Report on Apple Financial statement

74 BILLION dollars of business. In three months. With a profit margin of something like 25%. Ridiculous.

'Course, it'd be less if they paid any taxes...

18 billion profit in a quarter = 18,000,000,000
Let's say 31+30+31= 92 days
So that's 195,652,173 a day
8,152,174 an hour
135,869 a minute
2264 dollars a second in profit.

I heard a stat this morning : Apple has enough cash in it's bank account to buy 480 of the top 500 other companies on the US stock markets. That's not 'buy any of the 480 smallest of the top 500', that's buy ALL of the smallest 480 of the top 500. Together. Meaning if they wanted to completely throw away all their money doing so, the US would effectively be left with Apple and nineteen other major companies. Most of which dig for oil.

Jon

shouldn't have bought Macintosh, should have bought Aapl.

Yeah.

It's a bit hard to say exactly since they did a "We'll give you seven shares for each share you have but they'll be worth less" a while ago, but the rough estimate is that any given investment in Apple shares will have roughly tripled in value over about the last 18 months.

Apple is, of course, doomed once Samsung gets going.

There's something about this I don't get.
The first few generations of iPhone were more expensive than the competition, but the phones from the competition we arguably inferior.
For example my first top end HTC has less build in storage etc, though it did support SD cards, some apps etc couldn't be moved to it. Maybe earlier Android builds weren't quite as slick as iOS (though I still prefered Android when I tried them both out).
As such you could see how people would spend more an a slicker and more stylish iPhone.

But these days iPhone are still more expensive, but the competition has caught in in terms of style, hardware specs, OS slickness etc.
So why do people still pay a large premium for Apple phones? I just don't get it any more. There's been nothing revolutionary about the iPhone 5 and 6. (I can see the arguement for tablets as Android ones haven't quite reached that level of refinement yet).

Hardware specs, yes. In fact, I'd argue that there have been Android phones with better specs than any iPhone available for most of the last say three years. The others are subjective so you're never going to get general agreement on what is 'better'.


Because you're an engineer. You think in terms of quantifiable things. A lot of people don't, they think in more subjective terms and you can't rationlise that. Plus you have to account for previous investment - with smartphones the vast majority of people are going to upgrade to a smartphone that will run the apps they've already paid for. So iPhone and Android users are both going to stick with that they're already on. Given iOS was first out of the blocks with that ecosystem, they have an advantage in this regard.

I'll take that as a compliment.

True. I've taken advantage of that myself when I've switched between Android phones. However given that you can moved your Android apps between many different manufacturers, and that Android has more users, I'm not sure how true that is. Of course you correctly point out people have been using iOS apps much longer so will have more of a product build up.
I also guess people have been locked in by some of Apple's restrictive policies about thing being bought on iTunes only playing on iTunes.

This is merely my opinion of course, but I've found any Android phone I've used to be a counter intuitive mess.
Or, perhaps, my expectations of the OS were not met. Maybe that's more accurate. The SD card issue is a prime example - if you're offering that capability then why hobble it?
A student at work was very proud that his phone could shoot 4k video. The iPhone can't (well, not without an app).
However, when we did a comparison between the footage from both, you really wouldn't want to shoot 4k on that phone - it just wasn't very good.
Whether you'd want to shoot video on a phone that's intended for anything more than social media is up for debate, so at present 4k is pretty pointless and apparently crap quality.
So bigger numbers doesn't immediately equate to a better product in terms of satisfaction for the user.

If I was shooting 4k I'd want to use a proper camcorder with optical zoom and image stabilization.

And one which orientates the picture properly. You know, landscape instead of portrait.

I've gone the other route with apps. I used an iPhone 3GS and bought a bunch of apps, then I swapped to Windows Phone 7, bought a few app, then I swapped to Android, bought 1 app, now I'm back on Windows Phone. I just don't bother buying paid for apps on any platform. I'll use cross-platform apps that are free and maybe offer a subscription for extended services. I also bought app on the Apple Mac Store, but I rarely use my Mac any more - Apple stopped releasing security patches for it 18 months ago. I have bought a few Windows apps, which are now going universal, so I get them on my Phone as well now, but again, I tend to go for free + rent extended services where I can these days.

That irritates the heck out of me! All those YouTube videos in Portrait mode and blurred extended sides, I find them unwatchable.

And I found iOS too restrictive and uninituitive. Android is a bit of a mess, but it is flexible and can be set-up to work the way you want, you don't have to restrict yourself as much as you do with iOS.

Windows Phone is somewhere between the 2 and is my preferred choice at the moment. That said, the OS is always going to be a personal choice, the one that works closest to the way you work is the one that will fit you best.

Indeed, when I first played around with smartphone in (I think) early 2010, I found the lack buttons on the iPhone annoying. The Android phones had a back button that went back just one screen, not all the way back to the 'desktop' like iOS. The also had a menu/settings button (which has annoying disappeared from my latest phone) Plus I liked the widgets on Android. It's taken Apple far to long to catch up with that.