewhere between "too expensive" and "too little, too late".
The standard line is that if you make $$$ using the Mac Pro - e.g. production companies - the cost is peanuts. However, they took so long to upgrade the Pro lineup that some of those would-be-buyers have already moved on to non-Apple products because working on old hardware for so long was more expensive than jumping off Apple's ship.
Certainly many stayed. But I have several friends that work in production in LA and more than one of them left Apple's ecosystem during that dry spell. They aren't coming back for an overpriced machine.
From what I've heard it's not really overpriced at that scale, but yeah, I'm sure there are some that switched for whom the cost of switching back just wouldn't be worth it
As someone who has been wanting to buy a MBP for several years, the 16" MBP is the best laptop they've made since the 2015 MBP.
That being said, I agree with you. It's too large.
There's also still a lot of stuff I don't care for (bezel size, massive trackpad, still has an underwhelming keyboard, lack of port diversity, touchbar), but it's decent enough for me to pull the trigger if it were in a smaller package.
They gave us the esc key back, and moved away from the butterfly mechanism, etc. If it was just in a form factor similar to that of comparable dell/lenovos (<= 14"), I'd buy one and I feel like I'm not the only one.
That being said, I also echo the price concerns. You can easily spec out a 16" to over $3k - that's a lot for a laptop.
I think the fact that Macs don't have touch screens (like MS Surface) is really starting to hurt them. I don't understand it at all... they clearly have the tech know-how. Maybe they are worried that doing that would kill iPad sales?
macOS isn't suited for a touch-screen and it would create a bad experience in many contexts, which Apple has a history of steering clear of. Anyway, I've never understood the purpose of a touch-screen on a laptop if it can't transform completely into a tablet.
Even if it can, it's barely useful when it's not in tablet form. We have Dell touchscreen laptops at my office and the only reason people use the touch screen is to scroll with their thumb in the bottom right corner. That hardly seems like a good use case to make the whole screen touch responsive.
> I've never understood the purpose of a touch-screen on a laptop
Me neither BUT I noticed both my Dad and a friend try to touch my laptop screen when I was showing them something. They did so in a way that clearly they weren't even thinking about it and they just expected it to work, especially for scrolling.
People's constant use of phones, tablets and newer windows portables that support touch are changing people's expectations. People who primarily use the keyboard + touchpad/mouse are soon to be a minority (if the are not already when the wide world is considered).
My dad used to do this before I bought him a Mac. He’d had touch screen windows laptops since they first appeared on the market. I’d yell at him and say, don’t put your grubby fingers on my screen. Now that he has a Mac, he feels it is significantly superior to not touch the screen for this exact reason. The trackpad scrolling experience on a Mac more than makes up for it. I think no touch screens is a brilliant design wisdom that falls right in line with Apple’s design philosophy, if it becomes more of a differentiator in that Mac have clean screens, that’s good, subtle marketing. I have never heard someone who owns a Mac in the wild say, why doesn’t it have a touch screen?
I'm so used to browsing things on my tablet that I've caught myself a few times trying to navigate to a link on my laptop, hitting it several times before the brain kicks in and says, "You don't have a touchscreen, dumbass. Use the touchpad."
I don't get it either. A touchscreen is very nice to have on a laptop. You may not use it everyday, but it's very convenient especially to develop touch applications.
I have been using a 9 year old MacBook (non retina either) and really want to upgrade but the new ones are too out of my price range. Plus the tons of keyboard issues with them has discouraged me. The MacBook I am still using was bought at $1000 new (back to school offer plus student discount) and I manually upgraded the ram to 16GB and replaced the harddrive as well as the optical drive with 2 SSDs. So overall, it probably costed me around $1400 for 740 GB of SSD space. Getting these specs on the new macs is way too expensive for me personally.
I might just end up buying an old 2015 one. Retina display is the only thing I really want.
My MacBook Air is over 7 years old now, and I feel similar. Mostly because I’m thinking to myself “I need to buy a machine that will last me another 7”.
I have a new touchbar mbp at work, and feel absolutely no difference when using it or my personal 2015 retina. Any mbp's without the retina feel ancient.
Maybe you don't feel the difference, but everybody around you might hear the difference :) The smatter of the keys of the thinner MBP keyboards is horrible in a cafe or office or train etc.. :/ Did they make them more silent in the latest iteration?
From a couple days with the new keyboard, it feels basically identical to the pre-2016 keyboards.
I narrowly preferred the feel of the butterfly keys, and I like clicky keyboards in general. But I was one of the many who had keypress failures, which was infuriating.
I've beaten the crap out of this style of keyboard, from Apple, without problems, so I'm optimistic that they've fixed the problem. This is my eighth Apple keyboard, and of them all, I've had keypress failures only on the seventh.
And yes, to answer your question, it's considerably quieter. And has an escape key. And t-shaped arrow keys. I'm pleased.
For what it's worth, my 2017 Macbook Pro 13" feels slower than my 2015 Macbook Pro 13". Both with maxed CPU and Memory. It also spins the fan a lot more. The 2015 was a great silent machine that stayed silent unless you pegged the CPUs for minutes at a time. With the 2017 machine every time I do something mildly taxing the fan starts going.
What keeps me from going back to the 2015 is that everything at home is now set up for USB-C and I would prefer to not have two separate cabling setups for the shared desk.
I hate the touchbar MBP I have for work. The touchbar turns off when you don't use the keyboard, so if you are thinking whilst staring at some debugged code and want to step into/continue the code, where have the function keys gone??? Oh they've completely disappeared and I need to press a key eg. ctrl to get them to appear again. Drives me insane a thousand times a day.
The battery percentage hops up/down by a few percent when it is low, eg. 7%, 10%, 9%, 7%, 4% ALERT ALERT ALERT. I would replace the battery in it, but I can't......
I do not have this problem on my 2012. Also, on my 2012 I know how much battery life I left without having to turn the thing on. Nor do I need dongles.
Plus I am not deafened by the keyboard on the 2012.
Speakers on the touchbar MBP are good though! That's the only thing I can say about it.
I'm considering a Surface Pro X for this purpose. Better aspect ratio, better first-party thin keyboard, bundled LTE, fair price relative to the iPad Pro, better developer tool support (though, its still ARM Windows so...)
My dream is an ultra-thin, low/medium power device that essentially just runs the editor, plus a full local CLI environment and maybe some basic stuff like compilers/etc, move all the super hungry stuff like containers, databases, queues etc to the cloud. iPad is kind of there, though you're probably still going to be editing off of an SFTP share if you want to use one of the mediocre editors available on the App Store. Plus any web development is still a pipe dream given the lack of dev tooling in Safari mobile. Backend-facing development is more possible, but the Surface Pro X feels much closer to this dream.
Viruses really aren't an issue if you're (1) keeping your software up to date, and (2) aren't an idiot while browsing the internet. Modern browsers are very secure. Modern Windows is also very secure. I'd expect that ARM-based Windows is even less of a target.
But with iPads, I can download any random app and mostly be assured that it won’t escape the sandbox. I’m not saying iOS is perfectly secure, but Windows and Macs are for lack of a better phrase, designed to be insecure.
It's a bit lame that you're being downvoted, but no, viruses aren't much of a concern. That line is more Apple fear mongering than anything else nowadays, generally speaking.
Latest macOS has been brutal. I've dealt with about 50 or 60 crashes since the MBP I'm currently typing on was purchased and lagging is pretty frequent. They need to focus on making the platform more stable after all the changes they made in the latest upgrade.
The problem is that I can't afford to not have it for the period of time that Apple normally needs. I will say, the crashes have gotten less frequent lately, so I think they fixed many of the underlying issues.
Catalina on test USB disk for me has been terrible; same hardware with internal disk running High Sierra = no problems.
