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Apple

Daring Fireball

Daring Fireball is one of my favourite websites. Yesterday, I stumbled upon this post in which John Gruber explains the origin for the site’s unique name.

When I was very young, first grade/kindergarten or something like that, in the late 70s, Evel Knievel used to have regular specials on ABC. He’d jump overseas fountains or trying to jump over Grand Canyon or something. And I loved Evel Knievel. I thought that was America — just great. A guy on a motorcycle doing crazy stuff.

And the first thing I ever would answer ‘What’d you wanna be when you grow up?’ was I wanted to be a daredevil stuntman. I wanted to get shot out of a canon. This is my idea — instead of a motorcycle, I would do like Evel Knievel except getting shot out of a canon. And instead of just being in a tent in a circus and getting shot in to a net, I would do like Evel Knievel, go to landmarks around the world and get shot over them or in to them or shoot myself into an open window on the 47th floor of the Empire State building. And I came up with the name Daring Fireball.

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Apple finance

Apple Earnings Q1 – 2022

Apple:

Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2022 first quarter ended December 25, 2021. The Company posted an all-time revenue record of $123.9 billion, up 11 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $2.10.

Great news for Apple. The company made a record $34.6 billion in profit. Tim Cook is still almost apologetical as he explains how well the company has done during the pandemic.

Here’s the breakdown of the numbers with year over year change.

iPhone $71,628 million (up 9.2%)
Mac $10,852 million (up 25%)
iPad $7,248 million (down 14%)
Wearables, Home and Accessories $14,701 million (up 13%)
Services $19,516 million (up 24%)
Total Net Sales $123,945 million (up 11%)

Check out the Apple Earnings Charts from Jason Snell at Six Colors.

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Apple

Apple Financial Results Q4 2021

Yesterday, Apple released its financial results for the fourth quarter ending September 25, 2021.

The Company posted a September quarter revenue record of $83.4 billion, up 29 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.24. They announced quarterly dividends of $0.22USD per share.

iPhone $38,868 million (up 47%)
Mac $9,178 million (up 1.6%)
iPad $8,252 million (up 21.4%)
Wearables, Home and Accessories $8,785 million (up 11.5%)
Services $14,549 million (up 25.6%)
Total Net Sales $83,360 million (up 28.8%)

CEO Tim Cook explained that because of supply constraints the Total Net Sales were down about $6 billion from what they otherwise would have been. Macworld has the story:

Six. Billion. Dollars. That’s cash that Apple’s customers slapped on the table in the last three months, saying “shut up and take my money“… and were denied. Because Apple just didn’t have the products available to sell. That record $83.4 billion quarter should’ve been a record $89.4 billion quarter, but for all the woes in the international supply chain. And here’s the scarier part: it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

“What we’re saying is that the nominal amount of supply constraints for Q1, we estimate to be larger than $6 billion,” Cook said. “And so it’s important to know that we’re getting a lot more supply in Q1 than we had in Q4, obviously because our sequential growth is significant and we have very solid growth year over year. And so the amount of supply is growing dramatically, it’s just that the demand is so robust that we envision having supply constraints for the quarter.”

Jason Snell has some preliminary graphs, and don’t miss the revenue overview in his fun with charts post.

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Apple finance

Apple Financial Results Q3 2021

Yesterday Apple announced financial results for its fiscal 2021 third quarter ended June 26, 2021.

Its latest financial results included $81 billion in revenue, the best third quarter in the company’s history. In fact, Apple has reported record revenue for each of the last four quarters.

Here are the Q3 Six Color Charts.

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Apple

WWDC 2021

Apple hosted its World Wide Developer’s Conference (day 1) today. As much as I think a career in coding would have been good for me, I really only dabble as an amateur programmer. Nevertheless I love the keynote.

Here’s the summary video from Day 1:

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Apple finance

Apple Earnings Call Q2 2021

Apple released it’s second quarter earnings today and blew out even the most exuberant expectations with revenue reaching a record $89.6 billion, up 54 percent year over year. The results were fabulous across the board.

iPhone $47,938 million (up 66%)
Mac $9,102 million (up 70%)
iPad $7,807 million (up 79%)
Wearables, Home and Accessories $7,836 million (up 25%)
Services $16,901 million (up 27%)
Total Net Sales $89,584 million (up 54%)

What a great quarter. Particularly iPad and Mac were very, very strong. Just look at Mac alone — the last three quarters have each returned record earnings. Sales looking forward are predicted to be supply constrained rather than demand constrained.

More details of their earnings can be found in Apple’s Fiscal Year 2021 Second Quarter Consolidated Financial Statement.

Check out the charts at Six Colors.

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Apple finance

Apple Earnings Q1 – 2021

Apple released their first quarter earnings today and it was great news for the Cupertino lifestyle company1.

The company posted all time record revenue of $111.4 billion, up 21% year-over-year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.68, up 35%.

