By John Gruber
Mux — Video for developers
Linked List: October 21, 2008
Tuesday, 21 October 2008
- Seeking Alpha’s Apple Earnings Call Transcript ★
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These transcripts are a terrific resource provided by Seeking Alpha.
- Macworld: New MacBook Pro Benchmarks ★
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Fast.
- Not Been a Good Year for Sun ★
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Sun Microsystems’s market cap is down to $3.6 billion. Doesn’t seem like anyone is interested in buying them, though.
- Dave Shea on CameraBag ★
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Fun $5 iPhone app that runs photos through filters that attempt to replicate the look of old cameras. As Shea says, it makes lemonade out of the iPhone’s lemon of a camera.
- Macworld’s Live Coverage of Apple’s Quarterly Earnings Call ★
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Rare appearance from Steve Jobs — he’s only appeared on a handful of quarterly financial calls since 1999. Also: Apple is officially past goal of 10 million iPhones for calendar year 2008, with the entire holiday season ahead.
The main points:
- Apple’s subscription-based accounting for iPhone sales makes it easier to overlook just how much money they’re making from the iPhone. If not for subscription accounting, iPhone would account for 39 percent of Apple’s quarter.
- Apple sold more phones than RIM last quarter: 6.9 vs. 6.1 million.
- Measured by revenue, Apple is the third-largest mobile phone supplier in the world, behind only Nokia and Samsung. And they’ve been in the market for just 15 months.
Also: Excellent live coverage from MacJournals on Twitter.
- Apple Q4 2008 Financial Results ★
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iPhone, iPod, and Mac sales are all strong:
Apple shipped 2,611,000 Macintosh computers during the quarter, representing 21 percent unit growth and 17 percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 11,052,000 iPods during the quarter, representing eight percent unit growth and three percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone units sold were 6,892,000 compared to 1,119,000 in the year-ago-quarter.
“Apple just reported one of the best quarters in its history, with a spectacular performance by the iPhone — we sold more phones than RIM,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We don’t yet know how this economic downturn will affect Apple. But we’re armed with the strongest product line in our history, the most talented employees and the best customers in our industry. And $25 billion of cash safely in the bank with zero debt.”
So they’ve sold just over 13 million iPhones to date, and over 9 million in calendar 2008 alone. Given that the remaining three months of 2008 are the holiday season, Apple’s “10 million in 2008” goal looks like a sure thing — given that the current quarter started three weeks ago, they’ve probably already done it.
Also, the 6.9 million iPhones sold last quarter are more than the 6.1 million iPhones sold in the previous five quarters combined.
- PCalc 1.1 Post-Mortem ★
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James Thomson on getting noticed in the increasingly crowded App Store:
Anyway, right towards the end of development on 1.1, I heard that the App Store was going to change so that updates were no longer going to count towards the release date of your app. And worse, everything was now going to be sorted by the initial submission date of the app. And since PCalc was there on day one, it meant it was now on the very last page.
“Hmm…”, I thought, “that’s not going to be good”. And I was right. Sales went from very healthy to call-in-the-coroner levels.
- Undecided ★
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David Sedaris, on undecided voters:
To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
- iPhone-Optimized Web Site From MapQuest ★
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Better than nothing, but no matter how good their maps and directions, it seems hard to compete with the built-in (Google) Maps app with a web app that doesn’t have access to CoreLocation.
- Another Example of Why ‘Cult of Mac’ Is Held in Such High Esteem ★
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Pete Mortensen, back on October 6, regarding 9to5Mac’s report that Apple’s then-upcoming new laptops were going to be carved from solid pieces of aluminum:
I’ve been talking with other industrial designers about this issue, and they all agree that the reasoning behind the current Brick rumor doesn’t add up. One friend of mine guessed it would add up to $50 in manufacturing costs and might not be any stronger or lighter than more traditional manufacturing approaches.
Does Apple have a game-changing laptop in the wings that will reinvent the MacBook and MacBook Pro design language? For their sake, they’d better. Will it be milled from a single block of aluminum? Not in this lifetime.
Great call.
What’s important to Apple about this process isn’t that it makes laptops cheaper. It’s that it makes them better at the same prices.