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Apple Obliterates Q3 Earnings Estimates: Best Mac Sales Ever, Huge iPad Numbers
- tomerico 16y agoIt's amazing that the iPad's first full quarter sales nearly matches the entire mac lineup's best quarter all time. (In terms of number of units)
- pchristensen 16y agoWell, the iPad number is impressive, but they cost a whole lot less than Macs.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- stevederico 16y agoiPad Rev 2 billion vs Mac Rev 3 Billion. Its more than impressive its outstanding. http://mashable.com/2010/07/20/ipad-revenue/ http://mashable.com/2010/07/20/ipad-revenue/
- callmeed 16y agoExcept the mini
- silentOpen 16y agoThe mini's recent refresh made its base cost $699, actually.
- el_chapitan 16y agoThey do cost a whole lot less, but I wonder how much the cost to make. In other words, what is the profit margin on each one?
- hristov 16y agoWell the article said that Apple had a slightly smaller profit margin than that of previous years and they blamed that on the iPad. So it seems that the iPad profit margin is smaller than that of the Macs and iPhone.
- steve19 16y agoYes, and it is also a new type of product. Macs (and PCs) have been around for decades.
- nopal 16y agoAre you saying it should have been easier or harder for Apple to move this many units?
- OrangeGuutan 16y agoI imagine steve19 is saying it should be easier to move iPads than Mac computers. People already have computers in the traditional sense and are generally happy with them; there isn't a pressing need to upgrade more than every few years. In contrast with this is the iPad, a brand new product that people can purchase on an impulse (due to its lower-than-a-computer price) and show off to friends.
- MaysonL 16y ago61% year-over-year revenue growth: simply astounding.
- smackfu 16y agoAnd for that the stock is up 3% after hours.
- maukdaddy 16y agoI can't tell if you're being snarky or not. Keep in mind that expectations of future earnings are already priced into the stock, so the 3% gain you're seeing is for the earnings ABOVE expectations/estimates. Other factors, including uncertainty over antennagate, will also keep the stock from making a huge jump.
- ubernostrum 16y agoIt's more that Apple's stock behaves in completely irrational ways; typically, news which would cause any other company's stock to skyrocket instead causes Apple's to plummet. In the past, "analysts" such as Jim Cramer have admitted to deliberately manipulating the market to produce this effect, which may provide some explanation, but there seems to be a consistent trend of underestimating/undervaluing Apple regardless of how many consecutive quarters of stellar performance they crank out.
- brisance 16y agoIt's not irrational. The traders essentially control the stock market and call the shots by manipulating the market into a favorable position then sell the stock. A glut of shares appearing on the market would thus drive the price down. The term is called "profit taking". http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/profittaking.asp http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/profittaking.asp
- phob 16y agoAccording to your conspiracy theory, the price is sometimes artificially low and sometimes artificially high. Why haven't you made a profit by short selling? Why wouldn't a competing company?
- schammy 16y agoCan anyone tell me why this matters? In the context of "hacker" "news", I mean.
- sunir 16y agoApple is creating a market around the iPhone and iPad, and therefore changing the industry of computation, which will change the way startups (NB: this place used to be called Startup News) and hackers prioritize activities for the next few years at least. Why do you think it doesn't matter?
- schammy 16y agoAnd how does Apple's revenue apply to that exactly? Why does it need to be posted to HN every quarter and make top story? Everyone knows they're doing well. No one but the fanboys and shareholders care about their actual revenue/profits.
- Groxx 16y agoQ: Why does it need to be posted to HN every quarter and make top story? A: Why does it need to be posted to HN [by HN users] every quarter and make top story [because HN users have voted it up]? The community (which is why the site exists) hath spoken!
- derefr 16y agoNo. This conception of "the democracy makes the rules" is what turns sites into inane cat-picture/political-argument factories. Tiny democracies can work as closed systems, but when they're open to people entering/leaving them, every change will precipitate a change in membership to realign the community's interests with the change. This causes a positive feedback loop, where eventually, for example, nobody is left except Apple addicts. Sites have purposes (otherwise, there would only need to be one website on the Internet, that served everyone's needs equally.) Letting the community decide both what, and who, the community is to be composed of, leads inevitably to every community being composed of "everyone," and having a purpose of "general interest." I, for one, would rather have a place that just has "Hacker News."
- dman 16y agoWonder what new products they are talking about. mac pro refresh ? apple tv ? ipad with retina display ?
- pkaler 16y agoProbably MobileMe and iWork.com. The new version of iDisk on the iPhone streams music. I'm guessing second half of 2010 will be a big cloud push.
- thought_alarm 16y agoMagic Bluetooth Trackpad, New iPod Touch with FaceTime, new Apple TV, new iLife and iWork software, and perhaps one other thing no one's expecting.
