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People were losing their minds over the fact that iPhone shipments slightly declined. If you look at the year over year growth (excluding the massive bump for i

People were losing their minds over the fact that iPhone shipments slightly declined. If you look at the year over year growth (excluding the massive bump for iPhone 6), it would show that AAPL is still ahead of the growth curve. See https://imgur.com/vO0kPEy https://imgur.com/vO0kPEy * Apple's quarterly revenue: $75.9bil * Apple's quarterly profit: $18.4bil * Google's quarterly revenue: $21.3bil * Google's quarterly profit: $6.8bil In sheer numbers, Apple's total profit is quite a bit more than Google's so there's that.

deleted 11y ago
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VonGuard 11y ago
Very true, but Apple has been the darling for a long time, and Wall Street has be desperate to find any flaw in their plans. Apple is a big part of a lot of people's 401k and other investments, so paranoia prevails. Alphabet is only just now entering its Apple-like growth phase, however. It would seem that it could only go up, whereas at some point, Apple will saturate the market and have to start going down. Seem, mind you. This has nothing to do with reality, only with investor psychology.
bduerst 11y ago
* Apple's quarterly profit margin: 24.2% * Google's quarterly profit margin: 31.9%
bdcravens 11y ago
AAPL isn't as hot as it's been in the past, and that's ok. No company stays at the top forever. As your numbers show, Google has a higher profit margin.
npalli 11y ago
70% of the revenue and (maybe) 80% of the profit of Apple comes from a single product - the iPhone. Apple themselves have given lower guidance going forward. There is a limit to the number of people buying iPhone at huge margins every year. The total units might continue to grow but not at the current margins and not as frequently. Hard to be bullish unless some other product takes off.
- pinaceae 11y ago
  unlike Google, where practically 100% comes from one single product, which is ads. all "other bets" are actually losing money, per their data.
  - coldcode 11y ago
    People love Apple's products (for the most part). People hate ads (pretty much everyone). So this makes no sense to me at all that Google is worth more than Apple. If you imagine the future, no one really knows what each will do with all the stuff they are building, so saying Google is worth more than Apple in the future seems silly.
    - eric_h 11y ago
      > People hate ads (pretty much everyone). And yet the percentage of people who watch the Super Bowl explicitly to see the ads is a non-trivial percentage of the viewing population (obviously anecdata, but I know many people who throw super bowl parties for groups who have no interest in the football, and just want to have a party while watching the moderately amusing, big-budget ads with breaks for football in between).
      - adrusi 11y ago
        I don't think people hate ads on principle. Some do, and they're vocal, but most people hate ads because they're annoying and obnoxious. If every ad was as well produced and as tailored to the content as super bowl ads are, people would be fine with advertising. Instead we get the ugliest, most obtrusively designed 10 second animations looping alongside articles and in between paragraphs, advertising disguised as content, and tracking scripts that reveal to questionable organizations an unsavory level of detail into our lives.
    - codeka 11y ago
      > People hate ads (pretty much everyone) Except of course, the people actually paying for ads don't hate them... otherwise they wouldn't be paying for them.
mrb 11y ago
Which pretty much shows that the market value of a company is not based on what they sell today, but on the expectation of what they will sell tomorrow. Does Apple do research in biotech (Alphabet's Calico)? Are they developing drones delivering wireless internet to the world (Google's Skybender)? Do they have an investment arm (Google Ventures)? Did they start an ISP (Google Fiber)? People see Alphabet's increasing outreach that almost seems ludicrous. Then they compare this with Apple who seems to have been doing iPhones and iPads for 6-10 years, and doesn't seem to be interested in anything else (though this is slowly changing with Apple apparently getting into home automation and self-driving vehicles). It doesn't matter if it is true or not. This is what people perceive. This is what makes them value Google more than Apple. For all we know smartphones and tablets could be disrupted by another technology (the same way PCs were disrupted by phones and tablets) and Apple may not be ready for this next tech disruption, while Google is placing bets in many other markets.
- lazaroclapp 11y ago
  Apple's brand trades a lot on having extremely well finished products with very polished experiences. If they started experimenting left and right like Google does, they would lose that brand image, which is arguably their most valuable asset (even above and beyond the technology itself). If Google releases Glass and it flops, it hardly affects their image ('well, yes, it's cool technology, that's what Google does, but I don't think people want it for now...'), if Apple does the same it would be thousands of articles about how Apple is losing its touch and can't possible survive without Steve Job's genius. Maybe the only way around that is taking a page out of Alphabet's playbook and making a parent company with "riskier" subsidiaries with their own non-Apple brand?
  - samstave 11y ago
    >Apple's brand trades a lot on having extremely well finished products with very polished experiences I don't fully agree with this. Did you have the first version of the iPhone? No copy and paste? WTF. Antenna signal dropping because "you're holding it wrong!"? WTF. The only thing you can hold to the apple brand without any criticism is the industrial design of the packaging and look of their products has been consistent and un-matched. There are plenty of UX issues that have arisen that take away from the polished experience. Sure I like their products, but im not deluded to think that they are beyond reproach.
czhiddy 11y ago
If you add in the same comparison to Facebook's numbers, the valuations look even more puzzling (using the most recent quarter): * Apple's quarterly revenue: $75.9b * Apple's quarterly profit: $18.4b * Apple's market cap: $538.7b * Apple's P/E ratio: 10.24 * Google's quarterly revenue: $21.3b * Google's quarterly profit: $6.8b * Google's market cap: 517.6b (pre-earnings) * Google's P/E ratio: 35.37 (pre-earnings) * Facebook's quarterly revenue: $5.84b * Facebook's quarterly profit: $2.56b * Facebook's market cap: $319b * Facebook's P/E ratio: 89.22 Do investors really think Facebook can grow at the pace a 89.22 P/E ratio suggests? They're quickly reaching the point where everyone in the world who can get a Facebook account already has one. They're pushing hard to spread to poorer areas by offering Internet access, but how much marginal revenue/profit can a poor rural farmer add? If Facebook somehow magically increased their numbers tenfold at the same growth rate, which would make their numbers roughly match Apple's, the current P/E ratio would make them a 3.19 trillion dollar company. People knock Apple for relying too heavily on iPhone revenue, but Google gets a pass because their even more unbalance reliance on search has a "bigger moat"? Their core product, ads, is something most people despise and put up with, not something they seek out. Let's hope that some of their moonshots actually pan out.
- nl 11y ago
  Apple will always have a lower P/E because the costs associated with building and selling physical products is higher. Facebook's financials are ~1/3 Google's and so is its P/E. It's a much younger company and seems possible that's it's revenue and profit could approach Google's. I don't see anything unbelievable or even particularly unusual.
  - czhiddy 11y ago
    > I don't see anything unbelievable or even particularly unusual. Let's go back in time to a point when Apple's #'s roughly matched Googles. https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/10/18Apple-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-Results.html https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/10/18Apple-Reports-Fou... $28.27b revenue, $6.62 profit. In 2011, Apple's P/E ratio hovered around 14, with a stock price that fluctuated around $46-$56 throughout the year: http://financials.morningstar.com/valuation/price-ratio.html?t=AAPL http://financials.morningstar.com/valuation/price-ratio.html... http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl/historical http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl/historical A P/E ratio of 14, and the company basically tripled their numbers in ~4 years. Does Google's P/E of 35.7 suggests we can look forward to a rough 10x increase in Google's numbers over the next 4 years?
CptMouse 11y ago
Sorry for off-topic, but what the heck happened to Imgur? It used to be a great simple way of uploading photos, now it seems the product people managed to fuck it up thoroughly. I browse Random Mode daily, and sometimes the front page, so I get the social aspect, still there is such an insane amount of cruft there. https://i.imgur.com/T98DOZ5.png https://i.imgur.com/T98DOZ5.png
pilsetnieks 11y ago
> iPhone shipments slightly declined iPhone shipments didn't decline, iPhone shipment growth declined.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

