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Comment by ihuman | Hacker News Reader

MacStories has some nice graphical visualizations comparing this quarter's results to previous quarters.

https://www.macstories.net/news/apple-q3-2018-results-533-bi...

That is a pretty good visualization. One of the things that really stands out is the growth in services. One way that has personally effected me has been with music on my iPad.

It has become harder and harder to have purchased music live on your iPad for playing. They have completely skewed what was their signature 'appliance app' (from the iPod of days gone by) from 'carry your music with you where ever you go' to 'portal to our pay per month music service'. Every time I upgrade IOS I worry about how much harder it will be to put my music on the device so that I can listen to it without being connected to a network or paying a monthly fee.

Don't worry - while the majority of users simply consume their music via streaming, local music ownership isn't going anywhere for music enthusiasts.

And as long as Apple allows alternative music players on iOS I'm not worried. I recommend Cesium to anyone using a local music collection: http://www.cesium-app.com/

It uses the same iTunes library as any other music app, including Apple's default music.app.

Six Colors does it better IMHO: https://sixcolors.com/post/2018/07/apple-q3-results-charts-c...

Sort of. But the "Average Mac selling price (4q average)" is an abysmal chart. The first-glance takeaway is, "Wow! The average Mac price has almost quadrupled recently!" when in reality it has increased about $150, or about 12% from two years ago.

I don't agree: this is one chart where starting the Y axis at 0 would be more misleading, not less.

By way of analogy, consider a chart of somebody's body temperature in Fahrenheit: if that fluctuates +/- 5 degrees it's a cause of significant concern, +/- 10 degrees is a medical emergency. But all of those changes would look small and insignificant on a 0-based chart.

It's the same situation here. The ASP of a Mac is never going to be even close to 0, so the Y-axis should span only the range of realistic values so we can really see how significant the recent upswing was in context.

On why the US tax rate should be raised: access to the most profitable market: https://2672686a4cf38e8c2458-2712e00ea34e3076747650c92426bbb...

How about not just raising taxes to raise taxes? The US isn't really effective with what they collect already (beyond more military), but hey let's slap some more pork belly on.

That would be fucking swell.

This might make sense if the US had a territorial tax system, like much of the rest of the world. But the US rate applies to the global profits of US-based companies.

The mix of high rate and worldwide (non-territorial) taxation is why so many US companies end up being acquired by foreign companies. Then you don't have to pay US rates on your worldwide income.

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