Apple Reports Record First Quarter Results
apple.com
apple.com
- for first time seeing analysts excited about other products, watch and airpods as being real drivers of bottom line revenue!!!
- interesting note from Bloomberg tech reporter "Apple’s new revenue strategy isn’t a bad one. It’s, basically, sell the customer an iPhone every three to five years, and make a bunch of money in the years between by selling them a new Apple Watch or AirPods (which only last about three years tops before you need a new pair -- batteries!) and services. If a user subscribes to all of Apple’s services for two years straight, that’s about equal to revenue from a new iPhone. So in those cases, if that user doesn’t buy a new iPhone for a couple years, it’s not a big deal."
- apples done so well lately that the average analysts has a target price 5% below what apple is currently trading at
- they manufacture iphones 400 km from the center of the coronavirus outbreak, see if this is mentioned, also about 18% of apple revenue so China matters
- want to see what their effective tax rate is
Numbers:
- stocks almost back to record highs before reporting, after reporting it shot way past!!
- 1Q Revenue is $91.8B vs estimates of $88.38B!!!!!!
- 1Q EPS is $4.99 vs estimates of$4.56!!!!!
- wearables was $10 vs $7.3 last year( apple just continues to create $10+ billion dollar business every 3-5 years. Use to be that only MSFT could do that and GOOG spent heavily trying to do that
- iphone revenue for 1Q is $55.97
- service revenue for 1Q is $12.72
- declines in both mac($7.1 vs $7.4 last year) and iPad sales($6 vs %6.7 last year)
- iphone sales up everywhere except Japan
Numbers that really impress
- Cash/Equivalents have doubled from last year, that funds a lot of money loosing streaming shows
- keeping in mind they bought back $37B in stock this year
- almost $100B in term debt
Supply Chain:
- Qurvo up 1%
- Skyworks up 1%
- Cirrus up 3%
Aren't lots of people on monthly plans now with "free" annual upgrades?
The loan is absolutely zero interest, but I get ~$200 in fees when I upgrade from AT&T. It's enough where I didn't upgrade from the X to the 11.
I have also since switched to Google Fi and don't know if that same fee exists with them ....
I've been a part of the iPhone upgrade plan since it started and haven't been charged any fees by AT&T.
Ouch. Maybe it's your plan?
When I upgrade iPhones (financed through Apple) on AT&T, the fee is $35.
"Line activation fee" or some such lie. Why do I have to pay a fee to activate a line that's already active?
The only way to avoid the activation fee is to swap the SIM by yourself, I think.
Is the inventory already on the books of the cellular provider?
Is there a third party? Is it securitized?
This business model seems similar to leasing a car.
You take out a loan with Citizens One, and the phone is paid for (from Apple's perspective) outright. You then pay the loan down. However you can't get another upgrade until you've paid at least half of the installments, and then if you trade in the old phone the remaining balance of the loan is deleted.
There's also a new (similar) program integrated into their Apple Card. Not sure how exactly that works.
The inventory comes from Apple. You do not buy/lease/whatever the phone from any carrier. Once you purchase it, you have the option to activate it with whichever of the big carriers in store. You could also walk out and install your own SIM from elsewhere. AUP phones aren't carrier locked.
I'm constantly reading on HN about the deceiving nature of stock buybacks on earnings. Is this not an example? Net income was down year-over-year on "record" per share earnings.
Properly you care about more than that: you want to know how the business is faring; the thing that actually has to support the EPS. You want to know that you're not watching a dwindling scenario, where you're losing the business and the buybacks are getting you just a bit more than treading water. That's where EPS juicing can be a dangerous camouflage.
If juicing EPS with buybacks comes at the cost of longer term growth, it's a disaster for long-term shareholding. Incorrect capital allocation sinks a lot of ships.
IBM, as one infamous example, played (is playing) an aggressive financial engineering game where they were seeing their business contract every quarter for years, yet juiced EPS through buybacks.
