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Apple Reports Second Quarter Results
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- InTheArena 5y agoRevenue up 54%, $89B in Q2. M1 macs are a hit. Services are a hit. It's remarkable to see the success that AMD and Apple are having without Intel.
- 1cvmask 5y agoThe macs are unfortunately still a sideshow compared to iOS devices (written on an iPad now).
- faitswulff 5y agoAll related - iOS has never run on Intel.
- ant6n 5y agoIn the emulator, err, simulator it does, doesn’t it?
- qeternity 5y agoOnly because the dev hardware ran x86. Now with M1, you won’t need to.
- philistine 5y agoWhat's most important is not how the apps are developed, but what the hardware runs on.
- busymom0 5y agoiOS apps do run on Intel using catalyst. I recently ported over my hacker news client from iOS to MacOS and it works well on catalyst with small changes to handle right click and toolbar color etc. I was legit pleased to see how easy it was to get it working.
- twobitshifter 5y agoI’ve been considering dropping Spotify for the “Apple One” plan, looks like I’m not the only one from that huge jump in services.
- vmception 5y agoI really questions people's decision making process when I see them on Apple Music or Apple Maps I'm not the only one
- epistasis 5y agoI've had terrible terrible experiences with Apple Music, and there are far better options out there. But the alternative for Maps is Google, and the last thing I want to do is give them a bead on my current location and all the places I want to go and explore. With Google's ownership of so much information, I think anybody avoiding Google Maps is very well justified.
- vmception 5y agoThe point is to be navigated to the correct location. Just as recently as December in Los Angeles, an address on the beach sent a skin starved date to an alleyway 10 minutes inland that she was totally cool with being in, and I had to tell her to Apple Maps likely did that, whereas Google Maps matched my much more romantic location. Could the opposite happen? I guess. Does it though?
- epistasis 5y agoThats never been my experience, but I really only have my own to go on. However, in the early days of Google Maps, when MapQuest was still around and before cars had in-dash navigation, Google Maps did give me bad directions for driving, that I had printed out, and made me late. I still ended up using Google Maps, and they got better. I will still use Google Maps to discover biking routes in unfamiliar areas, so I do give up my location to them occasionally, but in my experience that's the only edge that Google Maps has these days.
- loloquwowndueo 5y agoSorry, I doubt AMD would be where they are now had they not been a second source for Intel’s x86 chips, that’s what really bootstrapped them.
- lurkerasdfh8 5y agoM1 is meaningless. To 99% of their market it is just a new vague number to justify an upgrade (like ram sizes, 3/4/5G, etc). What is masterful is how they redirected the desirable-number-du-jour to be something that is both 1) proprietary and 2) not cutting into their service revenue (e.g. larger storage = less people shelling out for cloud storage)
- valine 5y agoThe M1 is far from meaningless. Apple's new MacBook Air is by far the best laptop I've ever used. It has fantastic battery life, stays cool without a fan, and competes with the Intel i9 in terms of performance.
- lurkerasdfh8 5y agoYou are literally repeating the same marketing/self-justification that everyone said for every new Air model. Don't take my word, look it up. Around launch date, everyone in the universe will post "new MacBook Air is by far the best laptop I've ever used. It has fantastic battery life". Then the same model 6-12mo later "I loved the thinness, but now it's being too slow for X so I might get a macbook"
- valine 5y agoApple had never release a MacBook Air that's faster than the previous top of the line MacBook Pro. This is a first. The air has had great battery for a while that's true, but now it has great battery and great performance.
- TheRealSteel 5y agoI find it very interesting that due to the existence of the Emoji Bar, and the lower performance and worse battery life due to Apple Silicon, the MacBook Air is now a far more Pro machine than the 15 inch MacBook Pro.
- 5y ago
- halotrope 5y agoWhen Steve Jobs passed in 2011 I was certain that Apple would lose its way and start diluting their products/brand. To the contrary the last 10 years where an absolute tour the force in expansion of the spirit of Apple. Sure there where some issues. There always are. But in general it is incredible how they scaled to such epic proportions while maintaining this high level of discipline and excellence. I am amazed. Congratulations to the people who made it possible. Edit: typo
- justicezyx 5y agoWhat is "the spirit of Apple"?
- amelius 5y agoThink different.
- slt2021 5y agoextracting as much of "Apple premium" out of brand-loyal customers as possible and keeping that "Apple premium" perception in consumers' minds
- halotrope 5y agoFocus, products instilled with culture, starting with the user experience, attention to detail, cohesive ecosystem, good design, delivering high quality products at the lowest price possible, not shipping things that are not ready.
- loloquwowndueo 5y ago“Quality products at Lowest price possible” you’re probably being sarcastic. Just look at wired AirPods, among the most maligned earbud headphones and quite expensive within their category.
- NationalPark 5y agoThe $19 EarPods?
