Apple reports Q3 results
apple.com
apple.com
I'm curious if anyone has thoughts on what effect that has on the overall market in terms of volatility? (I really have no good idea as to how any of this works) Could we see other stocks dip/rise as money is reallocated?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/29/big-tech-including-apple-and... [2] https://siblisresearch.com/data/us-stock-market-value/
Sure, we could see sector rotation into tech tomorrow. This may be somewhat muted because tech is already a very crowded trade, and tech names are already trading far higher than where they closed.
If people started selling off their shares, the share price would drop, so maybe in the end this hypothetical company would end up worth $500k. I’m not the original commenter, but I assume that was their point.
This is only true if there is a lot of dispute about the value of the company.
Suppose a company is nothing more than the owner of a bank account with a million dollars in cash. Well, then it's worth a million dollars. If there are a thousand shares then you'll be able to find arbitrarily many buyers at ~$1000/share. Existing investors would have no reason to sell for less than that because they could get that much just by liquidating the company.
Where the values diverge significantly is where there is a lot of uncertainty about the value of the company, and then there could be a lot of variation in how different people value it, so that the existing owners might assign a much higher value than others, and if they tried to sell a significant fraction of the shares it's the others whose price they'd have to meet to find a buyer.
Public company acquisition prices are highly correlated with their market caps. In fact, in acquisitions, the acquirer generally pays a premium to the market cap [1].
[1] https://cpb-us-west-2-juc1ugur1qwqqqo4.stackpathdns.com/u.os...
Even then, market cap does actually correlate directly to realisable value in acquisitions. They rarely trade for exactly the market cap, but it's definitely a useful benchmark against which to compare the company's relative value to the acquirer and it's current owners.
Still doesn't explain the crazy valuation
Definitely no one forces people to buy Apple’s products at a large premium over their competitors. I would say that Apple has to work harder to get users to willingly depart with their cash.
Actually, it's often the opposite. In the Boston area, the Apple Stores are always packed while the Microsoft Store (now closed) was usually mostly empty in the high-end mall across the street from the stand-alone Boylston Street Apple Store.
Price isn't the primary factor for many people, especially younger people.
First, there's no real price difference between high-end Android phones—the newest Samsung, for example—and similar iPhones.
A Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G 128GB list price is $1399; the iPhone 11 Pro Max with 256GB (double the storage) is $1249. That's $52.04/month.
I worked with 24 public high school kids last summer. Most of them were from 1st or 2nd generation immigrant families and would qualify for free or reduced lunch at school. Every one of them had a newer model iPhone than my 6s at the time.
Zero Android devices.
Which confirmed something I learned from market analysis years ago regarding Apple: people with limited funds can't afford to make a mistake when spending their limited money, which is why they tend to gravitate to higher quality, better made products.
Yes, there was the typical desire for teens to have the right sneakers, t-shirt, jeans, etc. The iPhone is definitely in that category, with 85% of them either owning or intending to buy an iPhone: https://www.phonearena.com/news/teens-love-apple_id123682.
We know that anecdote says nothing. The only thing that the Microsoft store and Apple store sell in common are computers and Mac marketshare is around 10%. It’s not even close.
> Price isn't the primary factor for many people, especially younger people.
If price weren’t the determining factor, the average iPhone buyer wouldn’t live in a household in the US with A 40% higher income.
https://www.comscore.com/ita/Public-Relations/Infographics/i...
> First, there's no real price difference between high-end Android phones—the newest Samsung, for example—and similar iPhones. A Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G 128GB list price is $1399; the iPhone 11 Pro Max with 256GB (double the storage) is $1249. That's $52.04/month.
Only in the US. My understanding is that most of the rest of the world doesn’t have monthly payment options where the price delta would be more apparent.
But also, there are high end Android phones that cost the same, but out of the Android manufactures, Samsung has the highest average selling price, and it’s like $290 - $100 less than the cheapest iPhone. They haven’t been able to convince many people to pay for high end phones.
> The iPhone is definitely in that category, with 85% of them either owning or intending to buy an iPhone:
A survey also showed that 58% of iPod owners “intended” to buy a Zune in 2006....
I can tell you based on where I live and who I work with, there are many people who are low and moderate income who own iPhones now.