It did absolutely nothing for the stock, which hasn't moved in ten years (Adobe is now worth more than IBM + the former Red Hat, ouch). All those profits shoveled into buybacks and it did nothing to drive consequential returns for shareholders. If shareholders are lucky they've yielded three or four percent per year the past decade, with inflation + buybacks + dividends (while a lot of other prominent tech companies have generated epic returns in that time). It could have gone into building a better cloud business which would have provided growth, which would have rewarded them with a PE ratio that isn't a dismal 13 (Apple has a multiple 2x that with very modest growth). In four or five years AWS will be as large as IBM's entire business (it's already nearly as profitable now). Shareholders have seen some EPS boost while the business gradually vanishes out from under them.
Is it more likely that IBM's profits were better spent on buying shares back or driving business growth? You could have rolled up a massive cloud business for $50 billion in acquisitions between 2008-2018 (and ideally not stupidly paid twice what Red Hat was actually worth, near the peak of a stock market bubble).
To put it simply, wherher a company performs buybacks does not tell you what the future growth will be. All it tells you is that the company’s management believes shares are undervalued, or alternatively that they are irrational (to your point, I would characterize most share buybacks as irrational, but _certainly_ not apple’s)
It's a pretty clear sign of management saying "We see no better opportunity than to buy shares at the current price."
This may be because management believes shares are undervalued. But it may also be because they have no alternative plans.
And continued buybacks would seem to indicate the latter.
They beat a number that was supposed to have factored in the effects of buybacks.
These days, EPS contains a blend of past “dividends” payed out as buybacks.
The math works out so that when you buy the stock, you’re essentially paying the previous shareholder past dividends would have happend if they hadn’t been replaced with buybacks.
Anyway, none of that should change the way you reason about P/E. The main impact is that EPS trends over time aren’t comparable to net income trends, etc.
What a joke.
Seems like Apple is making money from creating disposable rubbish and trashing the Earth.
Maybe I’m wrong and they recycled all? I hope this is the case.
In perspective (to Elon Musk‘s products, for example) Airports are completely irrelevant, as long as they are not powered by enriched uranium: they are just too small.
That's the uncool part.
How environmentally friendly! Recycling is a corporate greenwashing tactic to make it seem like you can buy endless product and do the planet a favor because someone in china burned off all the non metals and grabbed the remaining aluminum.
That's FUD.
Apple was indeed "caught" doing that, in one very specific and generally customer-friendly sense.
Apple throttled the phone CPU as the battery aged to avoid spikes that could cause the phone to die. When people complained about it, they introduced a toggle to allow that behavior to be disabled.
Broadly speaking, Apple has had an excellent record relative to the rest of the industry. They provide day of release OS updates for years-old devices, they have shipped major new releases which have actually improved performance on older devices, and they will often block new features on older devices when those features are likely to cause severe performance degradation.
iPhone in Japan - For those not aware iPhone has 80%+ Market Share in Japan ( Usage, not Sales ). And majority of iPhone user prefer smaller handset, that is the iPhone 4.7" or smaller like the iPhone SE size. So Apple hasn't really had any update for that market in 2019. Another point was Japan has passed a law that ban the subsidise phone selling with carriers. Making the cost of iPhone higher. Face ID is also not as well liked comparatively speaking, so replacement cycle are longer.
But Mac not so Good. I only posted this yesterday[1]. Basically more Mac users are leaving the platform. The Churn rate is possibly the highest in the past 10 years. I am not sure if this is because casual users are generally leaving the PC platform as a whole, or they are leaving to Windows or Linux.
Their slow creep into healthcare is a particularly interesting longterm play, due to the size of the market if nothing else.
You didn't see them during games a couple of years ago... so I guess they opened a new market and people are used to them.
A lot of people wear Apple Watches when running. After they realize that the watch's battery won't survive a marathon or a hike of any significant length, they usually upgrade to a Garmin or Fitbit.
Of course 12 hours with constant heart rate monitoring will be tough, I haven’t tried that.
I ran my first half marathon race with last month with a year old Series 4. I was running the Workout app in "Outdoor Run" mode, and playing (synced) music with the Music app to Bluetooth headphones. I did the run in the morning and made it through the whole day without taking it off. Around 9pm I got a warning I only had 10% power left.
