Apple reports fourth quarter results | Hacker News Reader

Apple reports fourth quarter results

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35 pointssgerenser27 comments

As always, Jason Snell at Six Colors, delivers.

Graphs: https://sixcolors.com/post/2023/11/apple-q4-2023-financial-r...

Transcript of Cook and CFO Maestri: https://sixcolors.com/post/2023/11/this-is-tim-apple-q4-2023...

The consistency of the iPad revenue is the most surprising to me. People often talk about how the need to upgrade phones has decreased over time. But phones physically break more frequently, degraded batteries are a bigger problem, and they include other key feature upgrades like a better camera when compared to tablet which is basically just the same product every year only slightly faster. I feel like a 5-year-old iPad is just as good as a brand new one for almost all use cases, so how is Apple able to maintain consistent iPad revenue?

iPads are great for kids.

And kids are fine with a 5-year-old iPad. My point wasn't that iPads don't have use cases. It is that there is less need to upgrade an iPad than any other devices Apple sells (excluding peripherals).

We just upgraded our 10yo iPads this year. Maybe there's a bunch of people also doing this.

There's new kids being born all the time. Lots of new 1st time customers.

With the 34% YoY decrease in Mac revenue, it starts to make sense why Apple held a full video event on Monday for the M3 instead of just issuing a press release for a spec bump. (Note that M2 Pro and M2 Max were announced via PR: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/01/apple-unveils-m2-pro-...)

Also worth noting is that Apple's "services" revenue is currently under threat on more than one front. 1) Google's massive default search engine payment to Apple is under scrutiny in the ongoing Google antitrust trial. 2) The EU has mandated iPhone sideloading, and App Store revenue falls under services.

They really missed the LLM hype train with the M3s, however. I get that these chip improvements are planned quite a ways out, but lower memory bandwidth was short-sighted and effectively gave everyone who wants to do local stuff no reason to upgrade.

> lower memory bandwidth

It’s higher (double) on on the Max chip. Perhaps the intent is to push people who need the better bandwidth to those pricier models?

The Company posted quarterly revenue of $89.5 billion, down 1 percent year over year, and quarterly earnings per diluted share of $1.46, up 13 percent year over year.

Not sure how apple will survive this downturn - surely they can start making layoffs now.

Have they been hiring significantly?

It’s possible to reduce headcount without lay offs by bringing your hiring rate below your employee churn rate.

you can also do smaller layoffs that don’t get attention

This is a joke right?

Anyone else think maybe Apple Silicon in the Macs is hurting their sales? I used to feel the need to upgrade my Macbook every 2 years or so, since the battery life would have dropped significantly and the fans were giving me a constant jet engine drone in the background of my work. But my M1 Macbook Pro still lasts all day, I've never heard the fans, and the only task I've given it that it struggled with was local AI image generation. It flies through everything else imaginable. So why would I buy another one?

Yes but it wont show yet. It feels a little like the iPhone now, where a new iPhone doesn't "feel" much better. The M1 Max in particular felt lightyears ahead of it's time and I don't feel the need to upgrade it for a couple more years.

Most mac's are 3-5 year lifetimes tho, longer than phones.

The Mac is only 9% of their sales[1], according to today's call. They probably don't think about it too much.

Making everyone (aside from pros/enthusiasts) feel like they have to upgrade every 2-3 years would hurt their market.

1. https://sixcolors.com/post/2023/11/apple-q4-2023-financial-r...

Yes, that is a consequence of making really good products. Apple is suffering from success.

I don’t think so. M1 helped them establish a clear cut lead in the laptop market. It’s not even close. I think people will gradually switch to Mac (switch rate is painfully slow). Unless MS does something here, they’re going to leak Windows market share.

>> I used to feel the need to upgrade my Macbook every 2 years or so

You're a minority. The vast majority of Mac owners don't have thousands of dollars to spend upgrading every couple of years. And they don't need to - that's one of the great things about Mac's! I'm an iOS developer + do a lot of heavy music production on my Macbook Pro and after 4 years it's still working well. I'm starting to consider an update (mainly because of the vast improvements the Apple silicon chips bring) but I could probably use this reasonably for another year or two at least. More 'normal' users I know (docs + web browsing people) typically keep their Mac's 6+ years and those are the 'cheap' lower powered Mac's.

Allowing sideloaded iPhone apps might have positive long-term effects for Apple, even if App Store revenue falls over the short term.

Developers will see up to a 43% increase in revenue (minus the fees for a new payment processor), which is an enormous incentive to create new iPhone apps and thus indirectly increasing the value proposition of the iPhone.

If apple lose their 30% stranglehold, it will be terrible for their bottom line. I think more app stores hurt apple quite badly and consumers just don't care.

It's very good for developers who now have to pay the Apple Tax, with no way to avoid it. Gaming on mobile is the majority of this tax and game studios will immediately jump ship making their own payment processor choices to save 20% in a heartbeat.

It's undoubtedly good for iOS to have more developers looking at it.

They make 100B of PROFIT in a year, but still sell 1k+ computers with 8GB of RAM. I mean it is partly the reason for the profit, but when a company doesn't invest their profits into better product for their customers it's better to buy from competitors...

Services are doing good - I guess we can expect more service promoting crap ported over to macOS from iOS.

For the mac revenue big drop over the past year -- wouldn't the idea be something like "raise prices, lower revenue, but higher margin -- and therefore higher profit total than previously?" I wonder if that is reflected anywhere...?

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