They don’t buy their phones outright like some people do; they usually can’t drop $1000 in one go on something that’s not their rent.
However, low and moderate income people can pay $10 or $20 a month for the phone while using prepaid services.
To be blunt, that’s why poor inner city kids can rock very nice iPhones.
An iPhone SE is $200 on a carrier deal; it’s a better phone than anything else in that price range that low and moderate income people can afford.
What premium? Right now I'm trying to decide between Dell XPS 9500 and MacBook Pro 16" and with similar spec MacBook is actually the cheaper option.
In the smartphone space top Samsung models are also priced similarily to iPhones
Samsung’s average selling price is $290....
> This paper proposes that idiosyncratic firm-level shocks can explain an important part of aggregate movements and provide a microfoundation for aggregate shocks.
> Existing research has focused on using aggregate shocks to explain business cycles, arguing that individual firm shocks average out in the aggregate. I show that this argument breaks down if the distribution of firm sizes is fat-tailed, as documented empirically.
> The idiosyncratic movements of the largest 100 firms in the United States appear to explain about one-third of variations in output growth.
Also, services revenue grew YoY but it’s the first time it didn’t grow QoQ in a long time, so it seems to have stagnated. Services include a lot of recurring revenue so they should be consistently growing QoQ.
Wearables growth also slowed, this may be the other side of the coin when people are indoors and don’t want to buy a watch for fitness tracking.
I wonder how much this has to do with the release of iPadOS 13, which has made the iPad a significantly more capable "computer" than previous versions of the operating system. For the majority of users (you don't fall into this category, fellow Hacker News reader), the capabilities of iPadOS are quickly approaching that of macOS.
Huh wow, I haven't thought about iPads for a while, but apparently they even added multiple windows (predictably, 5 years late). That's probably the biggest blocker I considered that made tablets a toy even for laymen users (you hardly need to be a leet haxorz to use multiple windows)
I like the ability to easily export documents and send them to my students, as well as the freedom you get with a digital whiteboard––you can drag and manipulate individual pieces of your sketch as if they were magnets on the board in a traditional setting.
The Pencil definitely does not feel like using a regular pen, but it's rather similar to writing on a whiteboard and is rather comfortable to use (you get palm-blocking and everything). If you use the first-party Notes app, you also get automatic handwriting recognition and indexing in iPadOS 14.
Assuming they're currently accepting returns given the pandemic, Apple has a relatively reasonable return policy – 14 days for a full refund provided you repackage everything, so if you find you don't like it you can just return it.
Many high school students have access to CollegeBoard's AP Computer Science Principles and AP Computer Science A programs, which expose students to fundamentals of computing and Java respectively (Principles is more focused on the _concepts_ of programming–sequential instructions, working in teams, etc., while CS A is focused on writing working Java). I've worked with students who do not have access to these classes at their school as well, working with them through a self-study curriculum.
Occasionally, I'll also see middle school students (6-8 grade, age 11-14) who have (or whose parents have) expressed interest in learning to code. I usually work with these students in Scratch then Python, depending on their skill levels, as some schools are even teaching programming classes.
I also get some requests from elementary students, but generally decline those.
Since I can’t see them because of Covid, I can now Facetime them. It was frustrating talking to my dad since he is losing his hearing. He can understand me a lot better when he can see me and FaceTime audio is much clearer than phone calls.
I bought an iPad Air and a pencil to take notes.
Sounds like FaceTime alone is a big improvement over the regular phone, but I thought maybe earphones might be even better.
Any educational apps you can recommend?
This has also replaced paper notebooks for me which is what I bought it to do, and I had a pretty sizable book collection on my phone which has been shunted over.
You will need to examine Apple's Services Revenue more closely. Apple puts $10/ unit to Services as OS / Map / Siri usage. Considering Apple had record iPhone / iPad / Mac Shipment per quarter.
Google paid Apple roughly $10 per year per Active User as default search placement. Or Roughly $10B per year.
App Store is by far the largest source of Services Revenue.
Considering Apple said in the conference call all of their Apple Services users are growing ( Referring to TV+, Music and News, but we dont know if those are paying members because the TV+ membership could easily be skewed. ). The only variable in QoQ decline is likely App Store Revenue.