It kind of blew my mind. Here is a device tracking my route with GPS, taking my heartrate, and playing wireless music to me, for just under 3 hours, and it feels about as big as a chunky Casio watch I had when I was a kid in the 80s.
So, basically 7 days worn for 10-12 hours/day including 40ish miles of running. With heartrate. And that's the 4 year old model. The newer versions have even better battery life.
I’ve also run a road marathon with the watch without the phone.
The downside is if you’re using the Workouts app, then your data is silo’d. The upsides is that the data is local and encrypted.
I started using it a year ago after I got annoyed at the Strava iOS app failing me once a week, and haven’t had any issues since.
How terribly entitled. Presumably the rules against jewelry and wearables are meant to ensure safety in case of collisions!
Great example explanation within here: https://daringfireball.net/2020/01/the_ipad_awkwardly_turns_...
And clearly the investment with Catalyst means they see the future as unified iOS/OSX apps.
In that by offering a product (even an inferior one) for every customer need, you smother your competitors by denying them market share.
The Hades Canyon Nucs come close, but are larger, have a power brick and are not my taste in design. But the 2x nic, graphics, storage options and price are compelling.
Bring on ARM.
They're better than anything you can find in the bracket that you place them in.
Sure, everything can always be better but I don't see much market pressure forcing it.
The move to fully 64-bit as well as Project Catalyst are significant pieces of work. Not to mention the inevitable ARM Mac which will be appearing soon.
Even Apple's own first-party Catalyst apps are a joke.
Of course, Mac OS X/OS X/macOS has had glaring issues in almost every release, but the lack of design chops and inadequate testing across the software arena (like it was shown in one of the security issues exposed by Google Project Zero) are telling examples of Tim Cook being fine as a breadth guy but not a details guy or a focused guy who can drive his teams to double down on all the software quality issues.
a. You can’t create any directories on the root filesystem any more, eg. / so you have to set up a redirection system via the synthetic.conf in /etc
b. When I run a program in Catalina under xcode for debugging, it asks me the first time to put a password in to let me debug it, every single time after reboot. Why??
c. The file system is now spread over 2 partitions (one safe modifiable one, one hidden secret one) but if you ask for the size of the partition via a system call or via df -h, it adds the TOTAL from both partitions, eg. 100GB and then tells you how much space is used for EACH parition (not total) so you get
25GB / 100GB
10GB / 100GB
This is inaccurate - I do not have 200GB total capacity. I only have 100GB. The size for each partition should be just that - the size of that partition.
d. Also, search for text in PDFs no longer works??
e. If my MacBook goes to sleep, it crashes (2012 MacBook Pro for home, on USB disk). It doesn't do this when running High Sierra off the internal disk/SSD (I upgraded the disk, yes).
I found all of these issues in half-an-hour after installing when trying to set up a dev environment on it.
It's rubbish!!
My late 2012 mbp (also with upgraded ssd and 16gb ram) is also crashing about 20% of the time whenever I put it to sleep ever since I upgraded it to Mojave. I'm not upgrading it to Catalina since I got a feeling that the issue will only get worse.
I am dreading that 2012 finally giving up. It's a MacBookPro9,1 with 2.6GHz i7. I put a 1TB SATA3 SSD in and 16GB RAM like you - still going strong. I am impressed how I've got 8 years of life out of the thing, and it's like new other than the plastic shroud under the screen.
I don't know what I will get when it finally dies - you?
I notice that my 2017 isn't any different in daily use; in fact the 2017 battery life is worse and I can hear the fan a lot of the time compared to my 2012.
Every year I've been waiting for apple to finally release a good mbp. The specs for the new 16 inch mbp seems great on paper (but without any user-upgradeable parts like the 2012, but that ship has sailed), so I'm waiting to see if any major issue shows up before getting one (probably early next year).
The backup option if the 16 inch mbp turns out to be no good is building a kvm-based hackintosh with gpu pass-through. I could fully migrate to linux, but still need MacOS for iOS app development so this system might works for me.
I won an 8086k processor (thanks Intel) and the machine is not taxed heavily (other than C++ dev in Windows and gaming) so any options for multiplatform development are always interesting to me.
