Apple Profit Falls 22% But iPhone Sales Are Up 251
New submitter marcushoward writes in with news of Apple's quarterly results. From the article: "Apple on Tuesday reported fiscal
third-quarter revenues of $35.3 billion and profits of $6.9 billion, or $7.47 per share. The revenue number is basically even with Apple’s results from a year ago, but its profits were off by almost $2 billion. Revenues were mostly in line with Wall Street’s expectations of $35.09 billion and slightly above its earnings per share expectation of around $7.31. Apple itself had predicted revenues between $33.5 billion and $35.5 billion."
Compared to this quarter last year, sales of Macs are about even, iPad sales dipped slightly (14.6 million vs 16 million), and iPhone sales are up quite a bit (31 million vs 26 million).
Re:Cynic...? (Score:5, Informative)
Apple (headline) profits fall, just as they are being asked to pay tax.
During the depths of the recession they were able to negotiate really sweet deals on their huge purchases of components. Those contracts expired, and they're now having to pay more, but they certainly can't raise prices. Of course they explained all this and warned investors of the coming drop in margins about a year ago, but much easier for the irrational Apple-haters to ignore the perfectly sensible explanation from Apple itself, and start looking for strange conspiracies instead...
Better depends on use case (Score:5, Informative)
The Samsung Galaxy phone is better and any tablet in the world is better than the iPad.
Nothing against the Galaxy but "better" is a pretty ill defined term. For my Grandmother, who mostly wants to play solitaire and facetime with her grandkids, the Galaxy is a demonstrably worse choice. For your needs or mine it might be the better choice. "Better" depends on what you are doing with it.
As soon as people realize it has no HDMI, no micro-SD port, and no USB port for flash drives, they can go spend 5x less on a tablet that can or get the vastly superior Galaxy tablet for the same price.
There is a market for tablets with those connectors but it is, for better or worse, a minority. My several of my family members have iPads. Most of them would never use any of those ports and in fact most of them don't even know what an HDMI or micro-SD port is. That's not to imply that a tablet with those ports would be pointless. For someone like me they might actually be an attractive feature but I have no illusions that most iPad buyers would need or want them. Furthermore those extra ports add cost, complexity and opportunities for hardware failure. Furthermore there are other ways to accomplish things like file transfer, video display, etc without those ports so it is unclear why they would be necessary in most cases. You don't need HDMI to display video. You don't need USB to store or transfer files. I'm sure some people appreciate those ports but I'd wager a tidy sum that most of the time they go completely unused.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Informative)
SD-slot / USB == iCloud
That's how Apple handles those issues.
Also, I don't believe any iOS battery is soldered; they all have detachable connectors.