I 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.
Well 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.
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.
Both the Wii and DSi can play the format iTunes currently uses. I think the PSP and PS3 can as well. I’m also pretty sure Archos and a couple other of the high end media players also work with AAC. AFAIK, only the low end stuff, like SanDisk’s fare, are still using silicon tied to MP3/WMA.
Yes, although the silicon was slow coming. For a while, the iPod was the only game in town. The few other devices that used AAC at the time (like a Sony 8cm CD player I used to use) used the older MP3 style container instead of the modern MOV/M4A wrapper.
I 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.
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).
Google 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.
Noone else has a guy at the helm of the ship that's a worldclass salesman, a true visionary, an amazing product guy and a detail obsessed perfectionist all rolled into one.
It isn't just the ratio of growth, it is also the scale. 60% growth in a multibillion dollar company is much harder than going from 100k to 160k in revenue.
I 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.
It'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.
Really? You think you know when the market is being irrational? Can I ask how much money you've made trading your knowledge so far? I assume you're invested in Apple, since you know that the market consistently underestimates them.
Philip Elmer-Dewitt of Fortune (if you'd like some reading on the subject) does a rather amusing quarterly piece in which he compares analyst predictions of Apple's performance with observed reality. If it happened once or twice, that would be understandable; such predictions are complex and difficult to make. But the track record is so consistently and so universally bad that I find it difficult to believe there's a truly rational process behind it; sooner or later, folks should be noticing the disparity between prediction and reality and trying to fix their process.
Apple's stock price seems to behave similarly; if any company not named "Apple, Inc." announces a new product which receives good reviews, generates high pre-sale demand and looks to have a high profit margin, that company's stock price quite predictably rises. But if the company happens to be named "Apple, Inc." the stock price almost invariably drops (go look at charts for AAPL on and around the days of major product announcements and launches). Perhaps you're aware of some deep principle which explains why this is rational behavior on the part of investors and traders, but I certainly am not.
Um, if a person claims that the market itself is behaving irrationally then how why would you expect that they could prove it by making money on said market?
You know what's interesting about the stock market? If everyone else is wrong and you're right: you lose.
It'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".
According 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?
Which means that the smart people already figured it out and it was mostly priced into the stock already.
Remember, the stock price is at least as smart as the smartest investors trading it.
In all seriousness, and meaning this not at all as an insult, I recommend never investing in anything stock-market-related except index funds until it stops seeming intuitive to you that the stock ought to jump on the same day that news like this is publicly summarized and announced.
You have a pretty different view on the stock market than I do. The only "smart" people I see involved in the whole thing, as far as I can tell, are the ones writing algorithms that try to guess what the crowd is going to do (usually by looking at what they've previously done).
I 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.
iPad'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.
This 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?
I 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.
That 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?
>...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?
Even 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.
I'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.
(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.
I'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.
Apple has released a new iPod nano in September every year for the last five years, and a new iPod touch in September every year for the last three years.
Predicting new iPods before Christmas seems like a safe bet.
An iPad Nano may be quite unlikely in 2010, but the possibility is real, according to a recent Digitimes rumor [1]:
The sources noted that Apple has recently placed new iPad orders to Taiwan-based component makers for the fourth quarter of 2010 and the first quarter of 2011 with 9.7-inch, 5.6-inch and 7-inch models all included.
Admittedly, the same report notes that supply of OLED screens is limited, and may not ease until the second half of 2011.
You can right now buy MacBook Pro 15" with 1680x1050 display or MBP 17" with 1920x1080 display. The pixel size on those displays is pretty darn tiny; I doubt higher pixel density makes sense on laptop due to further viewing distance (compared to iPhone).
About new products: I would love to see 15" version of MacBook Air, or slimmed down MacBook 15" without optical drive, brand it whatever. Dear Steve, get rid of optical drives, please.
Did 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.
Apple 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.
And 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.
No. 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."
You say this, yet the submitter has been here over 1000 days, and over 100 longer than you. Evidently at least some of the long-timers, from when this was a much more closed environment, do indeed see this as interesting news.
So the question becomes: what's the definition of "hacker news", if not a user-submitted aggregator? And where do you define what is and what is not HN-worthy? It's apparently not age-related, nor precedence, nor community, and I don't know how you'd define what's hacker-related and what's not, barring strict, literal "hacks" (and then how about circuit bending to make music?).
It's just the fanboys voting it up. Nothing wrong with being a fanboy, I'm just saying. This news is of no interest to the general community here, except the people who love Apple more than themselves. And apparently, there are quite a few of these people here.
I come here to read news about startups, not to indulge in Apple lovefests. If I wanted to do that, I'd be over at TechCrunch.
I'm not hating on Apple. Re-read my posts and tell me one place where I said anything negative about Apple.
I'm simply asking a question - why is this news relevant to this community and why do we have to have a top-story post on it every quarter? What use is that to anyone here?
And for this simple question, I have lost almost 40 points of karma in the last hour.
I was talking about this conversation thread, not my posting history in general. Yeah I don't like Apple, but in this particular thread, I said nothing negative about them at all. That's what I meant. I was just asking a question, "why is this relevant to HN", and now have lost almost 100 points of karma.