Now to investigate the associated licencing issues!
People also reported great performance with hypervisors like esxi. I plan to try both methods and see which one works best for me.
Microsoft DOS and then Windows.
The people who want the lower end of the price range are still perfectly happy with their 5-7 year old iPads. Top of the line suffers in that most people in that market are probably fine or even better off with a MacBook Air/Pro, and they may even save a few dollars instead of buying a Smart Keyboard/folio.
Related to the 10 year anniversary: the iPad should be so much more capable than it is. I don't think the people behind shipping the first iteration are happy with its current state a decade later.
Main reason I got the mini5 despite its similarity to the mini4 is that I wanted to use the pencil while sketching.
Come to think of it, I probably use it more than my iPhone.
I use a Mini 4 now and it’s fine, but compared to my iPhone 11 feels a lot slower.
The current mini is just about the perfect package to blog like it's 2004, which is my want.
I've still got the iPad Air 2 I bought in 2014. I still use it nearly every day. I still love it. I haven't seen any compelling reason to upgrade, so far.
I am very impressed and hope they've put their MacBook hardware defects era behind them. Typing this on an awesome 16-inch MBP.
In the same vein that Apple is now working on designing and building its own modem chips (with the Qualcomm agreement being a stop gap thing), I’m sure (as are thousands of others) that Apple has been working on an ARM based Mac for some years. It’s just a matter of getting enough performance to use it on a low end MacBook and getting the related details on the software side (porting x64 apps to it with lesser effort) ironed out.
https://lowlevelbits.org/bitcode-demystified/
Also as we've seen with iPad Pro + AWS M6G instances the performance is now there to power desktops.
This myth was dispelled by no less than Chris Lattner on ATP.
Even though he did later admit that he wasn’t completely being honest. Part of the purpose of the bitcode requirement for the Watch was that Apple knew that they would be shipping a 64 bit chip for the Watch two years later.
https://atp.fm/205-chris-lattner-interview-transcript
Bitcode is not [12:30] a magic solution, though. You can't take a 32-bit app, for example, and run it on a 64-bit device. That kind of portability isn’t something that Bitcode can give you, notably because that is something that's visible in C. As you're writing C code, you can write #ifdef pointer size equals 32, and that’s something that Bitcode can't abstract over. It's useful for very specific, low-level kinds of enhancements, but it isn't a panacea that makes everything [13:00] magically portable.
John Siracusa: The same thing I would assume for architecture changes, especially if there was an endian difference, because endianness is visible from the C world, so you can't target different endianness?
Chris Lattner: Yep. It's not something that magically solves all portability problems, but it is very useful for specific problems that Apple's faced in the past.
And ARM I believe has runtime-selectable endianness.
Someone demoed transpiling bitcode to x86_64, it seems going the other direction wouldn't be a big problem, it's stock clang: https://www.highcaffeinecontent.com/blog/20190518-Translatin...
If I’d had a laptop like that on offer, my interest in the laptop platform would be surely rekindled as half the earth would line up around the block to buy one...
Given how impressive the recent Apple chips are, perhaps that's less of an issue now.
Non-Standard Quarters
For a variety of reasons, some public companies will use a non-standard or non-calendar quarterly reporting system. For example, Walmart's first quarter is February, March, and April; Apple Inc's Q1 is October, November, and December; Microsoft Corporation's Q1 is July, August, and September.
I have the 9.7" iPad Pro, which is something like 3 years old by now. I have no reason to upgrade. Swift Playgrounds is a great app and has a built-in compiler. It's very nearly an IDE at this point. On my iPad, it compiles slowly and really eats the battery. But I don't really care; it's just a toy app. If Apple were to allow things compiled in Swift Playgrounds to be run, say, via the Shortcuts app (in any shortcut I created), I'd be excited to start really developing code on the iPad, and I'd want to buy a new iPad to enable that.
If companies saw the chance to make money on the Oculus they would jump aboard regardless.
