Shares down?! But, but, but ... Apple just made $50bn – that's the way the Cookie grumbles Apple has confirmed analysts' fears of a drab quarter, reporting its first year-over-year sales decline in more than a decade. Its share price is down 8.2 per cent to $95.76 in after-hours trading – dipping below the magic hundred-buck mark. The Mac maker said that in the three months to March 31 – the second quarter of its …
"Mac shipments of 4 million units and $5bn represented a 9 per cent drop in revenue and a 12 per cent drop in shipments."
That seems to line up with what other Mac users I've met tell me, that they have been holding off new Mac purchases. They don't feel the latest versions of OSX have delivered the Apple Experience and quality they're used to and new Macs are over due.
The whole point, imho, is that they soldered RAM and storage ... who in their right mind would buy a system with that ? Right, only 12% drop ? Crikey, there are still quite a lot of idiots around.
OS X, yeah, that is the other problem ... as I have written before, they have removed frameworks left, right, and center .... when you buy a new mac, you also need to buy a new USB sound device, for example, if you are into music, because the manufacturer's fail to release drivers for newer releases of the operating system ... and we are talking "pro" kit, here ...
Interesting ? not so much ...
Drop in iPhone sales is a surprise, I think ...
I've been an Apple fanboi since 1985, when my father brought home a used Mac 512K with an extra external floppy drive. Still have the training audio tapes somewhere. Indeed, I'm such a Fanboi that in 2001, I bought 10 shares in Apple at $20 a share. This proved a wise investment as I still have most of them (have had a few splits since then). Just wish I had bought 100 :)
Anyway, our late 2007 Macbook is on its last legs after years of abuse. It's still usable because of RAM and hardrive upgrades, and cheap replacement batteries. I even recently replaced the thermal paste on the processor. I want to buy a new Macbook of some kind, but I just can't justify it at the current prices. I paid a premium 8.5 years ago because I knew it would last a long time with the chance to upgrade and perform basic repairs. However, paying several hundred £s over the odds for a machine that will need to be replaced in 3 or 4 years seems stupid. I prefer OSX, but it's not that much better than Windows 10 or Linux Mint anymore, Like my father-in-law says, "nothing ever gets better".
A "Me too" upvote on the Mac sales slowing.
I like OS X too (not to Fanboi lengths - I use Win 7 and Linux also) and was planning to migrate the Parental units to OSX from an antique Win XP system about 2.5 years ago. When I realised the shift to disposable Macs that cannot be repaired or upgraded I opted instead for a home built Win 7 system. That'll migrate to Linux when Win 7 goes out of extended support.
My MBP is still going strong because I upgraded the HDD to a SSD and added extra RAM. Not being able to do even basic maintenance or upgrades like that is a complete deal killer.
Well, this Mac user gave up "holding out" last year. When I need to change my remaining Mac laptop, I'll be buying a Surface Book. The Ubuntu subsystem on Windows 10 is what sealed the deal for me, as well over half the time I spend on my Mac is inside a BSD shell (plus the Ubuntu VM I host on it for when I need a genuine Linux target).
@Kristian Walsh
"The Ubuntu subsystem on Windows 10 is what sealed the deal for me"
Good luck with that one - Unless you think that having two loads of bloated crap will cancel one another out. There are other BSD (or even Linux) operating systems that will run on a real laptop...
Oh, it's much more than that, so much more...
1. Final Cut Pro / Final Cut X debacle - almost all install base lost to Adobe on Windows because of that.
2. No more Xserves - what's a company with proper racks to do?
2. Mac Pro trash cans - no more upgrades, no more Black Magic card, etc., etc. So once old towers were not supported by new versions of OSX - guess what happened?
But, there it's even more - every shop that depended on anything Apple (software, hardware) got screwed, so they're not gonna put themselves into that position again.
Sure, there is a gorgeous 30 inch iMac on CEOs and graphic designers' desks - but that's about it.
Live by the iPhone, die by the iPhone...
