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.