The iPhone had two major advantages that attracted developers - there were already iPhones on the market before the App Store opened and at the time, Apple had an easy payment system via iTunes and millions of credit cards on file. It was estimated that Apple had more credit cards on files than Amazon or it was a close second thanks to iTunes.
It also had a proven customer base of people willing and able to spend money on digital goods.
I'm not paying $4k for skylake refreshes refresh.
I would also love if they started shipping optane in their high end models (or at least have the option).
The 16" MBP is also the top tier in the notebooks, and despite complaints, the previous gen TouchBars are working decently for most people. Not surprised the 16" didn't have a huge impact.
Updating the 13" line would have a bigger impact. iMac/iMac Pro also haven't seen notable updates in a while.
That's fair
> it starts at $6000
The pricing/features can be (have been) debated ad infinitum, but no matter which way you slice it, it represents a huge new direction for the Mac line and at least at the high-end, industry professionals are excited about it. It's a big deal, and it's not a flop, so it should have an impact (next quarter, it seems).
> and despite complaints, the previous gen TouchBars are working decently for most people
Most people probably won't be trading in their 2018 MBPs for the new 16-inch, but given the strong feelings out there about the keyboard and airflow I'd bet some people will.
And more importantly there are people like me, who were holding off on a long-coming upgrade for a moment exactly like this, when Apple's solved the biggest issues with the design. It should've registered as some kind of sales bump, even if not a massive one.
Now I am just guessing while the new 16" made people more willing to buy a new MBP it wasn't getting them to rush and buy one. That is my case, I will likely buy this year, without the new 16" I think it was under 50% chance I bought a MBP (and a bit more likely I got some laptop I could run Ubuntu on).
I suspect both of these new models came in too late to appreciably affect the Mac quarter results, though, as the OP mentioned -- and I also suspect that the number of people who were holding off on upgrades, like you, has been steadily rising. And I know I'm not alone in looking at the 16" one and thinking it was neat but just too big. So maybe the acid test is going to be seeing what happens to sales when they update the smaller models with the new keyboard.
I pointed out in another comment that the 16" is actually slightly smaller on every dimension than the 15" 2015 MBP, even with the extra diagonal-inch of screen space:
358.9 mm × 247.1 mm × 18.0 mm
357.9 mm x 245.9 mm x 16.2 mm
You can't produce crap products for 5 years and expect people to use that as a reason to rush to upgrade to the latest and greatest.
Clearly you've been living under a rock. I see 15"/16" all over the place.
> The Mac Pro is just too expensive
For hobbyists. Not for its target market.
The mac pro is somewhere between "too expensive" and "too little, too late".
The standard line is that if you make $$$ using the Mac Pro - e.g. production companies - the cost is peanuts. However, they took so long to upgrade the Pro lineup that some of those would-be-buyers have already moved on to non-Apple products because working on old hardware for so long was more expensive than jumping off Apple's ship.
Certainly many stayed. But I have several friends that work in production in LA and more than one of them left Apple's ecosystem during that dry spell. They aren't coming back for an overpriced machine.
That being said, I agree with you. It's too large.
There's also still a lot of stuff I don't care for (bezel size, massive trackpad, still has an underwhelming keyboard, lack of port diversity, touchbar), but it's decent enough for me to pull the trigger if it were in a smaller package.
They gave us the esc key back, and moved away from the butterfly mechanism, etc. If it was just in a form factor similar to that of comparable dell/lenovos (<= 14"), I'd buy one and I feel like I'm not the only one.
That being said, I also echo the price concerns. You can easily spec out a 16" to over $3k - that's a lot for a laptop.
For what it's worth, it's actually slightly smaller on every dimension than the 15" 2015 MBP, even with the extra diagonal-inch of screen space:
358.9 mm × 247.1 mm × 18.0 mm
357.9 mm x 245.9 mm x 16.2 mm
Me neither BUT I noticed both my Dad and a friend try to touch my laptop screen when I was showing them something. They did so in a way that clearly they weren't even thinking about it and they just expected it to work, especially for scrolling.
People's constant use of phones, tablets and newer windows portables that support touch are changing people's expectations. People who primarily use the keyboard + touchpad/mouse are soon to be a minority (if the are not already when the wide world is considered).