- Steve886 5y agoApple folks - if you missed Apple's earnings call, here you go https://youtu.be/kTIUcdfcmF4 https://youtu.be/kTIUcdfcmF4
- surfer7837 5y agoblew it out the park AAPL is up 3% after hours (so $60bn or so)
- ant6n 5y agoIt seems most of the incredible performance is already priced in.
- qeternity 5y agoMost people don’t understand that bank analysts (the people whose estimates get averaged for every “Apple beats estimates” headline) are complete jokes. Research departments are there to support the sale of bank services, and making management look amazing by having lowball estimates creates good relationship with the IB desks. The markets trade on whisper numbers, which are what people with skin in the game are expecting. This is why you often see a name that beats estimates and drops...it’s because they missed the whisper numbers.
- microtherion 5y agoI doubt that this played a role here. Apple traded more or less flat over the quarter. If there were whisper numbers of even better results than what turned out to be a massively successful quarter, one should have seen the stock price go up significantly over the quarter.
- smiley1437 5y agoHow much is due to Covid, and how much is due to Jony Ive's departure? The designs seem to make a bit more sense now, I was always perplexed at Ive's 'thinness at the expense of everything else' mindset (butterfly switch keyboard, ugh)
- robenkleene 5y agoHere's my speculation: After the stellar early growth years for the iPad (here are some graphs from 2015 https://qz.com/376041/the-ipads-first-five-years-in-five-charts/ https://qz.com/376041/the-ipads-first-five-years-in-five-cha...), there was an impression at the Apple that the future of the Mac is iOS. Then that growth leveled off, and now iPad looks more like a comparable category to Macs (see the more recent Six Colors graphs https://sixcolors.com/post/2021/04/apples-record-second-quarter-in-charts/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2021/04/apples-record-second-quar...). So Apple appears to have been asleep at the wheel with the Mac (which is perhaps why Ive's had so much leeway with clearly unpopular decisions like the keyboard, missing escape key, etc...) resulting in its worst years ever. The laptop keyboard is one example, but the iOS-ification of the Mac is another (i.e., moving towards the iOS security model), as is the stagnate Mac Pro. Now things are back to normal, see the M1, the new Mac Pro, the new iMac, etc... The M1 transition going so smoothly, and with such an emphasis on backwards compatibility (they ported OpenCL! they helped with Blender!) is my favorite example of this, contrasted with the complete &$@^*% you! treatment that developers got with things like notarization, new security features, and pretty much everything recent going all the way back to Mac App Store Sandboxing, which I'd personally consider the start of the dark years (and I'd also consider that the single worst decision in all of this, worse than the keyboard, that's the one that fundamentally broke the Mac ecosystem, maybe forever).
- dangus 5y agoWhile I don't think your analysis is wrong, I think it's highly developer and power user focused, representing a very small percentage of Mac owners. iOS-ification of macOS in particular is incredibly overblown, power users have been playing up a few security design changes and modernized APIs (e.g. kext > system extensions) as if they're huge negatives that will "ruin" macOS. I just don't think those issues matter. If the Mac itself improving was part of the Q2 results, you wouldn't have seen the similar levels of iPad revenue spike. There has been no significant change to the iPad lineup that would convince someone to buy or not buy in the last couple of years. That's why I think this is 100% Covid or whatever you call this current spike in demand.
- johnmorrison 5y agoDumb Q - why is it called Second Quarter results when this is the end of the first quarter of the calendar year?
- dinglefairy 5y agocorporation's fiscal year start and end could be any quarter depending on when the accounting started.
- throwawaysea 5y agoCompanies often have a "fiscal year" that is their own made-up 12-month period that may not align with the regular calendar year: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fiscalyear.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fiscalyear.asp
- verdverm 5y agoAccounting calendars do not always align with the "normal" calendar. Companies can choose their own cycles (generally)
- a-posteriori 5y agoApple's fiscal year (internal accounting year) ends Sept, 30th instead of being aligned with the calendar year.
- secabeen 5y agoThis is very common for companies with holiday-linked or time-linked sales. It's much easier to make your big chunk of sales in Q1 (October-December for Apple), then have the rest of your fiscal year to spend that money. Getting all your revenue in Q4 is much harder to budget around.
- kshacker 5y agoBTW it is not 'exactly' September 30, it is usually last Saturday in September. So it does not even align at a 'calendar month' boundary.
- deleted 5y ago
- jchw 5y agoI’m very curious to see where it goes from here. In particular with M1... more memory, more cores, higher frequencies? I’m pretty impressed with the M1 Mac Mini and look forward to follow ups and the Linux porting efforts, too. With other companies announcing their own custom CPU designs, I wonder if we are entering into a new era of some kind.
- MengerSponge 5y agoM1 is a very impressive chip, but it can't compete with the Threadripper/Xeon club. It really has trouble with the high-end laptop club too. You can say "16gb is enough if you swap efficiently", but I run models that need 100+GB on the regular. I'd love to see what a super high-end Apple core can do to that workload!