Very bad OS release in my opinion, and poorly handled transition (eg. secret partitions, unwritable root partitions, security popups everywhere and for every activity). I am not using it because I want to work, not wrestle with the OS. IMHO they lost that feeling in Catalina.
The astounding thing about Apple is not the scale at which they operate, though that is impressive. It is the rate at which they still grow revenue concurrent with insane profitability and revenue diversification at that scale. Incredible business execution.
Their slow creep into healthcare is a particularly interesting longterm play, due to the size of the market if nothing else.
I was playing indoor soccer, and I noticed one of the opposing players had an apple watch on.
I wanted to complain the ref about it (jewelry and wearables are not allowed during games), but then I realized that at least 1/3rd of the players had some kind of watch (including my teammates).
You didn't see them during games a couple of years ago... so I guess they opened a new market and people are used to them.
You have a ref for indoor soccer? And rules on what you can wear? Indoor soccer to me was always just a casual affair, besides the odd tasty tackle and fall out
A lot of educational leagues have refs and rules on attire. For instance, every rec basketball league I've ever been in banned shorts with pockets because of the risk of defenders snagging/dislocating/breaking fingers and had rules on finger nail length to reduce incidental scratches.
I know this is anecdotal, but the Apple Watch has actually been a great entryway product for the fitness wearables market.
A lot of people wear Apple Watches when running. After they realize that the watch's battery won't survive a marathon or a hike of any significant length, they usually upgrade to a Garmin or Fitbit.
I wear it everyday for a workout of ~1 hour and while the battery goes down by around 10% from that it’s not unthinkable for the battery to survive a multiple hour hike if fully charged.
Of course 12 hours with constant heart rate monitoring will be tough, I haven’t tried that.
In my experience, Apple Watches will cover most running needs without needing to upgrade.
I ran my first half marathon race with last month with a year old Series 4. I was running the Workout app in "Outdoor Run" mode, and playing (synced) music with the Music app to Bluetooth headphones. I did the run in the morning and made it through the whole day without taking it off. Around 9pm I got a warning I only had 10% power left.
It kind of blew my mind. Here is a device tracking my route with GPS, taking my heartrate, and playing wireless music to me, for just under 3 hours, and it feels about as big as a chunky Casio watch I had when I was a kid in the 80s.
My Garmin can get through a week of daily wear and GPS tracking before I need to charge it.
So, basically 7 days worn for 10-12 hours/day including 40ish miles of running. With heartrate. And that's the 4 year old model. The newer versions have even better battery life.
I ran a trail 100K last fall and my Watch survived the almost 13.5 hours. Granted, I was carrying my iPhone with me and wearing a chest strap HRM, so a lot of the work was offloaded. But still — I was impressed.
I’ve also run a road marathon with the watch without the phone.
The downside is if you’re using the Workouts app, then your data is silo’d. The upsides is that the data is local and encrypted.
I recommend the app HealthFit which can sync Workouts data with pretty much everything else, including Strava. It also allows you automatically export FIT and GPX files to Dropbox if you’d like. It can’t yet automatically sync Runkeeper though.
I started using it a year ago after I got annoyed at the Strava iOS app failing me once a week, and haven’t had any issues since.
You can use an app such as HealthFit (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/healthfit/id1202650514) to export your data. Downside is that you have to pay for what should have been built in functionality but I guess $3 is reasonable. I use it all the time as I record my runs with the Workouts app and sync them to Strava (since Strava doesn't play nice with the health app and locks your data).
i play rec basketball and i am very tempted to try this little trick next time! i've really been wanting to see how much i run and such in a game, but the rules don't allow any accessories other than hairbands.
> I was playing indoor soccer, and I noticed one of the opposing players had an apple watch on. I wanted to complain the ref about it (jewelry and wearables are not allowed during games), but then I realized that at least 1/3rd of the players had some kind of watch (including my teammates).
How terribly entitled. Presumably the rules against jewelry and wearables are meant to ensure safety in case of collisions!
I'm happy for apple, but I'm annoyed at 'service' growing.
The free plan offering hasn't increased as far as I know, and the devices require more and more icloud backup space, so why would you be surprised in an increase of 'service' revenues?
The Files App on iOS can connect to any SMB share. Just make a shortcut that runs periodically: take everything in the "recent" folder, compress it, name it the current date, and copy it to a SMB share of your choice.
iCloud backs up when you plug in your phone at night without any configuration. Requirements to back up to your own computer include...
- Owning a computer
- Plugging your phone into your computer
- Having iTunes always running (if it's not a Mac)
Additionally, Apple provides a very convenient API where you can store files and have it show up on related devices after calling a sync function. Many apps which store user data use this, and it requires iCloud if you want to sync between Mac and iOS or iOS to iOS. It's a very common pattern, some popular apps that use it: GoodNotes, Studies, Notability, WhatsApp, Linea, and every Apple-made app.
You mean I have to own a computer to back up my phone to a computer that I own? Scandalous! Next thing you know, you'll tell me that I have to own a phone in order to back up my phone.
Plugging your phone into your computer
If an iPhone is charging and on the same wifi network as the computer, it will automatically sync at night. There's a checkbox for it.
Having iTunes always running
Or you just fire up iTunes when you want to sync. Once a week, or month, or whatever works for your schedule.
For my purposes, I get by without a phone backup. I store most data on my NAS or in iCloud (supposed to be E2E encrypted), so when I do get a new iPhone or iPad ever few years, the only data I've lost is my system config. It's a little bit of a pain to reconfigure, sure, but local backups to iTunes are much more of a pain (and always seem to break for me).
I would love to use iCloud Backup, but my understanding is that as soon as you do, everything that was E2E encrypted (because you're using iCloud services) immediately becomes visible to Apple.
Thanks! This is helpful. Is iMazing smart enough to not back up data that’s already in iCloud? For example, I don’t want to have two copies of my entire Photo Library (my laptop originals and my iPhone backup) on my laptop.
I pay for the 2TB tier, find it affordable as a business expense and that it definitely alleviates personal stress - one less thing to worry about. That they've positioned themselves with a storage offering at a time when people are taking larger photos and videos is clever by them, but I find it convenient enough to overlook. I might grumble if I was forever pushing up against the next tier, but 2TB has been fine.
Agreed. But I would like to see more features as of now iCloud requires some "grown up" cloud service for regular document sync. Would be great to migrate completely
What's with the downvotes? Even dyed-in-the-wool Apple fans like Gruber admit that the 5GB free tier iCloud storage is stingy at best. He's been saying so since 2012(!) and he's absolutely right.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/08/01/iphone-x-snell"I think Apple’s (Cook’s?) interest in increasing revenue from Services is keeping them from doing what’s right — increasing the base iCloud storage from 5 GB to something more reasonable."
Apple finally decided to start capturing some of the value add of the iPhone itself (App store fees are solid revenue I suppose but a tiny fraction of the overall potential value of an iPhone) and now somehow an unstoppable force has gotten even more successful. I don't think I've ever seen such a tentpole product. No doubt in my mind that Apple will be the one takes AR and possibly VR to the next level.
They stopped detailing their exact Mac and iPad sales too, so I dont see the problem.
I realize iPhone is an amazing amount of their revenue, but they are transitioning to a services and accessory business built around iPhone. It’s less important exactly what model iPhone you have, in my opinion.
They stopped doing that multiple quarters ago because it wasn't growing and they want investors to focus on other parts of the business and not just the iPhone.
If you believe the strategy laid out in the parent comment to yours, then it isn't a red flag at all. For the last 10 years, the number 1 thing that contributed to Apple's growth was the iPhone. They don't believe that will be the case for the next 10 years.
I think they should release those numbers for investor clarity, but I don't think it's a red flag.
If you don't invest in companies that don't release hardware unit sales, your options are rather limited since the following companies don't provide that data either:
The real problem is AAPL published that number to investors for years until the iphone X, when it was projected that they would miss targets on "expected YOY increase" in sales.