VonGuard 11y ago

Very true, but Apple has been the darling for a long time, and Wall Street has be desperate to find any flaw in their plans. Apple is a big part of a lot of people's 401k and other investments, so paranoia prevails. Alphabet is only just now entering its Apple-like growth phase, however. It would seem that it could only go up, whereas at some point, Apple will saturate the market and have to start going down. Seem, mind you. This has nothing to do with reality, only with investor psychology.

bduerst 11y ago

* Apple's quarterly profit margin: 24.2% * Google's quarterly profit margin: 31.9%

bdcravens 11y ago

AAPL isn't as hot as it's been in the past, and that's ok. No company stays at the top forever. As your numbers show, Google has a higher profit margin.

npalli 11y ago

70% of the revenue and (maybe) 80% of the profit of Apple comes from a single product - the iPhone. Apple themselves have given lower guidance going forward. There is a limit to the number of people buying iPhone at huge margins every year. The total units might continue to grow but not at the current margins and not as frequently. Hard to be bullish unless some other product takes off.

pinaceae 11y ago
unlike Google, where practically 100% comes from one single product, which is ads. all "other bets" are actually losing money, per their data.
- coldcode 11y ago
  People love Apple's products (for the most part). People hate ads (pretty much everyone). So this makes no sense to me at all that Google is worth more than Apple. If you imagine the future, no one really knows what each will do with all the stuff they are building, so saying Google is worth more than Apple in the future seems silly.
  - eric_h 11y ago
    > People hate ads (pretty much everyone). And yet the percentage of people who watch the Super Bowl explicitly to see the ads is a non-trivial percentage of the viewing population (obviously anecdata, but I know many people who throw super bowl parties for groups who have no interest in the football, and just want to have a party while watching the moderately amusing, big-budget ads with breaks for football in between).
    - adrusi 11y ago
      I don't think people hate ads on principle. Some do, and they're vocal, but most people hate ads because they're annoying and obnoxious. If every ad was as well produced and as tailored to the content as super bowl ads are, people would be fine with advertising. Instead we get the ugliest, most obtrusively designed 10 second animations looping alongside articles and in between paragraphs, advertising disguised as content, and tracking scripts that reveal to questionable organizations an unsavory level of detail into our lives.
  - codeka 11y ago
    > People hate ads (pretty much everyone) Except of course, the people actually paying for ads don't hate them... otherwise they wouldn't be paying for them.