- perardi 5y agoI, too, want my rocket car Mac. But we haven’t seen what they can really do yet. The M1 sure “feels” like an iPad SoC, what with the weirdness with some of the ports and bus limitations. (External displays: little off-kilter right now in terms of limitations.) I’m optimistic they are preparing some real firepower for a 30-inch iMac and 16-inch MacBook Pro. Or at least, I sure hope so, as I type here, looking at this damned useless OLED strip above my keyboard as my leg hairs are slowly burned away.
- jchw 5y agoWell, that’s why I’m curious where it goes from here. I don’t think Apple is under the impression that 16 GiB of RAM is enough to phase out their entire line-up of Intel-based computers, which is apparently the goal. All eyes are definitely going towards what the higher end machines will look like. It’s easy to doubt them, but it was also pretty easy to doubt their claims regarding the M1, too. All in all, I think it’s impossible to draw any hard conclusions from here. We all have to wait and see.
- odshoifsdhfs 5y agoI find this train of thought fascinating. "I am in the 0.0001% of the people that need 100+Gb ram", so it seems this massive hit of a cpu/laptop, where everyone is raving about it, is not so good when I compare it to what I need that are thousands of a percent of what regular people use. I'm a developer, I bought the M1 mbp with 8 (yes eight) gb of ram, for testing and was supposed to then be my gf's machine. You know what, almost 6 months in, she still hasn't touched it. I would maybe go for 16gb in the next one, but she will pry it from my cold dead hands before I get a newer model and she can keep this one.
- meepmorp 5y agoMac revenues went from $5.351B to $9.102B from 2020. 70% up.
- andy_ppp 5y agoI bet what 2/3 non-Intel? That means an extra (complete stab in the dark) 1/2 a billion ish $ in extra profit every quarter, maybe more!
- klelatti 5y agoSounds about right - which would mean 1.5% or so addition to gross margin - fairly material.
- andy_ppp 5y agoI’m assuming Intel processors even at the scale Apple buy them go for $50-100 of the retail price, maybe more? I’m guessing whatever they’re paying Intel it’s fractions on the dollar producing them through TSMC.
- anaclet0 5y ago$90 billion in buybacks is insane. IIRC analysts were expecting something between $70-$80 billion.
- MattGaiser 5y agoHere restarts the buyback boom.
- wombatmobile 5y ago“This quarter reflects both the enduring ways our products have helped our users meet this moment in their own lives, as well as the optimism consumers seem to feel about better days ahead for all of us,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. What a skilfully crafted piece of rhetoric that is. For a moment, I forgot I was in the gutter and imagined we were all united, looking at the stars.
- dylan604 5y agoIt's on par with all of their propaganda. Their WWDC and product release events are all written like that.
- linux2647 5y agoSix Colors offers some graphs of the earnings from the call: https://sixcolors.com/post/2021/04/apples-record-second-quarter-in-charts/ https://sixcolors.com/post/2021/04/apples-record-second-quar...
- spaetzleesser 5y agoLooking at this makes me wish companies lie like Apple didn’t get into services. They will do it because there is a lot of money to be made but it creates a lot of incentive to force their services deeply into the OS and reduce openness. It would be much better for innovation if Apple produced good hardware and OS as a platform for others to deliver services and application software.
- Synaesthesia 5y agoOne of the roles of their services division is to get customers for their hardware and keep them. Eg iMessage for iPhone, the App Store
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoThat works both ways, I'm pretty sure the Apple TV only exists to sell entertainment services.
- derefr 5y ago"Services" doesn't solely mean "subscription services." Apple's cut of app-store app sales is "services" revenue; as are individual songs/TV shows/movies sold through iTunes. Nothing inherently wrong with those lines of business, IMHO.
- kristiandupont 5y agoAgreed. The fact that there is a little banner in my settings app that says "Apple Arcade 3 months available free" annoys me. In fact, it creeps me out. Obviously that little banner is easy to ignore and on its own it's no big deal, but it feels like a yellow flag like if a friend jokingly hints that they really need a glass of wine in the morning, and you know that their social circle is full of alcoholics.
- gnicholas 5y agoShares are currently up 3% in after hours trading, at $136.70.
- pwinnski 5y agoGood grief, Q2 profit higher than all previous quarters through 2020! That company is a money-making operation that doesn't even seem to slow down. This worries me, as that seems like it inevitably leads to pursuit of profit over all else, to the detriment of everybody but shareholders.
- ebr4him 5y agoI'd argue its the opposite: If you do something really really well then the money follows. Apple products come at a premium, but you can't deny the fact they also offer substantially more in many ways than their counterparts.
- enos_feedler 5y agoThere is no basis for this assumption. Under your model there is no way for a company to overachieve and continue doing right by their customers. A bit pessimistic.
- kaba0 5y agoWell, as soon as a company’s profit is not aligned with the customers’ goals, it would happen. The question is always which road is more profitable.
- enos_feedler 5y agoRight, but that clearly isn't happening. So where does the worry come from?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]