This just reeks of financial engineering (buybacks/pumps/etc) taking a front seat in what should be a tech company.
Why would it not be the case? The important thing to report to investors is the financials. The last thing you want to do as a company is advertise to your competitors exactly which of your products are failing and which are succeeding. Also, it would be insane if companies had to report "Unit sales" do they have to report iPhone 7/8/9/X? Or 7/8/9/X + different colours? How about X vs X+? Do you need to know iPhone X+ White 64GB sales?
Yes. A lot of the diehards over at /r/apple let slip occasionally how they are always financing the latest and greatest. Which is absurd to me especially for the mac product lines where you are overpaying by thousands for an outdated machine [1].
And the estimate of 3 year lifecycle for wearables like the watch and airpods seems overly optimistic. My airpods are a year old and the battery dwindles in about an hour or two before needing charging, my watch is bricked after 7 months.
When the current debt bubble pops it'll be interesting if it effects Apple revenue as hard as it will the college debt / car debt markets.
Same but I stopped wearing mine. 7 months life is too short if it was new. Should take it to Apple.
All for complaining on the bad stuff, but this is a free throw.
Depends on your credit score if you get no interest on laptops, unlike with phones (where they approve you or don’t, but details remain the same). Also, there’s no trade up program on the laptop financing, so to go back to OP’s point, there isn’t an equivalent offering for laptops to what exists for phones.
Anecdotally, it happens to me because the old one broke/discharge battery at alarming rate/charging port stops working/home button (back when it was physical) stuck
I'm much more satisfied with the mac line sans the immovable blocks masquerading as keyboard.
EDIT: I owned 5 iPhones over 10 years, so it's not yearly. My iPhone 4 lasted 5 years, the rest are not so fortunate.
> Anecdotally, it happens to me because the old one broke/discharge battery at alarming rate/charging port stops working/home button (back when it was physical) stuck
What're you doing to your iPhones? I end up holding on to mine for 3+ years each because I can't kill the damn things and it feels so unnecessarily extravagant to upgrade more often.
Follow-up– if all these problems are necessitating yearly upgrades, why aren't you getting your phones fixed under their 1-year warrantee? Batteries, stuck buttons/switches, charging ports, etc. should all be covered.
Also anecdotal, but I've owned ~every iPhone since the launch-day original iPhone. I still own every single one, and they all still work like the day I bought them. My iPhone 5 was replaced the day after I bought it due to a few dead pixels. My iPhone X came down with some kind of touch digitizer problem in the first few months I owned it, and again, Apple replaced it under warranty. But overall, longevity for my iPhones has been comparable to every other Apple device I own (e.g. still have the Mac II I grew up with; still works fine).
You could open an Apple museum! I sometimes regret I threw away all old phones. I had a pre-iPhone smartphone with Windows and foldable keyboard, I however only used the stylus to type... I guess the iPhone was easier to use for normal people, and it didn't look like a geek phone...
> Tim Cook has added $1 trillion dollars to Apple's market cap since he took over.
No he hasn't. What's with the PR style nonsense with every earning release. Whether it's microsoft, apple, etc, every thread has these types of comments.
All of apple's top products were created before Cook took over in 2011.
Great products Cook inherited along with loose monetary policy and one of the greatest stock market booms is what added $1 Trillion to apple's market cap.
> All of apple's top products were created before Cook took over in 2011.
So did you miss the part about how "wearables" -- chiefly the Watch and AirPods, which came out under Cook's watch -- is up 37% and now brings in more revenue than the Mac or the iPad, and nearly as much this quarter as Services did? And, for that matter, how services revenue is now a higher percentage of the non-iPhone revenue than any other segment, which is surely being driven in no small part by Apple Music (which is now the #1 streaming music service in the US), which also first appeared on Cook's watch?
> is up 37% and now brings in more revenue than the Mac or the iPad
But less than 1/5th of iphone revenue.
> And, for that matter, how services revenue is now a higher percentage of the non-iPhone revenue
And?
All you are doing is cherrypicking data. Are you saying wearables is why Apple's stock gained $1 Trillion? Good god, the paid PR-style activity on some of these posts are absurd.
I'm "cherrypicking data" about stuff launched under Cook's tenure that's wildly successful that you said couldn't possibly have happened. Good god, the paid Apple-bashing activity on some of these posts is absurd!
Everything is going to be less than phone revenue. When Apple entered the phone market there were already 1 billion phones being sold per year, now it's close to 5 billion.
Having high internet points makes you marginally more able to inject whatever hustle you've got going on into the conversation at some future date. Just a guess.
Could be a bot that copies high point top level comments on threads about the same URL from reddit to HN and vice versa in order to create accounts with high karma for future sock puppeting?
Just a little sad to see how much value they put into the iPhone and services while iPad and Mac software is lacking. Obviously, they're making money, and that's their goal. However, I think sales could be boosted for the iPads and Macs if they increased the quality of the software for those devices.
It might make sense to assign the Mac to a dedicated team at the top executive level who’s only responsibility is to grow and update the Mac line. Except for MacBook Pro and the iMac, which seem to get some sort of periodic updates, the Mac mini and Mac Pro don’t get enough attention. The Mac mini hasn’t seen any updates since the latest update was launched in 2018. We’ll have to see how the brand new Mac Pro fares in the next two years to get a sense of Apple’s commitment to its entire Mac lineup.
I'm not sure that is a huge problem for the Mac Mini, it was released in late 2018 so we are only at about 18 months now. We are long past the stage where every new operating system version demanded new hardware.
New hardware would be great, particularly in the Mini. It has more CPU than anything else that size that I can find and with an internal power supply. The lack of compelling upgrades made by Intel seems to be the main problem.
The Hades Canyon Nucs come close, but are larger, have a power brick and are not my taste in design. But the 2x nic, graphics, storage options and price are compelling.
Most of the investment in iOS/OSX has been behind the scenes which is why it appears that not much has been done on it.
The move to fully 64-bit as well as Project Catalyst are significant pieces of work. Not to mention the inevitable ARM Mac which will be appearing soon.
Apple struggles with executing many things in parallel and doing them all well. That’s why we tend to see the most prioritized products getting all the love and the others languishing. I’m talking from the software perspective, where the changes in recent years and stability issues are way too painful and disruptive. Catalyst apps are third class citizens on the Mac. They cannot even be classified as Mac apps. Catalina is still plagued with different kinds of data loss issues (mail, iDevice integration, etc.).
Of course, Mac OS X/OS X/macOS has had glaring issues in almost every release, but the lack of design chops and inadequate testing across the software arena (like it was shown in one of the security issues exposed by Google Project Zero) are telling examples of Tim Cook being fine as a breadth guy but not a details guy or a focused guy who can drive his teams to double down on all the software quality issues.
I have been extremely disappointed with Catalina. I am keeping my work MacBook on Mojave as long as I can. My home MacBook is still on High Sierra I think, because I risk having non-functioning external audio hardware (mic preamps) if I upgrade. I did install Catalina on an external USB disk but found issues straight away:
a. You can’t create any directories on the root filesystem any more, eg. / so you have to set up a redirection system via the synthetic.conf in /etc
b. When I run a program in Catalina under xcode for debugging, it asks me the first time to put a password in to let me debug it, every single time after reboot. Why??
c. The file system is now spread over 2 partitions (one safe modifiable one, one hidden secret one) but if you ask for the size of the partition via a system call or via df -h, it adds the TOTAL from both partitions, eg. 100GB and then tells you how much space is used for EACH parition (not total) so you get
25GB / 100GB
10GB / 100GB
This is inaccurate - I do not have 200GB total capacity. I only have 100GB. The size for each partition should be just that - the size of that partition.
d. Also, search for text in PDFs no longer works??
e. If my MacBook goes to sleep, it crashes (2012 MacBook Pro for home, on USB disk). It doesn't do this when running High Sierra off the internal disk/SSD (I upgraded the disk, yes).