80% of App Store Revenue are Gaming. So this suggest people are buying less in game items.
If every single pay to win an advertiser supported game disappeared, nothing of value would be loss.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/07/apple-q3-2020-results-eve...
Some of them sold much more volatility, via variance swaps, with quite disastrous results.
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1lffwvwdh7xtq...
Selling puts, though, is a fools game unless the market has already really tanked. Black Scholes isn't perfect, yadda, yadda.
I guess one issue with this approach is that it somewhat assumes a period of low-inflation between now and option expiry (unless you're factoring that into the 15% expected return).
Buy at $400 (price at time of writing) sell an option at $460 for January which comes with a $42 premium[0] at time of writing, so if the stock goes up 15% over the six month period the total return is $102 per share, or about 25% return. If inflation is, say, 4% per annum due to Covid pushing it a bit higher than normal, then the total return is ~23% vs what would have been ~13% for doing the same play without selling the option, so the real return is around 75% higher than the alternative where the option was not sold.
Usually it's around 30% more, so right now is an especially good time for this play if you think that Apple will at least hold its value.
[0] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL220121C00460000?p=AAPL22...
For example, if the theory goes that more people will want to buy apple now that the price is a "steal" (people think it's harder to 2x a big number than a small number) then it could go above that on open.
I prefer to believe that stocks are not in a bubble of such epic proportions that a stupid split can be an "event".
That is the split of Google A and C some years back, where Google added a new class of shares with different voting power.
In the Apple split each share after the split will be worth 1/4th, have 1/4th voting power, will receive 1/4th of dividend, etc. just reading happens in smaller fractions.
I mean I would assume they do, but just wonder if there are ever any severe "gotchas" with a stock split with certain existing buy/sell arrangements, or derivatives etc.
There's a million tiny details like this that can cause consequences that are both different from what a customer intended and what our terms with said customer states, so making sure it's all handled in a safe way is just part of daily business.
Options are also split to take the stock split into account.
Trading platforms shouldn't have to do anything unless they are faking GTC orders by resending them out each day as Day orders.
But if your vendor is doing that then, get a new vendor as that's completely bush league.
Exchanges do not receive or handle GTC or GTD orders, see for example the NYSE pillar spec.[1]
Broker-dealers handle stock splits and the behavior varies according to your broker. Some brokers will request the broker-dealer cancel all orders back, but most brokers allow limit prices to be adjusted for orders "below the market" (buy limit orders and sell stop orders). The Fidelity FAQ is an illustrative one.[2]
I'm not sure what a "vendor" is here, but brokers send GTC orders to broker-dealers, who forward them to the exchange every day as a day order. This behavior is industry standard and certainly not bush league.
[1] https://www.nyse.com/publicdocs/NYSE_Pillar_Gateway_FIX_Prot...
https://www.nasdaqtrader.com/content/ProductsServices/Tradin...
it is true the the NYSE eliminated GTC orders. That just means you can't use them on NYSE, which doesn't affect my point:)
You'll have to flesh out your point more if you still feel like you have one:)
Given that I've written more than one trading systems for a living, I'm going to take my 20 years of experience over a random internet troll.
Here is the specific rule relating to adjusting the price of open orders: https://www.finra.org/rules-guidance/rulebooks/finra-rules/5...
For example 1 option contract for Amazon (over $3k share price) can easily be $4,000. In comparison, you can buy 1 option for Apple ($400) contract for $200. After the stock split, option contracts will be 1/4 the current price.
Lower stock prices make the options market much more accessible to people investing less money (for better or worse).
It's very curious to me how and why different companies decide whether this is important or not.
For example I'd like to sell some covered calls for my AMZN as a hedge against a correction later, but since I don't own $300k+ of AMZN share, I literally cannot sell a single call contract.
I'm not saying it would be a great idea or anything, just that it's going to happen eventually and being first will probably garner a fair amount of business and attention (both positive and negative).
As an example, I’m currently holding contracts I purchased in March on SPXL and the daily volume is less than 5. With such low volume, the practicality of fractional ownership is not there.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/01/snapchat-excluded-from-sp-50...
