Apple Announces Most Profitable Quarter in History 761
zacharye writes with an except from an article over at BGR about Apple's quarterly results: "'Disappointing' though it may have been to some, the iPhone 4S propelled what is now confirmed to have been the most profitable quarter any technology company has ever recorded. Apple on Wednesday reported record earnings for the December quarter, revealing a profit of $13.06 billion on revenue that surpassed $46 billion. Among technology companies, Apple's fiscal first quarter represents the most profitable quarter ever recorded. Only one U.S. company has ever posted a more profitable quarter — Exxon managed a profit of $14.8 billion in the third quarter of 2008 — and the driving force behind Apple's record-setting performance was quite clearly the iPhone."
Re:Who Cares? (Score:5, Informative)
abusus non tollit usum [merriam-webster.com]
: abuse does not take away use, i.e., is not an argument against proper use
That is, fanboyish reactions do not strip the relevance of one of the largest players in a tech industry making more money than ever before, or prevent sane discussion of the fact.
Re:Who Cares? (Score:5, Informative)
You should learn a few things about investing before making a fool out of yourself. The fact that AAPL shares are above 400$ bares no meaning at all on whether the price is "sky high" or not. Berkshire Hathaway class A shares are over 100,000$ each and their price is not "sky high" either. It's all about the actual valuation metrics of the company relative to the share price and according to them, AAPL was actually pretty fairly priced before the earnings release.
Or are you going to be making even more of a fool out of yourself by sticking to your guns and saying that a PE of 15 for a company with projected 30% revenue growth is "sky high"? Except that it was actually even cheaper then that, because the revenue growth ended up being twice higher.
Re:Who Cares? (Score:4, Informative)
Nerds are often arguing about issues that require foresight
That is exactly right, and why you should place no stock in predictions from those on Slashdot that constant predict Apple's demise for reasons that plainly make no sense and exhibit the continued misunderstanding of the market as a whole.
something the general public doesn't have when it comes to IT because they're good at other things than us.
And yet the general public generally speaking could have told you Apple continues to fare well, just form anecdotal evidence. So should not there be some giant red flags here that nerds En Masse have apparently willfully given up the power of foresight simply because of hatred?
Which is why we still argue that the 'losing' alternative is superior.
You can still argue something is superior while correctly predicting the thing you think is not superior will win out and understanding why. That's what helps you to make the truly superior thing fare well in the market.
But again many nerds here on Slashdot have instead decided over and over again to proclaim Apple is not successful because they say so, and the technologies they favor will win "just because". That is not going to work out well long-term.
Re:American jobs (Score:4, Informative)
Considering that the only reason Apple exists is because of American prosperity, they have a duty to aid in the continuation of that prosperity so that the innovators of the next generation receive the same benefits that they did. Reducing their profits by $1.8B out of $13B is not asking all that much... only about 14%. Less than Mitt Romney pays in taxes!
Besides, pumping an extra several billion dollars a year into the pockets of middle class Americans will increase the sales for all Apple products, so the actual cost to the company would be less.
If they don't do it voluntarily, slap a 15% tax on overseas production and give that money to the poor and unemployed. It would be more efficient if they did the right thing by choice, but if they don't, we should obtain the effect by force.
Re:Nokia and RIM (Score:5, Informative)
There are only 3 models of iOS phones currently being sold. You can't expect one of the tens-hundreds of Android phones to outsell anything on a platform of only 3 models.
And the reason for this is that Android users have Choice - this is a Good Thing, not a Bad Thing.
Re:That was sad (Score:4, Informative)
You should check out QNX on the Playbook -- It's undoubtedly rather heavily inspired by WebOS, and smooth as silk.
Re:so i guess. (Score:4, Informative)
1977 - Consumer friendly complete computer out of the box Apple II ...
1983 - Mass market desktop metaphor computer and software Lisa
1984 - Macintosh
1987(?) - Small business affordable ($6000) PostScript laser printer LaserWriter
2001 - iPod (hard drive based music player with easily purchased popular digital music, N.B. iTMS took some time to develop
2001 - Mac OS X first unix OS that allowed but did not require geek cred
2001 - Apple Store first tech store that didn't suck (usually) in contrast to Best Buy, Circuit City, etc
2007 - iPhone first modern multitouch based "smartphone"
2010 - iPad first tablet that is not a laptop wannabe due to same iPhone pioneered multitouch interface
Dates are off the top of my head so could be off slightly. You can contest all you want about "didn't exist before" but these things were not in stores available to buy from competitors
Re:Who Cares? (Score:3, Informative)
Don't forget that Apple got their OS for free too (most of it, anyhow).. since its primarily based on BSD, which they use and then of course contribute little back to the open source community, unlike Google who makes significant contributions to many open source projects
Oh really?
It looks [apple.com] like Apple contributes [apple.com] quite a few open source [opensource.org] projects.
Re:Nokia and RIM (Score:5, Informative)
[...] and had to be rescued by Microsoft.
I'm not sure that's entirely true.
One of Apple's biggest problems at the time was that they were going out of business. It was all over the news, in case you missed it. Apple was going out of business. Everybody knew Apple was going out of business.
Now, would you buy a product from a company that everybody knew was going out of business? Would you consider selling parts or components to a company that everybody knew was going out of business? If you would do so, would you offer them decent credit terms? Of course not--they're going out of business! Everybody knew that Apple was going out of business! You'd be crazy to offer them any kind of credit because they'd go out of business and you'd be left trying to collect pennies on the dollar in bankruptcy court.
It's tough to build iMacs when you have to pay cash up front for parts.
Microsoft's cash investment was $150 million in common stock--remember that, at the time, Apple had something like 4 billion dollars in the bank. So the dollar amount wasn't that much. It was more the press of Apple being aligned with Microsoft to basically shut up all the "Apple is going out of business" people. Once everybody decided that Microsoft wouldn't let Apple go out of business because then Microsoft would be a monopoly (of course,, Microsoft tried to play the Apple card during their monopoly trial and the judge decided that Apple was not a competitor of Microsoft), Apple was able to get better terms.
I will agree that Microsoft "rescued" Apple. But the rescue was more in the terms of reputation than in cash.
Re:Nokia and RIM (Score:5, Informative)
First of all, if Apple does any R&D, I'm fully unaware of it.
Apparently, such fullsome unawareness is a willful choice on your part, because R&D is a line item in public companies' income statements [edgar-online.com]. Looks like Apple spent $758 million last quarter. If that's typical, then that's about $3 billion a year.
I guess you're fully aware now.
Re:Nokia and RIM (Score:5, Informative)
Mmm... when Steve came back in 1996 and introduced the reworked Apple (with cleaning of the board and going back to the strongpoints) he also announced a deal with Microsoft where MS injected money for non-voting shares (that MSFT made use of 5 or so years later with hefty profit) and promised to bring office etc to Apple's platform for N years. THAT did save Apple to some extent as Steve's said that they were days away from bankruptcy.
Re:Nokia and RIM (Score:5, Informative)
But - How come we don't hear the politicians demanding a "windfall profits tax" like they did with Exxon two years ago? I guess it's only bad to make a profit if you're an evil oil company, but if your a tech company it's a good thing to rake-in equivalent amounts of money.
Um because Exxon was collecting subsidies from the US government at the same time they were making extreme amounts of profit. I am unaware that Congress enacted laws to give Apple subsidies. Also Exxon moved their headquarters to Switzerland [cbsnews.com] to reduce taxes than Apple which is still an American company. Now if you go down to Houston, the buildings and workers are still there. They just moved to Switzerland on paper.