I see no connection between Apple's revenue and emerging/sustaining trends.
- 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.
So if you didn't get a top-story post on Apple's revenue from HN every quarter, you would have no idea how fast mobile is growing?
> People are willing to pay a premium for quality even in tougher economic times
So? Unless you're in the business of selling expensive hardware - and my guess is that you are not - this is irrelevant.
> Digital distribution of Music and Software is the future
We're already living in this future. The last time I bought a hard-copy retail version of software was in the 90's, and for music, at least 5 years.
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.
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.
Hey everyone on Hacker News, please ask schammy before up voting any story so that nothing he isn't interested in doesn't make it to the front page!
Seriously, if you only read the top 10 stories you're missing the best stuff on this site. Try not to only read popular opinion, most people are sheep
Sure, location-detection portable devices have been out for a long time, but not until the iPhone did it actually take off.
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.
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.