It turns out that there are indeed share classes of these companies with no voting rights (GOOG, class C) but I haven't found an example of a company that doesn't have some voting shares in non-insider hands.
It's still shitty that the S&P indices barred SNAP while turning a blind eye to the existing inequities. I'm perfectly okay with them barring new split share listings but at least begin to apply it to others that benefit from the lack of corporate governance.
[1] https://berkshirehathaway.com/compab.pdf#:~:text=Berkshire%2....
https://www.bowdoin.edu/news/2020/07/bowdoin-to-provide-ipad...
I am also curious if increased internet usage in general is compensating for lower PPC as people are stuck at home.
But Facebook's ad engine allows micro-targeting, and is especially valuable to upstarts & small-businesses in times of changing behavior/consumer-loyalties.
To the extent big spenders free up inventory, Facebook has bidders-in-the-wings, offering just-a-little-less, and plenty of impressions among the 2.99 billion people who visit one of the Facebook family-of-sites monthly.
If you don't live in NY or CA, those extra $600 a week can go very far, and have probably helped stimulate the economy greatly
California's unemployment benefit caps out at $450/week.
True. My girlfriend lost her job March. She is unemployed since then. We are not based in NY or CA. She has mentioned this to me several times that how much more she has in savings now. With all this time and some extra cash, I have asked her learn coding. She is working on her app idea.
600 a week is 2400 a month, which way over any entry level salary in Europe.
How inflated are the salaries in US? Or are people used to some really abnormal level of living?
[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/atd-U...
$2,400/month is the legal minimum wage in some cities. ($15/hour)
And if you're on your own for it, it's the same, except you pay more and the quality of care is a lot lower because the "marketplace" plans are the absolute minimum the insurers can get away with and still comply with the law.
Yes, it’s called tax.
Entry-level tech compensation is ~$180K/year, mid-career = ~$600K/year. If you're not in tech you're screwed here - formerly middle-class professions like teachers/police/firemen live 4 to a 2BR apartment, or they buy houses an hour or more away. Even mid-career finance professionals get screwed - salary for CEO of a local (not nationwide) bank is in the ~$150-200K range, and barely competes with a new grad at Google or Facebook.
That's way high. A million-dollar house on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, assuming a 20% down payment, is ~4800/month including property tax. With a 10% down payment it would be about $5800/month.
To get to a $10k/month housing bill you need to buy a place that costs close to $2 million. The median sales price in Santa Clara county is closer to $1.3 or $1.4 million. Most people are paying a lot less than $10k/month for their house.
Low-end SFHs - we're talking a 3/2 built in the 1950s - go for about $1.8-$1.9M in Mountain View, $1.6-1.7M in Sunnyvale. A SFH like what you'd get in most of the rest of the U.S. - 4/2.5 or 5/3 on 1/4 acre lot, built somewhere between the 70s and 00s - will run about $2.4-2.8M.
Mountain View is one of the most expensive cities in the county, second to Palo Alto and maybe Los Altos. Most of the area is cheaper.
The minimum wage for adults worked full time in the UK (and similar in France) currently equates to 1,524EUR, which comes out as 1,807USD. Most salaried positions would yield more than that.
Sucks because I want to upgrade to something a little bigger, and I don't want to pay an extra 10K just to have it right now. So I'll wait until January and see if the dealer is feeling more agreeable.
Usually RVs are bought in addition to other travel, they are more of a luxury item.
In the current environment where booking a hotel is considered by some risky RVs are bought as a necessity if one wants to travel.
I've seen plenty of newspaper items in the last few months about people who usually fly places for summer vacation putting that money into a used, or cheap new R.V.
Aside from not being able to fly out of the country, it apparently gives them peace of mind knowing they can take their quarantine bubble with them wherever they go.
I'm glad for it, though, we're going to put ours on the market in a couple weeks after our last planned camping trip for the year, a strong market will be good for resale. Hoping it weakens a bit over the winter, though, because before next season rolls around I'll want another.
As an aside, we use new apps as a reward for various exceptional acts. My son looked at my phone not long after we started this and told me that I must have done a lot for my mom to have put so many icons on my phone.
Phones are luxury goods only up to a point. Especially once you're invested in an app store, it can cost a good deal to switch platforms. And it should be news to no one that having access to communications grows more, not less, important, the closer you get to stony broke.