I found all of these issues in half-an-hour after installing when trying to set up a dev environment on it.
> If my MacBook goes to sleep, it crashes (2012 MacBook Pro for home, on USB disk). It doesn't do this when running High Sierra off the internal disk/SSD (I upgraded the disk, yes).
My late 2012 mbp (also with upgraded ssd and 16gb ram) is also crashing about 20% of the time whenever I put it to sleep ever since I upgraded it to Mojave. I'm not upgrading it to Catalina since I got a feeling that the issue will only get worse.
That's why I did this on an external disk, knowing the reliance on me actually being able to use the machine for work.
I am dreading that 2012 finally giving up. It's a MacBookPro9,1 with 2.6GHz i7. I put a 1TB SATA3 SSD in and 16GB RAM like you - still going strong. I am impressed how I've got 8 years of life out of the thing, and it's like new other than the plastic shroud under the screen.
I don't know what I will get when it finally dies - you?
I notice that my 2017 isn't any different in daily use; in fact the 2017 battery life is worse and I can hear the fan a lot of the time compared to my 2012.
> I don't know what I will get when it finally dies - you?
Every year I've been waiting for apple to finally release a good mbp. The specs for the new 16 inch mbp seems great on paper (but without any user-upgradeable parts like the 2012, but that ship has sailed), so I'm waiting to see if any major issue shows up before getting one (probably early next year).
The backup option if the 16 inch mbp turns out to be no good is building a kvm-based hackintosh with gpu pass-through. I could fully migrate to linux, but still need MacOS for iOS app development so this system might works for me.
I'd be interested in the KVM-based Hackintosh - got any reading material?
I won an 8086k processor (thanks Intel) and the machine is not taxed heavily (other than C++ dev in Windows and gaming) so any options for multiplatform development are always interesting to me.
Now to investigate the associated licencing issues!
The people who want the lower end of the price range are still perfectly happy with their 5-7 year old iPads. Top of the line suffers in that most people in that market are probably fine or even better off with a MacBook Air/Pro, and they may even save a few dollars instead of buying a Smart Keyboard/folio.
Related to the 10 year anniversary: the iPad should be so much more capable than it is. I don't think the people behind shipping the first iteration are happy with its current state a decade later.
> The people who want the lower end of the price range are still perfectly happy with their 5-7 year old iPads
I've still got the iPad Air 2 I bought in 2014. I still use it nearly every day. I still love it. I haven't seen any compelling reason to upgrade, so far.
Does Apple ever have any chance of breaking into the enterprise space and start taking some of the Active Directory marketshare? Maybe a cloud IAM + productivity suite solution?
And they haven't even re-revolutionised computers again by putting their incredible low-nanometer and can-be-fanless A-series chips into their Mac line-up. That's coming up this year.
I am very impressed and hope they've put their MacBook hardware defects era behind them. Typing this on an awesome 16-inch MBP.
With Apple’s secrecy, it may not be easy to get a source for certain product developments. But it’s a guess that one could wager on, since Apple values complete control over its design, components, etc. Relying on Intel, while a lot better than how it was relying on PowerPC, has forced Apple to work with Intel’s delayed schedules for newer processors and to wait for the right ones for different device classes (mobile vs. desktop).
In the same vein that Apple is now working on designing and building its own modem chips (with the Qualcomm agreement being a stop gap thing), I’m sure (as are thousands of others) that Apple has been working on an ARM based Mac for some years. It’s just a matter of getting enough performance to use it on a low end MacBook and getting the related details on the software side (porting x64 apps to it with lesser effort) ironed out.
Lots of suspicion because of the move to force App Store apps to have Bitcode enabled for submission. This would allow them to potentially transpile x86 apps for ARM:
This is not true. It would not allow them to transpile between architectures.
This myth was dispelled by no less than Chris Lattner on ATP.
Even though he did later admit that he wasn’t completely being honest. Part of the purpose of the bitcode requirement for the Watch was that Apple knew that they would be shipping a 64 bit chip for the Watch two years later.
Bitcode is not [12:30] a magic solution, though. You can't take a 32-bit app, for example, and run it on a 64-bit device. That kind of portability isn’t something that Bitcode can give you, notably because that is something that's visible in C. As you're writing C code, you can write #ifdef pointer size equals 32, and that’s something that Bitcode can't abstract over. It's useful for very specific, low-level kinds of enhancements, but it isn't a panacea that makes everything [13:00] magically portable.
John Siracusa: The same thing I would assume for architecture changes, especially if there was an endian difference, because endianness is visible from the C world, so you can't target different endianness?
Chris Lattner: Yep. It's not something that magically solves all portability problems, but it is very useful for specific problems that Apple's faced in the past.
On one hand, an ARM powered mac would increase Apple's profitability by not having to pay Intel for processors, on the other hand there's a. the disruption and confusion an architecture switch would cause, and b. Apple's lack of interest in the laptop platform relative to Ipad pro and mobile.
Won’t switching form Intel to ARM allow Apple to basically double battery life for the same performance (or double performance with equal battery life)?
If I’d had a laptop like that on offer, my interest in the laptop platform would be surely rekindled as half the earth would line up around the block to buy one...
I don't see it causing any more disruption and confusion than the switch from 68k to PPC, from PPC to x86, or discontinuing support for 10+ years worth of 32-bit executables.
I recently bought a mid-range Nokia phone with Stock android. I wasn't expecting too much, but I am pleasantly surprised. It's stable and robust with good battery life.
I have used both. The main thing you’ll gain by switching to iOS is smoothness. It’s strange, but 0 frame drops and totally smooth non-jerky animations make a lot of difference.
When I’m navigating my iPhone with swipes, it’s like I’m conducting an orchestra.
On an Android it’s more like I’m opening cabinets and drawers who’s hinges need some lubricant.
I'm on my 3rd iPhone now (3G -> 4S -> 6S) in 12 years. Some people like to upgrade their phone every couple of years, and that's fine - but some don't -- and no Android is useful for these people.
My >5 year old 6S runs the latest-and-greatest OS 13 revision, it is still smooth and useful and does essentially everything I need. It's slower than a new model, has a much lesser camera, and the NFC is useful exclusively for Apple pay. But it's still perfectly useful for me for now.
Usability is subjective, and you may like iOS more, or not - but longevity is objective. If you want to stay secure and able to run latest apps (some of which are becoming essential for some of us - e.g. taxi hailing apps in various jurisdictions), you have to upgrade your Android every 2 years, or your iPhone every 5.
Yes, definitely one of the biggest failures of the Android "ecosystem".
Google has figured it out somewhat (3 years of updates), but even that's not enough. Most phones are actually used for 4-5 years, even if a single person doesn't use them for that long (only 2-3 years). But those phones still end-up with someone else.
Software updates should definitely account for that. I would dare say a law should be made to ensure that an electronic device should be supported for 80%+ of its typical life (again, not to be confused with how long a single individual uses that specific product, as it can have multiple owners during its life cycle).
It's also why electronic devices that don't have replaceable batteries should also be made illegal. It's a cheap trick for companies to add batteries that don't last that long as a indirect planned obsolescence.
It's just that it's very difficult to prove that they did it on purpose, as they can just say "we were just trying to lower costs when choosing the shit quality battery". And that's why it would be much better to have a law for replaceable batteries. OEMs can still add their shit batteries to devices if they want, but at least customers can replace them.
Not to nitpick, but the 6s was released in the autumn of 2015, so it's over 4 but not 5 years old. Don't get me wrong though, I'm also still really happy with my iPhone 7. I think I'd like the new cameras a lot, but that's not worth the price of upgrading for me. I think I'll get a new battery soon, then I should be good for another two years.
