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Apple earnings leap 50 per cent

Apple began one of the most important weeks in its recent history by reporting a 50 per cent jump in profits for the first quarter of its fiscal year when compared with the same period in 2009. This Wednesday, Apple is all but certain to unveil its long-awaited but still inscrutable iPad. Monday's news, however, left no room for …

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Anonymous Coward
Jobs Horns

Skeletor will be happy

Laughing all the way to hell.

Ty
Jobs Halo

No surprises there then...

Business as usual.

Carry on!

(Watch and weep PC weenies!)

Anonymous Coward
Big Brother

Shut it down

"What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders," Michael Dell said before a crowd of several thousand IT executives.

Ted Treen
Jobs Halo
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Although

I upvoted you - I'm peeved as that's what I was going to say....

Will 12

I love it.

Apple continues to prove the geeks wrong by selling lots of their 'overpriced' products. It just goes to show that all the armchair experts on here don't understand the real world and how normal folks think.

They don't buy Apple products because they are expensive and exclusive (ok a small number may do) they buy them because the user experience is better and as more and more people are exposed to their products the better the numbers will be.

Looking forward to the new tablet as it will do it's job better than any other competing product out there and will do for ebooks what the iPod did for digital music. Of course the 'experts' will say some cheaper android device will do it cheaper but again they will miss the point.

Boggy Bumblebee
Jobs Halo
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Geeks wrong?

"Apple continues to prove the geeks wrong", really? Go to any self respecting geek conference (especially the open source ones) and view the sea of apple logos sitting on the attendees laps.

Geeks also like user experience too!

eugene
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overpriced = more profit

"expensive" and "overpriced" means more profit per item. Apple can sell fewer things but make more money from them.

And judging from the comments of people I know, they buy ipods simply because they're not familiar with other brands, and 'ipod' is 'cool'. It's all about marketing. There are other players that have a better UI than the ipod, but because of marketing/brainwashing, people only recognize ipod. Why does Colgate sell more than generic supermarket-brand toothpaste?

ipod shuffle anyone? Haha.

stizzleswick
Happy
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I remember...

...a DebCon a few years ago where a large percentage of the attendees had the (then brand-new) Apple PowerBook (titanium shell, PPC G4 CPU) with them... all happily running DebIan Linux at speeds and battery runtimes no other notebook at the time could match. When it comes to geekiness, I do not figure one could top a DebCon. And yes, that was the conference that made me decide I needed to get a PowerBook G4. And I did. Served me well until, after over five years, the display backlight failed -- which is not too bad a figure; most other notebooks built at the same time failed much earlier. Oh well. Repairs would have cost more than the residual value, so I broke it up for parts and got a new one.

Funny how things work out... I needed something powerful that could, in a pinch, run XP. At the necessary computing power and battery up-time levels, the cheapest thing I could get happened to be an Apple MacBook Pro...

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Beleaguered Apple

When I was a boy $50bn was considered a lot of money.

Where's Michael Dell when you need him?

Anonymous Coward
Paris Hilton

Well, there ya go...

Well, as my PC-adoring buddy told me shortly before Windows 7 was launched, "With Windows 7 the end is nigh for Apple".

I'm just off to rub this article in his spotty, ugly, stupid fat face.

That is all!

Paris because... well, because.

eugene
Thumb Down
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wow

Wow. This is what you call typical fanboi behaviour. You give Mac users a bad name.

Glenn Amspaugh
Jobs Halo

Poor beleaguered Apple

They're on their last legs, their market share is way below Windows, and geeks everywhere hate their over priced, under powered, sexy hardware and software.

/Mine's the one with the Apple Stock sales receipt of $19/share from back in '99.

sleepy

in case of doubt about those restatements. . .

Apple was deferring huge amounts of iPhone earnings because of obscure accounting rules (now revised) reducing their apparent results for the past two years. The restatement simply brings their accounting into line with everyone else's. They have restated all their previous accounts using the new rules. Earnings really have grown 50% year over year on a comparable basis. Apple's P/E (price/earnings) ratio is now more or less the same as the others (MSFT, DELL, HP), but they aren't growing at all. Now if Apple had the same silly price/earnings ratio as Amazon (growth 27% YOY), the share price would be $850, not $200!

Anonymous Coward
Jobs Horns

$50 billion?

Only $50 billion? Bill Gates can still afford to buy the company with his own cash then, wonder if Jobs can afford to buy Microsoft... Nope! Jobs is only worth $5 billion, which for a snake oil salesman isn't bad I suppose. On the other hand, not even half of what Ballmer is worth.

So, 1 Bill Gates is worth 10 Steve Jobs, and 1 Steve Ballmer is worth 2 Steve Jobs.

"Well, as my PC-adoring buddy told me shortly before Windows 7 was launched, "With Windows 7 the end is nigh for Apple"."