I think you're incorrectly assuming people are good at any form of long term financial planning...
Remarkable either way because Apple stores were closed for most of the quarter.
My company recently announced everyone is staying home for at least the next 10 months, and is trying to get hundreds of iPhones for everyone who didn't have a company-issued phone before.
The company my wife works for is half at work, and half at home right now, but everyone is getting new phones, just in case.
If you looked solely at Apple's revenue during 2008/2009 you wouldn't even know there was a crash, never mind one that was severe by any measure.
I don’t think these buying patterns are incongruous to reality on the ground. In other news, certainly alcohol and drug sales are up too.
If you're stuck at home you probably and in any case spend more time online and/or on your phone, which has to be good for whoever owns online app and music stores. (This also explains Facebook's good results).
All in all, it's not surprising that results are good for Apple. But it is not sustainable growth.
A smartphone is probably one of the most essential and important devices in many peoples lives these days. Certainly one of the most used. There is the option of Android instead of Apple, but as someone pointed out one time, iPhones are cheaper than flagship Android devices if you account for the support lifetime of an iPhone being a lot longer than any Android device. And that's not counting the cheaper iPhone Apple launched recently.
Likewise, for many people, a computer would probably be considered an essential device. Sure there are cheaper Windows laptops, but the cost of switching ecosystems is potentially quite high, and if you're already in the i-device camp you're probably going to stick with a Mac due to its integration with all the other things you have (and had before the pandemic)
I would count iPads as largely luxury devices.
I have a lot of trouble characterizing tools as luxury goods. I don't consider my Dewalt tools "Luxury Goods" and they cost roughly twice what basic Harbor Freight tools cost.
You pay for longevity and performance. It's no different with phones/ tablets/ computers. If you want a phone or tablet that lasts 4+ years there is only one brand that offers that kind of device life.
Also, with Apple cranking out the base iPhone at $400, and the massive second hand market for iPhone, it's hard to argue many people associate the brand with luxury the way they do Coach or other luxury brands.
If anyone thought Apple was a "luxury" brand, the flop of the solid gold Apple Watch "Edition" sub-brand should have disabused them of the notion.
I still have my samsung after 5 years. I'm not sure why you'd consider it the only brand.
They often last for many more years than competitors' products, receive upgrades for longer, become obsolete less quickly, and Apple will repair them both under warranty and out of warranty. (Many competitors simply do not service their products.) And when you're finally done with your device, you can often still resell it on eBay and get even further value from it, again often for much more than with competitors' products of the same age.
Apple products on the lower end tend to be fantastic investments actually. And given how much we're working from home now, your primary devices for remote communication are hardly "luxury" and more "essential".
I’m planning on keeping my iPhone X past the end of the year, which takes it to a 3 year lifetime, which works out as ~$600/year which is amazing value.
My mother has a 6, and it still gets security updates for (IIRC) iOS 11.
It's her second 6, by the way. The battery on the first one started inflating, and they replaced it with a refurbished unit for the price of a new battery.
No other company plays in the same league as Apple when it comes to product support.
Haven't spent anything close to a MBP but I know people still using the 2015 model and holding up nicely. I guess price sort of correlates to build quality? Although same can't be said for resale value.
I did need to do a repair on the motherboard as it stopped charging but one repair after 7 years is crazy.
Apple products are often obsolete in a few years, especially iPads and iPhones. Their entire line of laptops and desktops is now practically obsolete with the move to ARM. Apple products are luxury products for people who can afford to simply throw away a device when Apple decides it's stopping support. I have several Apple devices that still boot up just fine, have capable CPUs inside, but are completely useless because Apple just decided they weren't interested in supporting them anymore.
The iPhone 6s was released September 2015 and it will run iOS 14, due later this summer/fall.
My daily driver is a refurb iPhone 7 (released September 2016) and I'm running the public beta of iOS 14—it runs noticeably faster than it did running iOS 13 just a few weeks ago.
I’m pretty sure nothing from Samsung, Motorola or HTC that's 4 or 5 years-old can run this year's Android release. Or even last year's.
iPadOS 14 goes all the way back to the iPad Air 2, which was released October 2014—nearly 6 years ago.