- alanthonyc 16y agoDon't forget the new data center. It's supposed to be operational by the end of the year. Some cloud thingy is coming. Personally, I can't wait for the Magic Trackpad.
- wvenable 16y agoI suspect there will be a new iPod Nano device before Christmas. A new Touch seems very likely.
- ido 16y agoiPad Nano! Same as the iPad, but in a small convenient package that fits in your pocket.
- Groxx 16y ago>iTunes store rev exceeded $1 billion. For that quarter? Wow, if they keep that up for a year, they'll essentially match revenue of physical music sales[1]. Remind me... why did the music industry think no-DRM would tank them? [1] 2008-2009 US shipment numbers: http://www.riaa.com/keystatistics.php?content_selector=2008-2009-U.S-Shipment-Numbers http://www.riaa.com/keystatistics.php?content_selector=2008-...
- sandipc 16y agoI think that includes app store numbers... but yeah, still impressive
- Groxx 16y agoAh, very good point. I don't know if they differentiate... looking at it again with that in mind, I doubt it.
- w1ntermute 16y agoAnd movies & TV shows.
- evo_9 16y agoI wonder if the various pundits predicting the end of the Mac line are taking note of this.
- bonaldi 16y agoThat the Mac, which has a huge product line and a much more complicated OS and so is harder to develop and support for than the iOS machines, is only just barely outselling the brand-new rev 1 iPad? Yeah, I think they're taking note of this.
- scrod 16y ago>...and so is harder to develop and support for than the iOS machines... Harder to develop because you can use the programming language and runtime of your choosing, including the exact same APIs that are on iOS, or harder because you don't have to cross-compile your app for an embedded platform and test it on a remote machine whose internals you aren't allowed to change or inspect? Maybe you meant harder because there's no convoluted chain of constantly-expiring certificates needed for testing and deployment, or because you have far more RAM, disk space, screen space, and CPU cycles available, or because you can run as root or even in kernel mode to extend the OS in ways that Apple hadn't imagined instead of playing along as their dancing promotional puppet app, which they can kick to the curb on a whim? Or maybe you meant it's harder to support because users have to drag an icon (which they received from a web site in a single click) into their applications folder, instead of thumbing through 200 seemingly-identical app listings with terse descriptions and then fumbling to enter the same iTunes account password for the 90th time, re-agreeing to yet another slightly different revision of a 28-page-long terms of service and then going back and entering the same iTunes account password because iOS forgot you were actually downloading an app? Ah, of course, now I see what you mean.
- wtallis 16y agoEven if iOS devices completely eclipse the Mac lineup, it can stay around as a profitable business for quite a while: All the big new features in Mac OS X recently have been driven by or also developed for iOS (Core Animation, OpenCL, GCD, Exchange support, etc.), so clearly it won't cost Apple much to maintain Mac OS X. The desktops and laptops have been a fairly slow-moving target lately, and particularly for the laptops they haven't been doing much in the way of revolutionary hardware design since introducing the unibody enclosures. Apple's relatively high profit margins also mean that sales can fall to a very low level before a product line becomes unprofitable. When you also consider how much easier it is to maintain Mac OS X as an iOS development platform than to make Windows a good development platform (due to the strong similarities between iOS and Mac OS X and Apple's control over both), and when you consider that Apple doesn't have any trouble attracting iOS developers in spite of the Mac-only development tools, it's pretty clear that the Mac can keep making Apple money, even if they don't put much work in to it.
- ThomPete 16y agoI wonder whether Apples ability make the solutions they do and have the success that they have is based on the fact that they have more or less total vertical integration. We know they have the best ecosystem out there, but there must be other things too. It does show one thing though. Google still have a lot to learn outside of advertising. In fact I believe google will fail building any serious kind of business around their mobile attempts.
- patrickaljord 16y agohttp://techcrunch.com/2010/07/15/android-costs/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/15/android-costs/ tl;dr the point of Android is so Google can put their ads on it. To that extend it is already a success given that google mobile ads were banned on the iphone and probably will be too on BB and windows mobile and that android phones are already outselling the iphones (all together, which is all that matters to Google).
- niels_olson 16y agoAnything as big as android has more than one purpose.
- pavs 16y agoGoogle is not competing with Apple on devices. Google is more interested in an ecosystem where they won't be at the mercy of other companies. Imagine a vibrant, rapidly expanding mobile internet devices and google doesn't have any footprint on it. They would have to rely on Apple and other smart phone manufacturer not screwing with them, literally being at their mercy. With Android, this is not the case anymore. Even if Apple decides to screw with Google and provides Bing as default choice for all their products across the board, they have other options.
- axod 16y agoThey seem to be opening lots of Apple stores here (UK, South East).