I was confused why this is Q1 2020 results and not Q4 2019 result (since sales figure is till Dec 28 2019).
Non-Standard Quarters
For a variety of reasons, some public companies will use a non-standard or non-calendar quarterly reporting system. For example, Walmart's first quarter is February, March, and April; Apple Inc's Q1 is October, November, and December; Microsoft Corporation's Q1 is July, August, and September.
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[ 7.6 ms ] story [ 467 ms ] thread- for first time seeing analysts excited about other products, watch and airpods as being real drivers of bottom line revenue!!!
- interesting note from Bloomberg tech reporter "Apple’s new revenue strategy isn’t a bad one. It’s, basically, sell the customer an iPhone every three to five years, and make a bunch of money in the years between by selling them a new Apple Watch or AirPods (which only last about three years tops before you need a new pair -- batteries!) and services. If a user subscribes to all of Apple’s services for two years straight, that’s about equal to revenue from a new iPhone. So in those cases, if that user doesn’t buy a new iPhone for a couple years, it’s not a big deal."
- apples done so well lately that the average analysts has a target price 5% below what apple is currently trading at
- they manufacture iphones 400 km from the center of the coronavirus outbreak, see if this is mentioned, also about 18% of apple revenue so China matters
- want to see what their effective tax rate is
Numbers:
- stocks almost back to record highs before reporting, after reporting it shot way past!!
- 1Q Revenue is $91.8B vs estimates of $88.38B!!!!!!
- 1Q EPS is $4.99 vs estimates of$4.56!!!!!
- wearables was $10 vs $7.3 last year( apple just continues to create $10+ billion dollar business every 3-5 years. Use to be that only MSFT could do that and GOOG spent heavily trying to do that
- iphone revenue for 1Q is $55.97
- service revenue for 1Q is $12.72
- declines in both mac($7.1 vs $7.4 last year) and iPad sales($6 vs %6.7 last year)
- iphone sales up everywhere except Japan
Numbers that really impress
- Cash/Equivalents have doubled from last year, that funds a lot of money loosing streaming shows
- keeping in mind they bought back $37B in stock this year
- almost $100B in term debt
Supply Chain:
- Qurvo up 1%
- Skyworks up 1%
- Cirrus up 3%
Aren't lots of people on monthly plans now with "free" annual upgrades?
The loan is absolutely zero interest, but I get ~$200 in fees when I upgrade from AT&T. It's enough where I didn't upgrade from the X to the 11.
I have also since switched to Google Fi and don't know if that same fee exists with them ....
I've been a part of the iPhone upgrade plan since it started and haven't been charged any fees by AT&T.
Ouch. Maybe it's your plan?
When I upgrade iPhones (financed through Apple) on AT&T, the fee is $35.
"Line activation fee" or some such lie. Why do I have to pay a fee to activate a line that's already active?
The only way to avoid the activation fee is to swap the SIM by yourself, I think.
Is the inventory already on the books of the cellular provider?
Is there a third party? Is it securitized?
This business model seems similar to leasing a car.
You take out a loan with Citizens One, and the phone is paid for (from Apple's perspective) outright. You then pay the loan down. However you can't get another upgrade until you've paid at least half of the installments, and then if you trade in the old phone the remaining balance of the loan is deleted.
There's also a new (similar) program integrated into their Apple Card. Not sure how exactly that works.
The inventory comes from Apple. You do not buy/lease/whatever the phone from any carrier. Once you purchase it, you have the option to activate it with whichever of the big carriers in store. You could also walk out and install your own SIM from elsewhere. AUP phones aren't carrier locked.
I'm constantly reading on HN about the deceiving nature of stock buybacks on earnings. Is this not an example? Net income was down year-over-year on "record" per share earnings.
Properly you care about more than that: you want to know how the business is faring; the thing that actually has to support the EPS. You want to know that you're not watching a dwindling scenario, where you're losing the business and the buybacks are getting you just a bit more than treading water. That's where EPS juicing can be a dangerous camouflage.
If juicing EPS with buybacks comes at the cost of longer term growth, it's a disaster for long-term shareholding. Incorrect capital allocation sinks a lot of ships.
IBM, as one infamous example, played (is playing) an aggressive financial engineering game where they were seeing their business contract every quarter for years, yet juiced EPS through buybacks.
It did absolutely nothing for the stock, which hasn't moved in ten years (Adobe is now worth more than IBM + the former Red Hat, ouch). All those profits shoveled into buybacks and it did nothing to drive consequential returns for shareholders. If shareholders are lucky they've yielded three or four percent per year the past decade, with inflation + buybacks + dividends (while a lot of other prominent tech companies have generated epic returns in that time). It could have gone into building a better cloud business which would have provided growth, which would have rewarded them with a PE ratio that isn't a dismal 13 (Apple has a multiple 2x that with very modest growth). In four or five years AWS will be as large as IBM's entire business (it's already nearly as profitable now). Shareholders have seen some EPS boost while the business gradually vanishes out from under them.
Is it more likely that IBM's profits were better spent on buying shares back or driving business growth? You could have rolled up a massive cloud business for $50 billion in acquisitions between 2008-2018 (and ideally not stupidly paid twice what Red Hat was actually worth, near the peak of a stock market bubble).
To put it simply, wherher a company performs buybacks does not tell you what the future growth will be. All it tells you is that the company’s management believes shares are undervalued, or alternatively that they are irrational (to your point, I would characterize most share buybacks as irrational, but _certainly_ not apple’s)
It's a pretty clear sign of management saying "We see no better opportunity than to buy shares at the current price."
This may be because management believes shares are undervalued. But it may also be because they have no alternative plans.
And continued buybacks would seem to indicate the latter.
They beat a number that was supposed to have factored in the effects of buybacks.
These days, EPS contains a blend of past “dividends” payed out as buybacks.
The math works out so that when you buy the stock, you’re essentially paying the previous shareholder past dividends would have happend if they hadn’t been replaced with buybacks.
Anyway, none of that should change the way you reason about P/E. The main impact is that EPS trends over time aren’t comparable to net income trends, etc.
What a joke.
Seems like Apple is making money from creating disposable rubbish and trashing the Earth.
Maybe I’m wrong and they recycled all? I hope this is the case.
In perspective (to Elon Musk‘s products, for example) Airports are completely irrelevant, as long as they are not powered by enriched uranium: they are just too small.
That's the uncool part.
How environmentally friendly! Recycling is a corporate greenwashing tactic to make it seem like you can buy endless product and do the planet a favor because someone in china burned off all the non metals and grabbed the remaining aluminum.
That's FUD.
Apple was indeed "caught" doing that, in one very specific and generally customer-friendly sense.
Apple throttled the phone CPU as the battery aged to avoid spikes that could cause the phone to die. When people complained about it, they introduced a toggle to allow that behavior to be disabled.
Broadly speaking, Apple has had an excellent record relative to the rest of the industry. They provide day of release OS updates for years-old devices, they have shipped major new releases which have actually improved performance on older devices, and they will often block new features on older devices when those features are likely to cause severe performance degradation.
Needing a new battery should be the absolute LAST reason you would want to replace your electronic device, not only in the sense that the customer is getting screwed this way through planned obsolescence, but also because this only makes the problem of electronic waste so much worse.
You should be able to replace the battery in your phone, watch, remote, electric car, and really every single device. I don't care said device would be slightly thicker because of it, the companies will innovate around that eventually. It's far from a good enough reason to create devices without replaceable batteries. I find this to be one of the most anti-consumer features a company can add to their products.
iPhone in Japan - For those not aware iPhone has 80%+ Market Share in Japan ( Usage, not Sales ). And majority of iPhone user prefer smaller handset, that is the iPhone 4.7" or smaller like the iPhone SE size. So Apple hasn't really had any update for that market in 2019. Another point was Japan has passed a law that ban the subsidise phone selling with carriers. Making the cost of iPhone higher. Face ID is also not as well liked comparatively speaking, so replacement cycle are longer.