Their entire line of laptops and desktops is now practically obsolete with the move to ARM.
Nope. All current Intel Macs will continue to be supported for years to come. Updated apps will be fat binaries—they'll run natively on Intel and ARM Macs, the same way fat binaries ran natively on PowerPC and 68K Macs back in the day.
macOS 11.0 Big Sur will run natively on both Intel and ARM-based Macs; so will next year's macOS 11.1. All of the important, mainstream apps (Microsoft Office, Creative Suite, Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher, etc.) will be updated to run on ARM-based Macs in addition to the existing Intel ones.
My last machine was a 10-year old 27-inch iMac that I still use as a server.
I have several Apple devices that still boot up just fine, have capable CPUs inside, but are completely useless because Apple just decided they weren't interested in supporting them anymore.
If they can still run Homebrew, there's lots of software, especially open source stuff, you can install and run. The core apps I use for web development like Vim, command line utilities, etc. work fine on unsupported Macs. If I had to, I could install FreeBSD or Linux and keep things moving.
Most indie developers allow you to download older versions of their apps if you're a registered user.
Macs that don't have 64-bit CPUs couldn't make the jump to 64-bit world, which Apple has been warning about for like 10-years.
At least android phones can still download apps from the google app store, older iOS devices are just cut off. I have a perfectly good original iPad that's basically useless. The iPad 4 is similarly useless.
>My last machine was a 10-year old 27-inch iMac that I still use as a server.
My current workstation is 10 years old, running Windows 10 like a champ. It's got one of the first 6-core CPUs in it, a recent graphics card, and 32GB of RAM which I may upgrade to 64GB because it's cheap - I have no real reason to get a new workstation, this thing is still running circles around most recent quad-core systems. Your 10 year old mac wishes it were this capable.
I feel really sorry for anyone buying a mac now, since they will be obsolete as soon as the ARM macs are out.
My 7 year-old iPhone 5s is still supported by Apple; it runs iOS 12.4.6 and I just installed a bunch of apps on it.
I feel really sorry for anyone buying a mac now, since they will be obsolete as soon as the ARM macs are out.
The first ARM Macs will start shipping in just a few months; the current Intel Macs won't be obsolete, since they too will get the new operating system and Universal apps will run just fine on both. What part of this are you not understanding?
There's a difference between not the latest and greatest (the ARM Macs) and current, supported machine, like any Mac that can run Big Sur.
I have a PowerPC iMac Mini somewhere—that's obsolete as far as Apple is concerned.
My two broken Macbooks in 3 years say otherwise.
This might have been true 5 years ago, but the countless complaints of keyboard issues with 2017-19 era Macbooks says otherwise.
That's not luxury by any means, and is price competitive even with the cheapest of android phones.
Apple's lower price-point offerings might have old hardware, but its more than made up for it by just working & offering long-term support. Something no android phone can match.
A necessity, not a luxury. Best security, best long term support, best re-sale value. If you're poor, an iPhone is the smartest choice. You need to AFFORD an Android device.
iPhone alone is ~50% of US market share: https://www.statista.com/topics/2711/us-smartphone-market/
Android splits the rest.
Presumably people are buying the best phone for their budget and needs. Per OP, "They don't own a PC, this is the only way to safely conduct e-commerce." How many people with an iPhone do you want to bet have a PC, versus how many people with a "junky low-end android"? I'll bet you vastly more iPhone owners have another computer.
Like it or not, HN is an English-language forum, run by a company based out of SF, and a lot of commentators presume that context. I try not to, just as I strive to use clear English for the benefit of ESL speakers. But it is the default.
iPad is the device to follow the stream of the school lesson.
iPad is what the manager got for his Zoom meetings.
For example, I don't think the volume they do in phones aligns with the typical notion of a luxury brand. The best-selling single smartphone model on the market is the iPhone. In analogy with the car market: BMW, Mercedes, Lexus do not have a best-selling model among them.
The iPhone is more like the Ford F-150, in terms of how it fits into the broader marketplace, than it is like a luxury car. The F-150 is not inexpensive! But it's not a luxury vehicle either.