- xenophanes 16y agoI wonder when was the last time any professional analyst overestimated Apple's upcoming quarterly earnings.
- yannk 16y agoI'm impressed and a little worried... how will they keep up? Sure there have been some major hiccups - but, great, appealing products and vision easily compensated for that.
- stevederico 16y agoListen to the Earnings Call Here: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/earningsq310/ http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/earningsq310/ They stated the NC datacenter will be completed and operating by the end of the year. Streaming iTunes could be announced before we know it. I found the "halo" effect they described particularly interesting. Data has shown, customers buying an iPhone as their first apple product come back and buy more Apple products. They are now seeing this trend in the iPad as well... Furthermore, they can't make the iphone4/ipad fast enough. The demand streams are simply insane and unlike any other products available today. </fanboy>
- adbge 16y agoThey should call it the all-my-shit-is-locked-into-iTunes effect.
- ptomato 16y agoWhich shit would that be? Video? That's a pretty small part of iTunes overall revenue... And even that plays just fine on Windows computers.
- ubernostrum 16y agoAre you also one of those people who believes iPods can only play music purchased from the iTunes store?
- ora600 16y agoBut the reverse is true. If you bought music from iTunes you can't play it elsewhere. Since iTunes are a convenient way to purchase music, some of us ended up with large quantities of music tied to Apple's devices.
- allertonm 16y agoYou know, I can't remember the last time I bought a DRM track from iTunes, and trust me, I buy a lot of tracks on iTunes.
- joubert 16y agoAnd without stimulus money.
- mikecane 16y agoDid they break out the iPod numbers? That had a decline. I'd like to know if that was due specifically to the non-Touch iPod. And if Touch sales actually went up when broken out.
- dmnd 16y agoiPod sales down slightly, but iPod Touch up 48% year-over-year. Source: http://www.macrumors.com/2010/07/20/apple-reports-profit-of-3-25-billion-in-q3-2010-on-record-15-7-billion-revenue/ http://www.macrumors.com/2010/07/20/apple-reports-profit-of-...
- tlrobinson 16y agoOver a billion dollars of profit per month. Holy crap.
- callmeed 16y agoFor the savvy traders here on HN: would you buy AAPL right now? Did/does this report change your mind?
- wisty 16y agoI'm not a trader, but it seems to me that the whole "antennagate" thing had a disproportionate effect on the share price. They compare it to MS Vista, or Toyota's brake problems. It's a one-off engineering flaw. Vista flopped because XP is good enough for looking at LolCatz, and it lacked tangible innovations - a sign that Microsoft's ability to bring innovative products to market has gotten congested. Toyota's brake problems puts people in fear of their lives. When Apple lost 5% market cap, it was obvious that people were panicking. They could easily afford free bumpers, and a free upgrade to affected customers when the next iPhone comes out, for the price of the downgrades they were getting. If they don't hand out free stuff, it's because they have an even better option - to point out that all phones have reception issues, and maybe then blame AT&T.
- ars 16y agoDefinitely don't buy now. Buy when no one is thinking about apple - i.e. when it's not in the news (or at least when the news is bad).
- mrtron 16y agoWhich won't happen in the next 5 years. (just so someone can come back and quote at one of us in 6 months...) Now seems like a reasonable time looking at the fundamentals and ignoring the antenna issue.
- phob 16y agoHow do you know that Apple won't gain even more share and profits than anticipated next year? Shouldn't you be short selling instead? I think you're falling to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_effect
- etherael 16y agoSomewhat interesting in light of http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/07/iphone-second-quarter-2010-in-bloodbath-market-share-is-declining-where-all-big-rivals-picking-up.html http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/07/iphone-...
- HSO 16y agoI wonder when Apple will take a higher share in the enterprise market, i.e. when the "halo effect" from use of iphones, later maybe ipads, in big corp.s will lead to increased use of macs/os x there too. if it happens, i.e. when os x reaches a certain threshold of trust or viability in enterprise systems, it will probably be something that happens quite fast. in a sense, there'll be a network or lemming effect where you'd just need one big firm to switch to make it "acceptable" for other "orifices" to do so too.
- atlbeer 16y agoiPad's (at least in my office Fortune500) are very much the new must have tech executive toy. Toy is probably the wrong word as they are carried everywhere to every meeting.
- allenp 16y agoThis is interesting - do you think a RIM or HP (Palm) tablet would make the same in-roads if the functionality/aesthetics were good enough? Is the iPad a social marker or is it filling a functional need?
- rmc 16y agoI suspect it isn't 'trust' that's holding OSX back in the enterprise world, but the software available (or lack thereof). If so, then it can't be a fast change.
- sigzero 16y agoThis isn't the quarter to watch. Next quarter should be interesting to see if "antennagate" ruptures the Apple containment field.