But Mac not so Good. I only posted this yesterday[1]. Basically more Mac users are leaving the platform. The Churn rate is possibly the highest in the past 10 years. I am not sure if this is because casual users are generally leaving the PC platform as a whole, or they are leaving to Windows or Linux.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22170080
I have the 9.7" iPad Pro, which is something like 3 years old by now. I have no reason to upgrade. Swift Playgrounds is a great app and has a built-in compiler. It's very nearly an IDE at this point. On my iPad, it compiles slowly and really eats the battery. But I don't really care; it's just a toy app. If Apple were to allow things compiled in Swift Playgrounds to be run, say, via the Shortcuts app (in any shortcut I created), I'd be excited to start really developing code on the iPad, and I'd want to buy a new iPad to enable that.
If companies saw the chance to make money on the Oculus they would jump aboard regardless.
The iPhone had two major advantages that attracted developers - there were already iPhones on the market before the App Store opened and at the time, Apple had an easy payment system via iTunes and millions of credit cards on file. It was estimated that Apple had more credit cards on files than Amazon or it was a close second thanks to iTunes.
It also had a proven customer base of people willing and able to spend money on digital goods.
I'm not paying $4k for skylake refreshes refresh.
I would also love if they started shipping optane in their high end models (or at least have the option).
The 16" MBP is also the top tier in the notebooks, and despite complaints, the previous gen TouchBars are working decently for most people. Not surprised the 16" didn't have a huge impact.
Updating the 13" line would have a bigger impact. iMac/iMac Pro also haven't seen notable updates in a while.
That's fair
> it starts at $6000
The pricing/features can be (have been) debated ad infinitum, but no matter which way you slice it, it represents a huge new direction for the Mac line and at least at the high-end, industry professionals are excited about it. It's a big deal, and it's not a flop, so it should have an impact (next quarter, it seems).
> and despite complaints, the previous gen TouchBars are working decently for most people
Most people probably won't be trading in their 2018 MBPs for the new 16-inch, but given the strong feelings out there about the keyboard and airflow I'd bet some people will.
And more importantly there are people like me, who were holding off on a long-coming upgrade for a moment exactly like this, when Apple's solved the biggest issues with the design. It should've registered as some kind of sales bump, even if not a massive one.
Now I am just guessing while the new 16" made people more willing to buy a new MBP it wasn't getting them to rush and buy one. That is my case, I will likely buy this year, without the new 16" I think it was under 50% chance I bought a MBP (and a bit more likely I got some laptop I could run Ubuntu on).
I suspect both of these new models came in too late to appreciably affect the Mac quarter results, though, as the OP mentioned -- and I also suspect that the number of people who were holding off on upgrades, like you, has been steadily rising. And I know I'm not alone in looking at the 16" one and thinking it was neat but just too big. So maybe the acid test is going to be seeing what happens to sales when they update the smaller models with the new keyboard.
I pointed out in another comment that the 16" is actually slightly smaller on every dimension than the 15" 2015 MBP, even with the extra diagonal-inch of screen space:
vs Although I do believe it is slightly bigger than the 2016-2018 15"I really don't know how Apple justifies using Xeons instead of AMD Ryzen in Mac Pros. Every way you look at it - whether it's cheaper for buyers, or higher profit margin for Apple - it would seem to be the smart way to go about it.
Sometimes (often?), company relationships really stand in the way of progress.
You can't produce crap products for 5 years and expect people to use that as a reason to rush to upgrade to the latest and greatest.
Clearly you've been living under a rock. I see 15"/16" all over the place.
> The Mac Pro is just too expensive
For hobbyists. Not for its target market.
The mac pro is somewhere between "too expensive" and "too little, too late".
The standard line is that if you make $$$ using the Mac Pro - e.g. production companies - the cost is peanuts. However, they took so long to upgrade the Pro lineup that some of those would-be-buyers have already moved on to non-Apple products because working on old hardware for so long was more expensive than jumping off Apple's ship.
Certainly many stayed. But I have several friends that work in production in LA and more than one of them left Apple's ecosystem during that dry spell. They aren't coming back for an overpriced machine.
That being said, I agree with you. It's too large.
There's also still a lot of stuff I don't care for (bezel size, massive trackpad, still has an underwhelming keyboard, lack of port diversity, touchbar), but it's decent enough for me to pull the trigger if it were in a smaller package.
They gave us the esc key back, and moved away from the butterfly mechanism, etc. If it was just in a form factor similar to that of comparable dell/lenovos (<= 14"), I'd buy one and I feel like I'm not the only one.
That being said, I also echo the price concerns. You can easily spec out a 16" to over $3k - that's a lot for a laptop.
For what it's worth, it's actually slightly smaller on every dimension than the 15" 2015 MBP, even with the extra diagonal-inch of screen space:
vs Anyway, I'm sure the keyboard updates will make it to the 13" soon.Me neither BUT I noticed both my Dad and a friend try to touch my laptop screen when I was showing them something. They did so in a way that clearly they weren't even thinking about it and they just expected it to work, especially for scrolling.
People's constant use of phones, tablets and newer windows portables that support touch are changing people's expectations. People who primarily use the keyboard + touchpad/mouse are soon to be a minority (if the are not already when the wide world is considered).
Thankfully, Lenovo and Huawei have good offers.
I might just end up buying an old 2015 one. Retina display is the only thing I really want.
I narrowly preferred the feel of the butterfly keys, and I like clicky keyboards in general. But I was one of the many who had keypress failures, which was infuriating.
I've beaten the crap out of this style of keyboard, from Apple, without problems, so I'm optimistic that they've fixed the problem. This is my eighth Apple keyboard, and of them all, I've had keypress failures only on the seventh.
And yes, to answer your question, it's considerably quieter. And has an escape key. And t-shaped arrow keys. I'm pleased.
What keeps me from going back to the 2015 is that everything at home is now set up for USB-C and I would prefer to not have two separate cabling setups for the shared desk.
The battery percentage hops up/down by a few percent when it is low, eg. 7%, 10%, 9%, 7%, 4% ALERT ALERT ALERT. I would replace the battery in it, but I can't......
I do not have this problem on my 2012. Also, on my 2012 I know how much battery life I left without having to turn the thing on. Nor do I need dongles.
Plus I am not deafened by the keyboard on the 2012.
Speakers on the touchbar MBP are good though! That's the only thing I can say about it.
I'm looking forward to getting a 2nd gen 16". It's likely to line up with my upgrade cycle.
My dream is an ultra-thin, low/medium power device that essentially just runs the editor, plus a full local CLI environment and maybe some basic stuff like compilers/etc, move all the super hungry stuff like containers, databases, queues etc to the cloud. iPad is kind of there, though you're probably still going to be editing off of an SFTP share if you want to use one of the mediocre editors available on the App Store. Plus any web development is still a pipe dream given the lack of dev tooling in Safari mobile. Backend-facing development is more possible, but the Surface Pro X feels much closer to this dream.
Edit: I didn’t expect to be downvoted. Are viruses not a concern?
When I am doing serious work I need a proper keyboard, a proper mouse and two screens. Not having those reduces my productivity by at least 50%.
I mean, what benefit really is there?
If you just purchased it I would take it back for a replacement.
Very bad OS release in my opinion, and poorly handled transition (eg. secret partitions, unwritable root partitions, security popups everywhere and for every activity). I am not using it because I want to work, not wrestle with the OS. IMHO they lost that feeling in Catalina.
Their slow creep into healthcare is a particularly interesting longterm play, due to the size of the market if nothing else.
You didn't see them during games a couple of years ago... so I guess they opened a new market and people are used to them.
A lot of people wear Apple Watches when running. After they realize that the watch's battery won't survive a marathon or a hike of any significant length, they usually upgrade to a Garmin or Fitbit.