mrb 11y ago

Which pretty much shows that the market value of a company is not based on what they sell today, but on the expectation of what they will sell tomorrow. Does Apple do research in biotech (Alphabet's Calico)? Are they developing drones delivering wireless internet to the world (Google's Skybender)? Do they have an investment arm (Google Ventures)? Did they start an ISP (Google Fiber)? People see Alphabet's increasing outreach that almost seems ludicrous. Then they compare this with Apple who seems to have been doing iPhones and iPads for 6-10 years, and doesn't seem to be interested in anything else (though this is slowly changing with Apple apparently getting into home automation and self-driving vehicles). It doesn't matter if it is true or not. This is what people perceive. This is what makes them value Google more than Apple. For all we know smartphones and tablets could be disrupted by another technology (the same way PCs were disrupted by phones and tablets) and Apple may not be ready for this next tech disruption, while Google is placing bets in many other markets.

lazaroclapp 11y ago
Apple's brand trades a lot on having extremely well finished products with very polished experiences. If they started experimenting left and right like Google does, they would lose that brand image, which is arguably their most valuable asset (even above and beyond the technology itself). If Google releases Glass and it flops, it hardly affects their image ('well, yes, it's cool technology, that's what Google does, but I don't think people want it for now...'), if Apple does the same it would be thousands of articles about how Apple is losing its touch and can't possible survive without Steve Job's genius. Maybe the only way around that is taking a page out of Alphabet's playbook and making a parent company with "riskier" subsidiaries with their own non-Apple brand?
- samstave 11y ago
  >Apple's brand trades a lot on having extremely well finished products with very polished experiences I don't fully agree with this. Did you have the first version of the iPhone? No copy and paste? WTF. Antenna signal dropping because "you're holding it wrong!"? WTF. The only thing you can hold to the apple brand without any criticism is the industrial design of the packaging and look of their products has been consistent and un-matched. There are plenty of UX issues that have arisen that take away from the polished experience. Sure I like their products, but im not deluded to think that they are beyond reproach.

czhiddy 11y ago

If you add in the same comparison to Facebook's numbers, the valuations look even more puzzling (using the most recent quarter): * Apple's quarterly revenue: $75.9b * Apple's quarterly profit: $18.4b * Apple's market cap: $538.7b * Apple's P/E ratio: 10.24 * Google's quarterly revenue: $21.3b * Google's quarterly profit: $6.8b * Google's market cap: 517.6b (pre-earnings) * Google's P/E ratio: 35.37 (pre-earnings) * Facebook's quarterly revenue: $5.84b * Facebook's quarterly profit: $2.56b * Facebook's market cap: $319b * Facebook's P/E ratio: 89.22 Do investors really think Facebook can grow at the pace a 89.22 P/E ratio suggests? They're quickly reaching the point where everyone in the world who can get a Facebook account already has one. They're pushing hard to spread to poorer areas by offering Internet access, but how much marginal revenue/profit can a poor rural farmer add? If Facebook somehow magically increased their numbers tenfold at the same growth rate, which would make their numbers roughly match Apple's, the current P/E ratio would make them a 3.19 trillion dollar company. People knock Apple for relying too heavily on iPhone revenue, but Google gets a pass because their even more unbalance reliance on search has a "bigger moat"? Their core product, ads, is something most people despise and put up with, not something they seek out. Let's hope that some of their moonshots actually pan out.

nl 11y ago
Apple will always have a lower P/E because the costs associated with building and selling physical products is higher. Facebook's financials are ~1/3 Google's and so is its P/E. It's a much younger company and seems possible that's it's revenue and profit could approach Google's. I don't see anything unbelievable or even particularly unusual.
- czhiddy 11y ago
  > I don't see anything unbelievable or even particularly unusual. Let's go back in time to a point when Apple's #'s roughly matched Googles. https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/10/18Apple-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-Results.html https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2011/10/18Apple-Reports-Fou... $28.27b revenue, $6.62 profit. In 2011, Apple's P/E ratio hovered around 14, with a stock price that fluctuated around $46-$56 throughout the year: http://financials.morningstar.com/valuation/price-ratio.html?t=AAPL http://financials.morningstar.com/valuation/price-ratio.html... http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl/historical http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl/historical A P/E ratio of 14, and the company basically tripled their numbers in ~4 years. Does Google's P/E of 35.7 suggests we can look forward to a rough 10x increase in Google's numbers over the next 4 years?

CptMouse 11y ago

Sorry for off-topic, but what the heck happened to Imgur? It used to be a great simple way of uploading photos, now it seems the product people managed to fuck it up thoroughly. I browse Random Mode daily, and sometimes the front page, so I get the social aspect, still there is such an insane amount of cruft there. https://i.imgur.com/T98DOZ5.png https://i.imgur.com/T98DOZ5.png

pilsetnieks 11y ago

> iPhone shipments slightly declined iPhone shipments didn't decline, iPhone shipment growth declined.