Why am I bothering with this argument... because I think it leads to confusion about Apple's business, like the comment above. Apple does well because they sell products people want, on the high end of the range, but well within what a lot of people can afford.
As an example, pretty much every item of food is "luxury" if based on necessity alone. From bread to the cheapest vegetable in your location - except for items that might be the only locally available/affordable way of getting certain essential nutrients, you don't need that specific food for a healthy life.
But... if that food can only be grown on the other side of the world, and therefore is in short supply and/or very expensive relative to local wealth: suddenly maybe that vegetable, type of meat, or whatever is considered a luxury without becoming more of a dietary necessity.
Would the cheapest, most common Casio watch available be a luxury because I don't need to have the time on my wrist?
As to the subjective/contextual side: I don't know anything about pickups, but I consider my car a luxury to me, and yes that's more to do with necessity than cost - it's not a fancy car, I could afford a much more expensive one, but I very much don't need it. I've never used it in relation to work, I get my groceries delivered, etc. (But while I'd call it a luxury for my life, if asked what kind of car I have I'd never call it a "luxury car".)
$200 off the list price of the $399 iPhone SE. $8.33/month, with 0% APR for 24 months.
It has similar specs of a $1000 iPhone from a few years ago and is faster than any Android device you could buy for the same price.
Most carriers have the same deal.
It is like leasing a car, except it is a hand computer.
Seems likely a lot of this came from laptop and iPad sales for work-from-home, and home education respectively, as opposed to frivolous luxury consumer spending.
The vast majority of Apple products and services are no where near "luxury" prices.
If congress really does not extend benefits, there's bound to be a sizable negative effect.
When I think of cutting back on luxury, I am looking for things with a very high incremental cost to incremental value ratio. Apple products could be one but it would be farrrr down the list speaking for myself and others I know.
Several articles discussed such around the time. Here are a few.
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-carl-ic...
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/carl-icahns-2-billion-appl...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2017/11/10/carl-icah...
Sheltering taxes in a double-Irish requires pretty accurate projections.
Also often they just don't have all the data they need to close out a year until a few weeks after holidays, especially if people are taking a break, so it's just a lot easier on the humans involved.
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.
In addition, certain governments use different quarter systems. The first quarter of the United States federal government’s fiscal year is October, November, and December, Q2 is January, February, and March, Q3 is April, May, and June, and Q4 is July, August, and September. State governments may also have their own fiscal calendars.
Sometimes a company may have a non-standard fiscal year to help with business or tax planning. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) allows companies to choose a “tax year” that is still 52-53 weeks long but does not end in December. H&R Block (HRB) ends its fiscal year on April 30th, which makes sense because that is the end of the busiest part of the company’s year. Releasing your annual report, which may be accompanied by shareholder meetings and additional disclosures after the busiest part of your year will help managers and shareholders make better decisions about the year ahead.
Companies that rely on U.S. government contracts may use September as the end of their fiscal year, and the fourth quarter because that is when they expect new projects to be closed and budget planning from the government to be available. Historically, large technology firms had stronger quarters early in the year, which is why many of them (including Microsoft (MSFT)) have a fiscal year that closes at the end of June.
Some companies have very unusual quarterly systems. Adobe (ADBE) closes their fiscal year on the Friday closest to November 30th. In 2018, November 30th was a Friday, as well as the last day of the month but in 2017, ADBE closed their fourth quarter and the fiscal year on Friday, December 1st, because it was the Friday closest to November 30th.
This can make things quite confusing when comparing revenue or earnings between periods as years may have 52 or 53 weeks (a 2% difference) and quarters may have 12 or 13 weeks (a 8% difference).
If it's a small business, you probably find it most convenient to have the tax year be the calendar year and match up with your personal filing.
Many businesses have some concept of a "selling season" that makes it really convenient to not use January through December. A retailer, for example, probably prefers not to close their books on December 31 every year because of all the post-Christmas gift returns. Walmart has a January fiscal year (February 1 through Jan 31).
If you sold stuff to schools, you might choose a June fiscal year; most universities use a June fiscal year so an entire school year stays in a single fiscal year.
I have no idea why Apple chose September, but it was probably a rational decision.
https://www.benzinga.com/news/16/10/8617799/why-do-different...