Of course 12 hours with constant heart rate monitoring will be tough, I haven’t tried that.
I ran my first half marathon race with last month with a year old Series 4. I was running the Workout app in "Outdoor Run" mode, and playing (synced) music with the Music app to Bluetooth headphones. I did the run in the morning and made it through the whole day without taking it off. Around 9pm I got a warning I only had 10% power left.
It kind of blew my mind. Here is a device tracking my route with GPS, taking my heartrate, and playing wireless music to me, for just under 3 hours, and it feels about as big as a chunky Casio watch I had when I was a kid in the 80s.
So, basically 7 days worn for 10-12 hours/day including 40ish miles of running. With heartrate. And that's the 4 year old model. The newer versions have even better battery life.
I’ve also run a road marathon with the watch without the phone.
The downside is if you’re using the Workouts app, then your data is silo’d. The upsides is that the data is local and encrypted.
I started using it a year ago after I got annoyed at the Strava iOS app failing me once a week, and haven’t had any issues since.
How terribly entitled. Presumably the rules against jewelry and wearables are meant to ensure safety in case of collisions!
The free plan offering hasn't increased as far as I know, and the devices require more and more icloud backup space, so why would you be surprised in an increase of 'service' revenues?
Or if you want to live dangerously, you don't have to turn on iCloud backups at all.
In fact, you don't have to turn on iCloud, period.
- Owning a computer
- Plugging your phone into your computer
- Having iTunes always running (if it's not a Mac)
Additionally, Apple provides a very convenient API where you can store files and have it show up on related devices after calling a sync function. Many apps which store user data use this, and it requires iCloud if you want to sync between Mac and iOS or iOS to iOS. It's a very common pattern, some popular apps that use it: GoodNotes, Studies, Notability, WhatsApp, Linea, and every Apple-made app.
You mean I have to own a computer to back up my phone to a computer that I own? Scandalous! Next thing you know, you'll tell me that I have to own a phone in order to back up my phone.
Plugging your phone into your computer
If an iPhone is charging and on the same wifi network as the computer, it will automatically sync at night. There's a checkbox for it.
Having iTunes always running
Or you just fire up iTunes when you want to sync. Once a week, or month, or whatever works for your schedule.
Many people only own an iPhone and nothing else.
> If an iPhone is charging and on the same wifi network as the computer, it will automatically sync at night.
Even fewer people have a computer that stays on all night.
> Or you just fire up iTunes when you want to sync.
Sure, something you have to remember to do.
The main point though is that many apps that have sync capabilities require iCloud. iTunes backups do not work for sync.
I would love to use iCloud Backup, but my understanding is that as soon as you do, everything that was E2E encrypted (because you're using iCloud services) immediately becomes visible to Apple.
I recommend iMazing [0]. Very well executed local backups over WiFi.
[0].
https://imazing.com/store
2012:
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/09/24/icloud-storage-... "Now that iCloud is up and running and seemingly holding up under demand, Apple needs to start offering more than 5 GB of storage at the free level."
2016:
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/08/08/google-photos-s... "I realize Apple is building up its “services” as a profit center, but 5 GB just isn’t enough for the free tier."
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/09/27/icloud-photos-c... "Surely Apple will eventually increase the storage capacity of the free tier; the sooner they do so, and the larger they make it, the better."
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/09/27/trouton-icloud-... "Apple should give all iCloud users a lot more free storage"
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/12/15/speirs-icloud-s... "This 5 GB tier is just untenable."
2018:
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/01/25/stern-icloud-st... "5 GB seems ridiculous when the company is selling $999 iPhones with 64 GB of storage."
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/05/25/icloud-storage-... "My fingers are still crossed that they’ll increase the storage capacity of the free tier at WWDC, though."
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/08/01/iphone-x-snell "I think Apple’s (Cook’s?) interest in increasing revenue from Services is keeping them from doing what’s right — increasing the base iCloud storage from 5 GB to something more reasonable."
2019:
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/11/01/snell-services "That miserly 5 GB free tier is emitting an evermore pungent nickel-and-diming aroma."
Microsoft DOS and then Windows.
I realize iPhone is an amazing amount of their revenue, but they are transitioning to a services and accessory business built around iPhone. It’s less important exactly what model iPhone you have, in my opinion.
Reducing investor visibility into a publicly traded company when numbers start turning negative is a huge flaming red flag.
Well, I think the console makers do.
Post a link proving your false claim.
Live blog: Apple’s fiscal Q4 2018 earnings call https://9to5mac.com/2018/11/01/aapl-live-blog-fy18-q4/
If you believe the strategy laid out in the parent comment to yours, then it isn't a red flag at all. For the last 10 years, the number 1 thing that contributed to Apple's growth was the iPhone. They don't believe that will be the case for the next 10 years.
I think they should release those numbers for investor clarity, but I don't think it's a red flag.
Dell, HP, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Samsung, LG... etc etc
Red Flags everywhere
This just reeks of financial engineering (buybacks/pumps/etc) taking a front seat in what should be a tech company.
Apple's ability to sell a new IPhone every year is honestly the stuff of legends, it almost defies logic but they keep on executing it.
It is a bit interesting to see misses from Macs, IPads and services. Which tells you Apple is still very much an iphone story.
And the estimate of 3 year lifecycle for wearables like the watch and airpods seems overly optimistic. My airpods are a year old and the battery dwindles in about an hour or two before needing charging, my watch is bricked after 7 months.
When the current debt bubble pops it'll be interesting if it effects Apple revenue as hard as it will the college debt / car debt markets.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIB389tqzCI
Don't they have a 1-year warrantee?
I'm in Japan and recently bought a mac mini with a 2 year interest free loan through a local company[0].
0: https://www.orico.co.jp
Anecdotally, it happens to me because the old one broke/discharge battery at alarming rate/charging port stops working/home button (back when it was physical) stuck
I'm much more satisfied with the mac line sans the immovable blocks masquerading as keyboard.
EDIT: I owned 5 iPhones over 10 years, so it's not yearly. My iPhone 4 lasted 5 years, the rest are not so fortunate.
After only 1 year?
Also, technically, they still do work.
No he hasn't. What's with the PR style nonsense with every earning release. Whether it's microsoft, apple, etc, every thread has these types of comments.
All of apple's top products were created before Cook took over in 2011.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Apple_Inc._product...
Great products Cook inherited along with loose monetary policy and one of the greatest stock market booms is what added $1 Trillion to apple's market cap.
So did you miss the part about how "wearables" -- chiefly the Watch and AirPods, which came out under Cook's watch -- is up 37% and now brings in more revenue than the Mac or the iPad, and nearly as much this quarter as Services did? And, for that matter, how services revenue is now a higher percentage of the non-iPhone revenue than any other segment, which is surely being driven in no small part by Apple Music (which is now the #1 streaming music service in the US), which also first appeared on Cook's watch?
But less than 1/5th of iphone revenue.
> And, for that matter, how services revenue is now a higher percentage of the non-iPhone revenue
And?
All you are doing is cherrypicking data. Are you saying wearables is why Apple's stock gained $1 Trillion? Good god, the paid PR-style activity on some of these posts are absurd.
https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/evc2re/apple_202...
Same with the trillion dollar comment below.
Great example explanation within here: https://daringfireball.net/2020/01/the_ipad_awkwardly_turns_...
And clearly the investment with Catalyst means they see the future as unified iOS/OSX apps.
In that by offering a product (even an inferior one) for every customer need, you smother your competitors by denying them market share.
The Hades Canyon Nucs come close, but are larger, have a power brick and are not my taste in design. But the 2x nic, graphics, storage options and price are compelling.
Bring on ARM.
They're better than anything you can find in the bracket that you place them in.
Sure, everything can always be better but I don't see much market pressure forcing it.
