
Apple Reports Record Fourth Quarter Results - runesoerensen
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/10/27Apple-Reports-Record-Fourth-Quarter-Results.html
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austenallred
32% quarterly profit growth, 22% quarterly revenue growth. Good night.

In case you're doing the math at home:

~$24M/hour.

~$500,000/minute.

~$6,500/second.

(And an extra $200B in the bank.) Unbelievable.

~~~
Cookingboy
In this quarter AAPL have made more profit than AMAZ has ever made in its
entire lifetime as a company, and probably for the next 5 years too.

AAPL also has about the same revenue growth as FB/GOOGL, while trading at
about 1/10th the PE.

Man, Wall Streets really, really hate this company.

~~~
austenallred
To be fair, Amazon is a pretty bad company to compare to with regard to
profit; Amazon intentionally tries to have 0 profits while increasing revenue.

Apple is literally running into the, "How much more money could you possibly
make?" problem.

~~~
r00fus
Which is ridiculous on the face of it - why would Wall St. subsidize Amazon's
quest for 0 profits while spurning Apple's kingly quarterly earnings?

The reason is that Wall St. is threatened by Apple because they cannot control
them.

~~~
what_ever
I disagree. The only point people on Wall St pay attention to is how to make
more money. Apple depends a lot on iPhone for it's profits to trading at other
companies' P/E.

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guelo
With that unbelievable 40% margin it seems like they could wipe out all
competition by lowering their prices. I wonder if they worry that that would
get them into monopoly territory and bring heavier regulation.

~~~
jonpaine
Apple is a premium* brand. They don't make commodity products.

I think there are better articles out there than this one [0], but it was the
first search result.

Thinking about their behaviors through that lens is interesting and, to me,
clarifies a lot of the strategy behind some of their actions. Fun stuff.

[0]:[http://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/15/apple-is-a-luxury-brand-
not-a...](http://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/15/apple-is-a-luxury-brand-not-a-tech-
company.html) AUTO PLAY NON-MUTED VIDEO WARNING

~~~
czr80
Apple is in general a premium brand, not a luxury brand. The Apple Watch
Edition is their first foray into luxury brand territory,

See: [http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/luxury-vs-
pr...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/luxury-vs-premium.html)

~~~
jonpaine
I agree. That's a great little writeup - thanks for posting it.

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cryptoz
Apple shipped 48 million barometers this quarter, up from 39 million in Q4 of
last year.

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samstave
That's a good litmus

~~~
cryptoz
Mhm. You might say that the barometer shipments are a good...barometer of
Apple's performance. More seriously, I'm actually interested because I'm on a
mission to crowdsource atmospheric pressure data from at least 1 billion
barometers, so the more Apple ships the better. Projects like PressureNet[1]
and Sunshine[2] are only currently accessing a tiny portion of what's now
available for weather forecasting.

[1] Android:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.cumulonimbu...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ca.cumulonimbus.barometernetwork)

[2] iPhone: [https://thesunshine.co/](https://thesunshine.co/)

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LiweiZ
Apple is leveraging its established ground to pursue more profit. This
requires operation excellence. However, to win in the future, it needs
products like what Jobs delivered. Based on the products Apple offered in the
post-Jobs era so far, Apple has not shown any sign to provide a product that
really shines as a whole. Even though I am a big fan of Apple, this makes me
wonder its future.

edit: typo

~~~
arjunrc
I think about this a lot, but I can't come up with a single product that has
an average selling price of over $600, that pretty much EVERYONE (at least
adults) in the world would need, that they would also want to upgrade every
two years.

The Watch would be this device as long as its gets more independent of the
phone. Maybe a car in the future!

But in the near term, I would imagine their growth would taper off as more and
more of the developing world get an iPhone (China still has few more years of
growth) & Moore's law means features aren't added as often.

~~~
r00fus
> But in the near term, I would imagine their growth would taper off as more
> and more of the developing world get an iPhone (China still has few more
> years of growth) & Moore's law means features aren't added as often.

Apple has enough in the bank to make a strategic shift or leap into another
market when that starts to happens (who knows what they haven't released that
they've been prototyping for years).

~~~
LiweiZ
The problem is not about resources. It's about the organization's product-
oriented DNA and its familiarity to the field it works on. I hope Apple could
show us some more polished products so that as someone who works on iOS could
see a clearer and brighter future.

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tdkl
While they're busy counting money, they managed to ship an iOS who stutters on
their flagship phone :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGCA_v4WUaI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGCA_v4WUaI)

The performance downgrade is even worse on last years 6, 6+ and 5S, they
stutter and drop frames while scrolling.