Thankfully, Lenovo and Huawei have good offers.
I might just end up buying an old 2015 one. Retina display is the only thing I really want.
I narrowly preferred the feel of the butterfly keys, and I like clicky keyboards in general. But I was one of the many who had keypress failures, which was infuriating.
I've beaten the crap out of this style of keyboard, from Apple, without problems, so I'm optimistic that they've fixed the problem. This is my eighth Apple keyboard, and of them all, I've had keypress failures only on the seventh.
And yes, to answer your question, it's considerably quieter. And has an escape key. And t-shaped arrow keys. I'm pleased.
What keeps me from going back to the 2015 is that everything at home is now set up for USB-C and I would prefer to not have two separate cabling setups for the shared desk.
The battery percentage hops up/down by a few percent when it is low, eg. 7%, 10%, 9%, 7%, 4% ALERT ALERT ALERT. I would replace the battery in it, but I can't......
I do not have this problem on my 2012. Also, on my 2012 I know how much battery life I left without having to turn the thing on. Nor do I need dongles.
Plus I am not deafened by the keyboard on the 2012.
Speakers on the touchbar MBP are good though! That's the only thing I can say about it.
I'm looking forward to getting a 2nd gen 16". It's likely to line up with my upgrade cycle.
My dream is an ultra-thin, low/medium power device that essentially just runs the editor, plus a full local CLI environment and maybe some basic stuff like compilers/etc, move all the super hungry stuff like containers, databases, queues etc to the cloud. iPad is kind of there, though you're probably still going to be editing off of an SFTP share if you want to use one of the mediocre editors available on the App Store. Plus any web development is still a pipe dream given the lack of dev tooling in Safari mobile. Backend-facing development is more possible, but the Surface Pro X feels much closer to this dream.
Edit: I didn’t expect to be downvoted. Are viruses not a concern?
When I am doing serious work I need a proper keyboard, a proper mouse and two screens. Not having those reduces my productivity by at least 50%.
I mean, what benefit really is there?
If you just purchased it I would take it back for a replacement.
Very bad OS release in my opinion, and poorly handled transition (eg. secret partitions, unwritable root partitions, security popups everywhere and for every activity). I am not using it because I want to work, not wrestle with the OS. IMHO they lost that feeling in Catalina.
When I’m navigating my iPhone with swipes, it’s like I’m conducting an orchestra.
On an Android it’s more like I’m opening cabinets and drawers who’s hinges need some lubricant.
My >5 year old 6S runs the latest-and-greatest OS 13 revision, it is still smooth and useful and does essentially everything I need. It's slower than a new model, has a much lesser camera, and the NFC is useful exclusively for Apple pay. But it's still perfectly useful for me for now.
Usability is subjective, and you may like iOS more, or not - but longevity is objective. If you want to stay secure and able to run latest apps (some of which are becoming essential for some of us - e.g. taxi hailing apps in various jurisdictions), you have to upgrade your Android every 2 years, or your iPhone every 5.
Apple's ability to sell a new IPhone every year is honestly the stuff of legends, it almost defies logic but they keep on executing it.
It is a bit interesting to see misses from Macs, IPads and services. Which tells you Apple is still very much an iphone story.
And the estimate of 3 year lifecycle for wearables like the watch and airpods seems overly optimistic. My airpods are a year old and the battery dwindles in about an hour or two before needing charging, my watch is bricked after 7 months.
When the current debt bubble pops it'll be interesting if it effects Apple revenue as hard as it will the college debt / car debt markets.
Don't they have a 1-year warrantee?
I'm in Japan and recently bought a mac mini with a 2 year interest free loan through a local company[0].
Anecdotally, it happens to me because the old one broke/discharge battery at alarming rate/charging port stops working/home button (back when it was physical) stuck
I'm much more satisfied with the mac line sans the immovable blocks masquerading as keyboard.
EDIT: I owned 5 iPhones over 10 years, so it's not yearly. My iPhone 4 lasted 5 years, the rest are not so fortunate.
After only 1 year?
