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Comment by mythz | Hacker News Reader

Killed it again:

  - Revenue: 53.3B (17% YoY) 
  - Net Income: 11.5B (40% YoY)

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That's impossible. Everyone keeps telling me that Apple is dying.

At this rate I imagine Apple could lock the doors of all of its stores and pull the plug on its website, and it would have enough cash to pay its employees for decades.

Especially if they also fired all the employees.

You can look up their cash and cash equivalents and get a sense of their employee costs, you don't have to guess.

Without the business, 15 years would be a fair estimate for how long the cash would last, based on modest inflation adjustments on salaries, an average $100k to $125k cost per employee (all in), and either clearing their debt or just paying interest on it perpetually.

They'll probably burn $150b over ten years on employee costs, with 100,000 employees (present count). That's mostly ignoring the destruction of the stock itself, which would hit employee compensation and require higher salaries to offset.

Apple has been said to be doomed as long as I can remember.

Somehow it’s great to be underestimated continuously. But on the other hand the stock takes the toll with a low PE ratio (compared to other tech stocks)

A P/E of 17 is perfect for a great company, in my estimation.

the problem is that it looks like growth has stalled.

Revenue up 17% YoY, Net Income up 40% YoY up from the largest profitable base is not stalled growth.

I think she/he was saying that a PE of 17 looks like growth has stalled, which is evidently not the case. All other tech companies have higher PE due to expected growth. With Apple it is always hindsight, since 15 years

Please help me understand by substantiating the statement. Thanks.

Look at those Mac numbers. That’s something to shake your head at.

This was discussed on the call, new Mac shipped Q3 last year and slipped to Q4 this year. Nothing to see here...

That's nonsense.

You're buying a laptop for your college kid. Your choices: a thin laptop that requires $350 of accessories, a midrange laptop that is 4-5 years old, or a laptop that is expensive and has a defective keyboard.

I always enjoy the 5% stock drops every time they miss on iPhone sales (they missed Eleventy-Billions by 100K units!).

>That's impossible. Everyone keeps telling me that Apple is dying.

It's the reverse of a pump and dump scam. It has happened every quarter for the last 21 years. I honestly think it was something SJ cooked up. It started happening just after he returned. My guess, he got John Dvorak in on the scam. That guy's 'beleaguered Apple' PCMag trolling was instrumental in driving the price down for years. Everyone would parrot it. Then, "bam" Apple produces a great quarter. I wonder if JD still does that schtick... You can make money without fail by buying on the dip before earnings announcements and selling on the news.

Apple isn't a plucky start up, they're a tanker. They don't change directions quickly. Apple could start putting out rubbish hardware where even the most basic input devices don't work, not admit their mistake for 3 years, double down and roll that out on their entire product line and it would take years to impact sales & revenue.

By the time revenue starts dropping it's probably too late to fix.

>That's impossible. Everyone keeps telling me that Apple is dying.

When people say it's dying they're not talking about financials, and holding up how much money they made as a barometer of success doesn't mean anything.

Some people judge their success on how good the products are not how much money they make because lots of these people have been fans of the company even when it was doing bad financially.

All just seems like they have become what Jobs was describing here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AxZofbMGpM and holding up the bag of money when they have shipped an objectively poorly designed laptop for 3 years now just reinforces that for some of us.

They are selling about the same number of phones, but charging more for them.

And that actually works.

Unit sales up 1% year over year, revenue up 20%.

Q1 2016: 74.8 million iPhones sold

Q1 2018: 77.3 million iPhones sold

Q3 2016: 40.4 million iPhones sold

Q3 2018: 41.3 million iPhones sold

They are selling MORE iPhones..

Q3 2018: 41.3 (0.7%)

Q3 2017: 41.0 (1.5%)

Q3 2016: 40.4 (-15%)

Q3 2015: 47.5 (35%)

Q3 2014: 35.2 (13%)

seems pretty flat to me

Macbook Pro sales down to 2010 levels. Worrying for the HN crowd, no? Bloomberg tech reporter saying that the Macbook is going the way of the iPod. :/

It wouldn't surprise me if the iPad is actually cannibalizing MacBook Pro sales. (the meme has come true!)