Net sales by category in the three months ending December 26, 2020 compared with the three months ending on December 28, 2019:

  • iPhone $ 65 597 000 up $9 640 000 (17% growth year over year with an all-time high of 1 billion devices activated)
  • Mac $8 675 000 up $1 515 000 (Up 21% compared to last year)
  • iPad $8 435 000 up $2 458 000 (Surveys measure iPad users with 94% satisfaction)
  • Wearables, Home and Accessories $12 971 000 up $2 961 000 (75% of customers this quarter are new)
  • Services $15 761 000 up $3 046 000 (New services are all helping this category)
  • Total Net sales $111 439 000 — Up $19 620 000

This is fantastic news for shareholders. Apple continues to show strong growth in all of it’s categories. The details of their earnings can be found in their First Quarter Results.

Update: As always Jason Snell has the graphs.

1. Poor Intel

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Apple article

Apple Considers Paid Subscription Podcasts?

A slew of recent articles1 claim that Apple is creating a new paid subscription service providing premium podcasts. According to these reports, Apple thinks they need to start shelling out cash for big name podcasts in order to compete with Amazon and Spotify. This is the same Spotify that was recently downgraded from neutral to sell by financial group Citi because Spotify hasn’t seen the kind of returns they would like on the hundreds of millions they spent locking down premium podcast providers such as Gimlet Media, Joe Rogan, and others.

From fortune.com:

Apple has been the dominant distributor of podcasts in the U.S. for more than a decade, offering the programs for free. […] But the company now faces significant competition from two of its biggest rivals: Spotify and Amazon.com Inc.

So let me get this straight, Apple has been offering podcasts for free for almost 20 years and NOW they suddenly face significant competition to their FREE offering?

It’s not crazy that Apple may feel they are leaving money on the table. It’s not uncommon for Apple to discuss ways it could improve growth and it makes sense to explore the idea of bringing in top tier podcasts as an additional draw to Apple Music, but Apple does not care one iota about Spotify’s attempt to monetize podcasts. If anything they chalk it up as a win when people use their hardware more often regardless of the service they are using.

From The Information:

“Apple—long considered the sleeping giant in the podcast space—is waking up. The company, which runs the most widely used podcasting app in the industry, is discussing launching a new subscription service that would charge people to listen to podcasts, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Apple has plenty of “discussions” about all kinds of ideas. Don’t go to print until at least there is a hint that they’ve decided on something.

Here’s my Claim Chowder: There will be no premium podcast subscription service from Apple. If there is any truth to these rumours, it’s about Apple giving a little more love to their Podcast app (which has also been rumoured). If Apple were to offer “high quality”, “paid” podcasts, it will be tied into users’ existing subscriptions to Apple Music.

Update: They did it. Apple is now offering subscription podcasts. What I didn’t understand when I called down the idea was that they wouldn’t pay upfront for finished shows or personalities but would facilitate podcasts adding a subscription and then take a cut of the proceeds.

1. Apple Is Ready to Invest in Its Own Original Podcasts, Apple Developing Podcast Subscription Service to Better Compete With Spotify, Apple Plans Podcasting Subscription Service in Threat to Spotify, Apple Mulls Podcast Subscription Push Amid Spotify’s Land Grab.

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Apple design

Apple’s New Map, Expansion #10 Canada

I’ve been loving the level of detail in the new Apple Maps rollout and have been waiting for THIS particular update since I first learned that Apple was making these updates. Justin O’Beirne has been documenting the changes from old to new and I particularly love that street view (or as Apple calls it Look Around) has come to Lethbridge.

If you haven’t tried Apple Maps lately because you had a bad taste in your mouth when Google Maps used to be far superior, you don’t know what you’re missing. It’s got so much better and with the new maps rolling out, it’s now visually so much nicer to look at too.

If you’re a maps person, don’t miss Justin’s other documentation of Apple Maps updates.

(via Daring Fireball)

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Apple

One More Thing…

Yesterday, Apple held their third major event this fall and it’s the one I’ve been waiting for to FINALLY upgrade Andrea’s eight year old computer. If you haven’t been paying attention, the biggest thing about these new MacBooks is that they are running on Apple Silicon, which reports indicate are both faster and more power efficient than almost every other chip on the market by a huge margin. The M1 chip announced at this event outperforms every Mac ever made in single-core performance.1

The M1 appears to be a reworking of the A14 Bionic and is included in the new MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13″, and Mac Mini. We decided to go with the MacBook Air because the drawbacks appear to be slim compared with the MacBook Pro. Sure there is no fan which might mean some thermal throttling if things get too hot and no Touch Bar but for the price difference, I think it’s worth it. It ships in 1 to 2 weeks and I think it’s safe to say I’m even more excited than she is. I’m holding out for the MacBook Pro 16″ with Apple Silicon which, Apple says, will arrive within the next two years.

1. Not including truly industry level performance from discrete GPUs on Mac Pros.