@ vgrig_us
"1. Final Cut Pro / Final Cut X debacle - almost all install base lost to Adobe on Windows because of that."
1b. The summary EOL of Aperture, which also cast those that don't know about alternatives towards Adobe (Lightroom).
When I was looking for a RAW processing package I trialled Lightroom and Aperture. In the end I reluctantly opted for Lightroom as it came with Win 7 and Mac versions in the box whereas Aperture was Mac only and depended on Apple's mercy for its continued existence. With the FCPX stuff going on at the time I wasn't keen to take a risk on that continued mercy and good job I didn't*.
*Not that Adobe is a bag of happiness but at least Lightroom is still supported
@paulf
Ah, forgot about that - our photog was complaining about it.
To tell you the truth, i wasn't that surprised about all this - i remember 10+ years ago Apple buying, what was that audio app, Logic Pro (?), making it OSX only and loosing that market completely to Sennheiser (i think - it was long time ago).
Constant growth is impossible. There is a limit to how many of anything that can be sold.
The idea that Apple's performance was in any way bad is moronic, and symptomatic of the short-termism that infects our economies. Apple made $10.2bn profit in Q2. That's a shed-load of money!
Investors should be looking at that and saying "well, we made a lot of money", not "we didn't make enough money".
Because Apple, like most "tech" stocks, doesn't pay a representative dividend: $0.57 dividend a year on a $100.00 share from a company that's still making $40 Billion profit a year is pathetic (my bank pays me a better return on deposits), and for all the time that the iPhone was taking over the world, there was zero dividend payable.
Without an income stream, the only way that shareholders can benefit from owning the company's stock is to trade it, and that requires volatility. That need to constantly "flip" shares to earn money is what drives the short-term thinking of the market.
The reason for the low dividend is twofold. One, due to tax laws and changes in the way compensation is paid, it has become more attractive to buy back shares than it used to. Two, since every major US company began parking cash overseas to delay paying taxes on it, companies started building up large cash hoards instead of returning it to shareholders.
Apple has $232 billion in cash now! It is really less since tax is due on most of it, but it still probably adds up to at least $150 billion if they brought it back into the US. Doing so may not be smart though, because hope springs eternal for corporations that another tax holiday like the ill advised one Bush had a decade ago will happen. Why bring it back at the full rate when you can wait for however many years is necessary for a friendly republican administration willing to grant a temporary lower rate?
Sure would be nice if the US reworked its corporate tax system, lowering the rate in exchange for closing loopholes (such as being able to delay taxes by leaving money overseas) but our government gets more dysfunctional by the day, and our choice between President Hillary or President Donald will likely only make that worse.
Zero innovation, flops like their overpriced pointless watch, a toxic hellstew of malware hitting them on all sides and of course the iSheep seeing the quality of these half price new Android devices.
Android is on 82% market share with Apple having the lions share of the dregs. The next interesting figures will be these during the same period.
We really did hit peak Apple a few years back when they ran out of things to copy, or as they put it "thinking different".
Paris, for she also hit her pinnacle a while ago but is experiencing more and more flops as time goes by.
"The dregs"? You mean substantially all the profit in the smartphone market? People switch from Android to iPhone at a higher rate than the other way around, regardless of your babbling about the quality of half price Android devices.
No one has made any significant innovation in smartphones for years, because a higher resolution screen, better camera, better performance etc. are just incremental advances on what we have now. Nothing anyone can do about it, until someone comes up with some new "must have" thing that you have to buy a new smartphone to get.
"People switch from Android to iPhone at a higher rate than the other way around" [citation needed]
My own anecdotal experience is the other way round. Many people I know, buying their first smartphone, went with the iPhone because of the apparent "cool" factor. Many have stuck with Apple for a few generations however, slowly but surely, they're switching to Android. The reasons are many and varied but the general gist is that one size (not physical size) no longer fits all and there is nothing the iPhone does that Androids can't and more often than not for less of an outlay.
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