I doubt it's cannibalizing many MacBook Pro sales, but it probably is cannibalizing MacBook and MacBook Air sales.

A lot of people were waiting for a macbook pro refresh so that might be the reason for lower sales.

I think having no updated machine under $1000 for the last 3 or 4 years is the culprit and not the refreshed MacBook Pro, which starts at $1800 and has never been their best seller.

Need to update my wife's Mac but she doesn't need a $1,800 machine.

Every refresh they just make it worse now. Holding out isn't a good strategy.

don't worry, the suck level will integer overflow eventually and it will wrap around to a super positive release

No wonder Apple were so quick to push out a MBP update

I've been holding off buying the new Macbooks due to issues with the keyboard, CPU performance (which was fixed), and the absence of a non-touchbar 15" Macbook (biggest blocker for me).

Until they release a 15" non-touchbar version with a better keyboard, I'll stick to my 2012 rMBP, as I'm sure others (including people I know) are too.

Legitimately curious: What is your plan if they never do?

Haven't actually thought about that. I'm holding out for as long as I can, and I think my 2012 will last me for at least another year. I'm hopeful that with next year's refresh they'll put out a 15" without the touchbar, or just the same 2012 MBP with the new chips and 32G RAM.

What's a computer?

Clearly that ad campaign did such a great job burning into your mind you can't stop thinking about it. You really need to consider what's not paying rent in your thoughts that takes away from your active attention.

Good on Apple marketing though, it stuck hard and each time someone makes a cute comment like OP's, it's just free advertising for Apple.

Isn't the whole market shrinking in an even faster rate? Besides that: there's nothing spectacular to upgrade to for people that have bought a MacBook Pro in the last 5-6 years. I don't think that's entirely Apple's fault.

Apple still relies on the MacBook, and specifically MacOS (of which the MacBook is the flagship product line), as a development platform for all of its other devices... Within Apple's current platform strategy, Apple does not have any alternative for the MacBook. So, it's currently not possible for the MacBook to go the way of the iPod...

Sure it can, they still sell an iPod Touch model from 3 years ago.

Heck, if all they sold was a Macbook Pro from 2015, quite a few developers would be happier about it.

They did up until a month ago....

> Within Apple's current platform strategy, Apple does not have any alternative for the MacBook.

They can open source or license OS X. Not within their current strategy, but that has to be one of their backup plans.

That said, slower sales doesn’t mean less users, because replacement times are just getting longer. I’m using a late 2016 MBP, and Apple isn’t expected to have a meaningfully better one until late 2022 or so.

Even the iPhones have really only changed cosmetically since the 6S came out three years ago. This year’s model will be the first one since then that will actually be noticeably faster.

> Even the iPhones have really only changed cosmetically since the 6S came out three years ago. This year’s model will be the first one since then that will actually be noticeably faster.

According to this link, the currently shipping iPhone is roughly 1.75x as fast as the 6S (Geekbench score of ~4200 vs. 2400):

https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks

The limiting factor of phone performance though is mainly modem quality though, and to a less extent RAM. A 1.75x increase in some CPU/GPU-bound benchmark is nice, but it's not going to make your web pages render that much faster in practice. Whereas the performance is going to increase dramatically once we get access to the new 600MHz spectrum, 4x4 MIMO, etc.

Except all the cases where it isn't limited by the modem. For example, web pages, heavy web apps on wifi, you know, native apps, games.

That’s crazy out of touch. The modem is definitely not the limiting factor. I get better LTE bandwidth than I do on my home fiber.

Latency is an issue, sure but not as much as CPU here.

I see Qualcomm’s PR campaign is working.

>> Macbook Pro sales down to 2010 levels. Worrying for the HN crowd, no?

If you've got a Core i series CPU, your laptop will age fairly well and potentially delay your upgrade. Maybe that's the cause of the decline?

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