Also, technically, they still do work.
https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/evc2re/apple_202...
Same with the trillion dollar comment below.
The AD market is not exactly hugely profitable and it takes enterprise sales people to push it. That’s not the type of business Apple wants to be in.
The US GDP is ~$21 trillion, but that's not its market cap, it's just one year's worth of production. You can't buy the USA for $21 trillion.
The free plan offering hasn't increased as far as I know, and the devices require more and more icloud backup space, so why would you be surprised in an increase of 'service' revenues?
Or if you want to live dangerously, you don't have to turn on iCloud backups at all.
In fact, you don't have to turn on iCloud, period.
- Owning a computer
- Plugging your phone into your computer
- Having iTunes always running (if it's not a Mac)
Additionally, Apple provides a very convenient API where you can store files and have it show up on related devices after calling a sync function. Many apps which store user data use this, and it requires iCloud if you want to sync between Mac and iOS or iOS to iOS. It's a very common pattern, some popular apps that use it: GoodNotes, Studies, Notability, WhatsApp, Linea, and every Apple-made app.
You mean I have to own a computer to back up my phone to a computer that I own? Scandalous! Next thing you know, you'll tell me that I have to own a phone in order to back up my phone.
Plugging your phone into your computer
If an iPhone is charging and on the same wifi network as the computer, it will automatically sync at night. There's a checkbox for it.
Having iTunes always running
Or you just fire up iTunes when you want to sync. Once a week, or month, or whatever works for your schedule.
Many people only own an iPhone and nothing else.
> If an iPhone is charging and on the same wifi network as the computer, it will automatically sync at night.
Even fewer people have a computer that stays on all night.
> Or you just fire up iTunes when you want to sync.
Sure, something you have to remember to do.
The main point though is that many apps that have sync capabilities require iCloud. iTunes backups do not work for sync.
I would love to use iCloud Backup, but my understanding is that as soon as you do, everything that was E2E encrypted (because you're using iCloud services) immediately becomes visible to Apple.
I recommend iMazing [0]. Very well executed local backups over WiFi.
[0].
2012:
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/09/24/icloud-storage-... "Now that iCloud is up and running and seemingly holding up under demand, Apple needs to start offering more than 5 GB of storage at the free level."
2016:
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/08/08/google-photos-s... "I realize Apple is building up its “services” as a profit center, but 5 GB just isn’t enough for the free tier."
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/09/27/icloud-photos-c... "Surely Apple will eventually increase the storage capacity of the free tier; the sooner they do so, and the larger they make it, the better."
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/09/27/trouton-icloud-... "Apple should give all iCloud users a lot more free storage"
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/12/15/speirs-icloud-s... "This 5 GB tier is just untenable."
2018:
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/01/25/stern-icloud-st... "5 GB seems ridiculous when the company is selling $999 iPhones with 64 GB of storage."
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/05/25/icloud-storage-... "My fingers are still crossed that they’ll increase the storage capacity of the free tier at WWDC, though."
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/08/01/iphone-x-snell "I think Apple’s (Cook’s?) interest in increasing revenue from Services is keeping them from doing what’s right — increasing the base iCloud storage from 5 GB to something more reasonable."
2019:
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/11/01/snell-services "That miserly 5 GB free tier is emitting an evermore pungent nickel-and-diming aroma."
I realize iPhone is an amazing amount of their revenue, but they are transitioning to a services and accessory business built around iPhone. It’s less important exactly what model iPhone you have, in my opinion.
Reducing investor visibility into a publicly traded company when numbers start turning negative is a huge flaming red flag.
Well, I think the console makers do.
Live blog: Apple’s fiscal Q4 2018 earnings call https://9to5mac.com/2018/11/01/aapl-live-blog-fy18-q4/
If you believe the strategy laid out in the parent comment to yours, then it isn't a red flag at all. For the last 10 years, the number 1 thing that contributed to Apple's growth was the iPhone. They don't believe that will be the case for the next 10 years.
I think they should release those numbers for investor clarity, but I don't think it's a red flag.
Dell, HP, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Samsung, LG... etc etc
Red Flags everywhere