I'm sorry, selling 3 million PC's in a quarter is a success? Seriously? Around 85 million PC's will have shipped in that same quarter, so for every Mac sold, 29 PC's are sold, I can see that as an amazing success there, must go to a bank and ask for a business loan "yeah, my sales figures mean I'll only sell 1 device for every 29 other devices, but I'll sell them a lot more expensive!"

Snake oil salesman....

Yes I have an iPhone and I detest it, its a horrific user experience. Yes I have Snow Leopard, I also hate it, the user experience is terrible. Yes I have OpenSuSE and the user experience is 10 times that of Snow Leopard. Yes I have Windows 7, it is slightly better than OpenSuSE and much better than Snow Leopard, which explains why Apple brings out bootcamp, all the Mac fanbois need it to run a real OS on their overpriced PC's.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward
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Hmm, let's have a look at the flipside of that business proposition:

"I'm going to sell 30 times as much product as my competitor to make a quarter more profit than they do" (using MS Q2 figures to December 31st 2009, released last week). Isn't our friendly bank manager going to wonder why we aren't making 30 times as much profit?

Oh, and shareholders don't give a monkey's how rich the CEO is, but instead how rich they themselves are, and Apple investors are getting 5 times the return per share of MIcrosoft investors...

Rolf Howarth
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Re: $50 billion

That's $50bn revenue, not the value of the company. (The share price of AAPL values it at $185bn, bigger than Google, IBM, Oracle etc. and about 70% of MSFT.)

What makes you think Apple is particularly interested in numerical market share? It's profit share and mind share they are concerned about.

richard 69
FAIL
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still sniffing glue?

have you ever heard of bmw, or mercedes? they don't sell as many as ford you know.

and snow leopard worse than win7? you really are talking shite aren't you.

you think apple released bootcamp because win7 is better? go and read some facts somewhere son, and stay off the strong coffees.

Anonymous Coward
FAIL
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@AC: $50 billion

Listen up, schmuckface

Apple, a single entity, sold three million Macs. God alone knows how many companies or guys in garages sticky-taped a bunch of PCs together. Was it hundreds? Thousands? Micky Dell, the chaps from Acer and, er, whoever the other wackos are, rather dilute the effort and make your argument look pretty damned silly.

Oh, and it's hard to imagine that you find Windows a more satisfying experience when all that OS is these days is a pale imitation of Apple's version. Here's a tip: the start button at bottom left of your screen doesn't appear on the Mac desktop.

Thank you for trolling.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward
Reply Icon

All the money in the world makes no difference

if you have the business vision of a particularly myopic mole with its head shoved up its arse and which refuses to leave its burrow to even sniff at the world outside once in a while

Prag Fest
Stop

The big question

Apple stuff is pretty damn good, thats the way it is, deal with it. The big question for me is, where's the competition? The public have voted with their wallets, so why do Microsoft, Dell, Sony, HP etc keep churning out mediocre, poorly marketed products? Step up your game chaps.

Prag Fest
FAIL

Eh?

"Yes I have an iPhone and I detest it, its a horrific user experience."

I mean, each to their own, but, seriously...how the f**k to you define the iPhone as a 'horrific user experience'? You need help. Have you ever used Win Mobile?

Luseferous
Stop

Impressive...

Let me get this straight, they managed to increase sales by 30% compared to Q4 2008 / Q1 2009 (i.e. the time when the economic shit had just hit the fan). Meh...

jai
Jobs Halo
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re: Impressive...

perhaps you should do some research and read El Reg's article on the Q42008/Q12009 report before you are so quick to 'meh'.

For a time when the economic fit hit the shan, as you say, it's hard to tell that they were even impacted by the downturn that everyone else experienced:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/22/apple_q1_results/

Daniel 1
Coat

Register users

I really do think some Register commentards actively spend their entire days trying to talk a new reality into existence. $50 billion is 'nothing' in their world, in the same way that a five year plan to sell $5 billion, in shares, is a sign that 'Google Is Imploding'. These people need a 'centre alignment' option, to give their comments that extra bit of of credibility.

Maybe they reason that if the can just clog up the entire Internet with their own version of the truth, then The World Will Listen? The problem is, that people will only listen, if you're interesting enough to read, in the first place.

Mine's the one with the Nissan Micra car keys, in it, where I'd much rather find $50 billion.

Anonymous Coward
WTF?

Contradiction in stories

...yet a more recent story from El Reg sez Apple isn't making money on iphone or apps store.

I dinnae understand...does this mean they're absolutely raking it in on "traditional" hardware? I thought profits were wafer thin there too? And did I hear someone say Apple now had 20% desktop share? WTF?

Regardless of how Apple is managing to "scrape by", it makes me wish I hadn't sold my AAPL shares at $40 a pop now, when it was all about to go down the toilet. <cry>

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