What does that say about this community? Nothing good in my opinion. But obviously, anyone who doesn't drink the Apple kool-aid doesn't have a valid opinion around these parts.
I expect to lose another 20 points of karma from this post. Have at it, sheeple.
Edit: Ya know what, after all this, I just don't see the purpose of participating in this site anymore. I was asking a perfectly valid question and received almost nothing but hate in response. Obviously I'm not welcome around here. I will send an email to HN to have my account deleted.
FWIW I up'ed your initial question but down'ed some of your replies. Not due to your views of Apple (couldn't care less..), but because you seem to be acting kind of silly and trying really hard to not understand how Apple's current performance, and it's implied future performance, wouldn't be news to hackers and startups.
If you're being genuine, there's no need to leave - just try harder to understand or ignore the Apple stuff. If not, whatever.
p.s. for someone calling others "sheeple" I just want to point out that you seem rather concerned and emotional over your karma, with karma simply being an average of how those around you tend to see you.
I do agree that going against the grain isnt very well rewarded on hn (or for most online communities for that matter). But you do have my respect for expanding the discussion space and asking what I think is a legitimate question.
It's just the fanboys; try to ignore them. They downvote anyone who expresses an opinion which they disagree with, or which they think is anti-apple. When the more sane users get to these comments, you'll regain at least a bit of your karma, probably.
That's more of an unfortunate thing on your part, IMO. I take this from it personally:
- Mobile is still growing like crazy
- People are willing to pay a premium for quality even in tougher economic times
- Digital distribution of Music and Software is the future (I left out movies here because Apple doesn't give a detailed breakdown, but I think this is a significant part of the iTunes revenue as well)
Information exists everywhere, the truly successful are those that can extract it.
You're still not getting it (or more likely being intentionally obtuse). Corporate results matter: remember the hype around the Palm Pre? If you dropped your iPhone development or even moved resources to build a Pre version of your software you made a mistake. The fact the this is on the front page is relevant to people that making strategic decisions based on market leaders.
Interestingly this site has a great feature that allows you to ignore things you believe are irrelevant: if you don't click the link you don't need to read it.
What would be actual news is Apple suddenly doing bad. At this point it's a given that they're crushing it, so having a big circlejerk every time they release insane quarterly numbers every quarter serves no purpose.
The Pre is a good example of corporate results being interesting, but that's because they were the huge underdog. Reporting that the top dog keeps getting more toppy is not interesting.
I know I can ignore stories I don't find interesting, but I usually read almost all of the top 10 stories on HN every day and Apple's quarterly results always gets in there (typically #1 for a while), so it's hard to ignore.
They sure as hell made it a lot easier. I was involved in a location based start up in about 2000. I was laid off in 2003, and they kept going until this year when they merged with Xora.
The most striking difference between modern location based startups and ours is how easy it is to get your application on a phone these days. I don't care how draconian Apple seems to be with getting your app on the phone, it just doesn't compare.
The company worked for months (if not years) to get the app distributed with a phone automatically (or nearly automatically), and the best we could get was that the enterprise sales group at the carrier could sell the solution to a company. You could still get our app on a phone w/o that, but it required a whole bunch of proprietary tools (that nobody would know how to get) and a serious amount of technical know-how at that. In other words, there was zero chance of someone saying, "hey, why don't we try this out for free to see if it can be of any use to us"
Perhaps this is why I don't get all in a tizzy about Apple's draconian app store practices (though, the last bits finally did get to me). I'm like a transplant from Czarist Russia who has come to post Patriot Act America.
Apple's revenue reinforces the belief that proper execution of an emerging trend works, as well as the sustained proper execution of it will keep on working.
Yes, but everyone knows that Apple is crushing it. What would be actual news is if they suddenly lost this crazy momentum. Hence, there is no need to have a story every quarter about Apple's insane revenue. It's a given.
The only reason everyone knows that Apple is crushing it is because of news stories like this.
Also, there was no way prior to this article to know that this was the Mac's best quarter ever, or that the iPad outsold the Mac. Knowing both these facts now, I'm much more focused on adding integration and syncing features to the Mac application and iPad companion app I'm working on.
Apple has bet a significant portion of their business over the last 12-18 months on a mobile strategy. A very significant portion of the WWDC this year was focused on Mobile. Any developer out there wondering where to direct their energy into a new endeavor (and news.ycombinator.com is a place where such developers congregate, ycombinator being a well known seed fund) would be very interested in seeing Apple's success as an indicator of both the popularity of Apple Products as a development platform, and the mobile environment, in particular.
This is big news for the Hacker community that is interested in creating new startups. Clearly, the Apple Ecosystem has both legs and inertia for another quarter.
I continue to look forward to Google's, and, oddly enough, Micrsoft's response. I'm guessing we're going to see a lot of Mobile and Tablet news in the next 18 months based on Apple's most recent quarter. Less so on the Cloud - until, of course, Apple has a blowout quarter based on the revenue from their new $1B NC Data Center. :-)
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-...