~~~
bsaul
I really don't understand why you got downvoted. I am extremely worried by the
latest iOS release that managed to make an iphone 6s laggier on ios 9.1 than
an iphone 5 on ios 8 for an app i'm currently developping. Provided that ios 9
brings absolutely nothing fundamentaly new, and how buggy ios 9.0 was, that
makes me hope really strongly that they had the interns work on that release
while the good developpers were working on revamping the whole os for ios10.

We all know that blackberry was still making great sales until the very last
moments of its expected collapse, simply because good business managers always
find a way to grab some profits in the short term eventhough things look bad
in the long term.

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jlgaddis
iOS 9.1 is causing major performance issues on the iPhone 6s? I assume the
recommendation is to stick with 9.0.2 at this point then?

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tdkl
You have no choice with 6S, since it shipped with iOS9. 9.0.2 stutters too.

~~~
jlgaddis
Yes, when I bought it (at the Apple Store), it came with iOS9. I have updated
it to 9.0.2 but have yet to update it to 9.1. I haven't noticed any problems,
though (except for one issue with the Facebook app going crazy -- so that the
phone was hot to the touch when I picked it up -- but that only happened
once).

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zaroth
I love the profits that this industry can bring, that much is amazing.
Deploying that capital, like on R&D and acquisition is Apple's bigger problem
now. The dividend is not bad either!

With the added competition from Microsoft, I'm sure they will be pushing even
harder for the next release. I am hoping a recent down-trend will be well
reverse via software updates to come, apparently the phones need some more
optimization? But also nice to see competition on features, form factor,
power, display size... seems like some really good Surface products and I'm
not following Apple as closely I guess.

The market has no idea how to value it. Which should mean a huge opportunity
for someone who does?

(I wonder if 10 hours late this can get any responses)

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olympus
Something important to consider is whether this beat analyst expectations or
not. Your earnings could grow by 20%, but if the stock had priced in 25%
growth then you'll still see your stock drop after a report.

Anybody know whether this beat expectations or not? It doesn't explicitly say
it in the press release.

Edit: According to Fortune, looks like this was a modest beat:
[http://fortune.com/2015/10/27/apple-beats-expectations-
stock...](http://fortune.com/2015/10/27/apple-beats-expectations-stock-pops/)

~~~
Cookingboy
Well.. considering AAPL has about the same P/E as IBM/HP, which has about -10%
growth, I would personally say the growth is not priced in at all.

But even though it's priced as if the company is dying, analysts are still
expecting it to grow 20%+.

The disconnect is almost funny.

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hagope
Eventually people will realize how grossly overpriced their iPhone is and the
party will slowly come to an end... There are so many great alternatives at
much lower cost.

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trendnet
iPhone gets them ~63%. iPad brings less than Mac hardware. Apple Watch is just
~4% after a year. Investors should probably be a bit worried.

~~~
matwood
Apple watch at ~4% in less than a year is amazing. Especially considering that
most people are claiming it is an abject failure. Version 2 is typically when
an Apple product hits its stride so I expect to see it grow.

The iPad was great when the iPhone was small, but Apple has basically
cannibalized iPads with plus size phones. The large iPad Pro will be a wait
and see thing.

~~~
ghaff
There are so many interesting dynamics going on with tablets that it's really
hard to read the tea leaves about where things are going. You seem to have
long (in part because unsubsidized) upgrade cycles, larger phones, questions
of reconvergence(?) with laptops, indirect competitors like Chromebooks in
areas like education, very cheap entrants like the $50 Amazon Fire--the list
goes on. I'm neither bearish nor bullish on tablets as a category simply
because I find it so hard to really get my head around the space.

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aapl8888
There are people who make under $10 an hour assembling Apple computers in
California. I teach at a community college and some of my students are
employed at the factory. It's interesting how Apple gets a complete pass on
their wages but companies that make a fraction of Apple's profits like Walmart
or McDonald's are constantly criticized for how they pay their employees.

~~~
cgy1
What computers are Apple assembling in California? They assemble the Mac Pro
in Texas.

~~~
aapl8888
They're assembling the iMacs there and a few others

~~~
r00fus
You mean Flextronics?

[http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/06/13/us-assembly-of-
app...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/06/13/us-assembly-of-apples-new-
mac-pro-to-be-handled-by-flextronics---report)

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myth_buster
The importance of lifestyle branding! A lot of the iPhone sale could be
attributed to the Rose Gold 6s.

    
    
      leaving the world better than we found it.
    

Good Grief!

Edit: Did I hit a nerve or what!