The move to fully 64-bit as well as Project Catalyst are significant pieces of work. Not to mention the inevitable ARM Mac which will be appearing soon.
Even Apple's own first-party Catalyst apps are a joke.
Of course, Mac OS X/OS X/macOS has had glaring issues in almost every release, but the lack of design chops and inadequate testing across the software arena (like it was shown in one of the security issues exposed by Google Project Zero) are telling examples of Tim Cook being fine as a breadth guy but not a details guy or a focused guy who can drive his teams to double down on all the software quality issues.
a. You can’t create any directories on the root filesystem any more, eg. / so you have to set up a redirection system via the synthetic.conf in /etc
b. When I run a program in Catalina under xcode for debugging, it asks me the first time to put a password in to let me debug it, every single time after reboot. Why??
c. The file system is now spread over 2 partitions (one safe modifiable one, one hidden secret one) but if you ask for the size of the partition via a system call or via df -h, it adds the TOTAL from both partitions, eg. 100GB and then tells you how much space is used for EACH parition (not total) so you get
25GB / 100GB
10GB / 100GB
This is inaccurate - I do not have 200GB total capacity. I only have 100GB. The size for each partition should be just that - the size of that partition.
d. Also, search for text in PDFs no longer works??
e. If my MacBook goes to sleep, it crashes (2012 MacBook Pro for home, on USB disk). It doesn't do this when running High Sierra off the internal disk/SSD (I upgraded the disk, yes).
I found all of these issues in half-an-hour after installing when trying to set up a dev environment on it.
It's rubbish!!
My late 2012 mbp (also with upgraded ssd and 16gb ram) is also crashing about 20% of the time whenever I put it to sleep ever since I upgraded it to Mojave. I'm not upgrading it to Catalina since I got a feeling that the issue will only get worse.
I am dreading that 2012 finally giving up. It's a MacBookPro9,1 with 2.6GHz i7. I put a 1TB SATA3 SSD in and 16GB RAM like you - still going strong. I am impressed how I've got 8 years of life out of the thing, and it's like new other than the plastic shroud under the screen.
I don't know what I will get when it finally dies - you?
I notice that my 2017 isn't any different in daily use; in fact the 2017 battery life is worse and I can hear the fan a lot of the time compared to my 2012.
Every year I've been waiting for apple to finally release a good mbp. The specs for the new 16 inch mbp seems great on paper (but without any user-upgradeable parts like the 2012, but that ship has sailed), so I'm waiting to see if any major issue shows up before getting one (probably early next year).
The backup option if the 16 inch mbp turns out to be no good is building a kvm-based hackintosh with gpu pass-through. I could fully migrate to linux, but still need MacOS for iOS app development so this system might works for me.
I won an 8086k processor (thanks Intel) and the machine is not taxed heavily (other than C++ dev in Windows and gaming) so any options for multiplatform development are always interesting to me.
Now to investigate the associated licencing issues!
People also reported great performance with hypervisors like esxi. I plan to try both methods and see which one works best for me.
The people who want the lower end of the price range are still perfectly happy with their 5-7 year old iPads. Top of the line suffers in that most people in that market are probably fine or even better off with a MacBook Air/Pro, and they may even save a few dollars instead of buying a Smart Keyboard/folio.
Related to the 10 year anniversary: the iPad should be so much more capable than it is. I don't think the people behind shipping the first iteration are happy with its current state a decade later.
Main reason I got the mini5 despite its similarity to the mini4 is that I wanted to use the pencil while sketching.
Come to think of it, I probably use it more than my iPhone.
I use a Mini 4 now and it’s fine, but compared to my iPhone 11 feels a lot slower.
The current mini is just about the perfect package to blog like it's 2004, which is my want.
I've still got the iPad Air 2 I bought in 2014. I still use it nearly every day. I still love it. I haven't seen any compelling reason to upgrade, so far.
The AD market is not exactly hugely profitable and it takes enterprise sales people to push it. That’s not the type of business Apple wants to be in.
I am very impressed and hope they've put their MacBook hardware defects era behind them. Typing this on an awesome 16-inch MBP.
In the same vein that Apple is now working on designing and building its own modem chips (with the Qualcomm agreement being a stop gap thing), I’m sure (as are thousands of others) that Apple has been working on an ARM based Mac for some years. It’s just a matter of getting enough performance to use it on a low end MacBook and getting the related details on the software side (porting x64 apps to it with lesser effort) ironed out.
https://lowlevelbits.org/bitcode-demystified/
Also as we've seen with iPad Pro + AWS M6G instances the performance is now there to power desktops.
This myth was dispelled by no less than Chris Lattner on ATP.
Even though he did later admit that he wasn’t completely being honest. Part of the purpose of the bitcode requirement for the Watch was that Apple knew that they would be shipping a 64 bit chip for the Watch two years later.
https://atp.fm/205-chris-lattner-interview-transcript
Bitcode is not [12:30] a magic solution, though. You can't take a 32-bit app, for example, and run it on a 64-bit device. That kind of portability isn’t something that Bitcode can give you, notably because that is something that's visible in C. As you're writing C code, you can write #ifdef pointer size equals 32, and that’s something that Bitcode can't abstract over. It's useful for very specific, low-level kinds of enhancements, but it isn't a panacea that makes everything [13:00] magically portable.
John Siracusa: The same thing I would assume for architecture changes, especially if there was an endian difference, because endianness is visible from the C world, so you can't target different endianness?
Chris Lattner: Yep. It's not something that magically solves all portability problems, but it is very useful for specific problems that Apple's faced in the past.
And ARM I believe has runtime-selectable endianness.
Someone demoed transpiling bitcode to x86_64, it seems going the other direction wouldn't be a big problem, it's stock clang: https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20190518-Translatin...
If I’d had a laptop like that on offer, my interest in the laptop platform would be surely rekindled as half the earth would line up around the block to buy one...
Given how impressive the recent Apple chips are, perhaps that's less of an issue now.
The US GDP is ~$21 trillion, but that's not its market cap, it's just one year's worth of production. You can't buy the USA for $21 trillion.
When I’m navigating my iPhone with swipes, it’s like I’m conducting an orchestra.
On an Android it’s more like I’m opening cabinets and drawers who’s hinges need some lubricant.
My >5 year old 6S runs the latest-and-greatest OS 13 revision, it is still smooth and useful and does essentially everything I need. It's slower than a new model, has a much lesser camera, and the NFC is useful exclusively for Apple pay. But it's still perfectly useful for me for now.
Usability is subjective, and you may like iOS more, or not - but longevity is objective. If you want to stay secure and able to run latest apps (some of which are becoming essential for some of us - e.g. taxi hailing apps in various jurisdictions), you have to upgrade your Android every 2 years, or your iPhone every 5.
Google has figured it out somewhat (3 years of updates), but even that's not enough. Most phones are actually used for 4-5 years, even if a single person doesn't use them for that long (only 2-3 years). But those phones still end-up with someone else.
Software updates should definitely account for that. I would dare say a law should be made to ensure that an electronic device should be supported for 80%+ of its typical life (again, not to be confused with how long a single individual uses that specific product, as it can have multiple owners during its life cycle).
It's also why electronic devices that don't have replaceable batteries should also be made illegal. It's a cheap trick for companies to add batteries that don't last that long as a indirect planned obsolescence.
It's just that it's very difficult to prove that they did it on purpose, as they can just say "we were just trying to lower costs when choosing the shit quality battery". And that's why it would be much better to have a law for replaceable batteries. OEMs can still add their shit batteries to devices if they want, but at least customers can replace them.
Non-Standard Quarters
For a variety of reasons, some public companies will use a non-standard or non-calendar quarterly reporting system. For example, Walmart's first quarter is February, March, and April; Apple Inc's Q1 is October, November, and December; Microsoft Corporation's Q1 is July, August, and September.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/q/quarter.asp