There’s little doubt that iOS will see some revisions when iOS 7 is announced shortly. Scott Forstall is gone and Jony Ive has been installed as the director of Human Interface across all software. Nobody knows for sure how the software will be affected. Changes to both the visual and functional nature of the software are inevitable, and welcome.
9To5Mac’s Mark Gurman has a good post about the nature of some of the changes that are in store.
I’m always fascinated by great profiles of very successful people. There’s always at least a little nugget of information you can take away and apply to some part of your life. Fast Company has a fantastic profile of J. Crew’s President, Jenna Lyons.
I highly recommend that you check it out.
Hat tip to MG Siegler
I think most people don’t fundamentally understand the job of Wall Street analysts. This Wall Street Journal article does a nice job of pulling back the curtain. Anyone who consumes information provided by analysts needs to read.
Hat tip to Matt Richman
It’s been a news week largely about Apple’s earnings announcement and what it all means. iMore’s Chris Umiastowski has taken a step back and written a nice piece on the topic.
There’s a lot of wisdom here.
Wow. Marco Arment sold Instapaper.
It’s no secret that Apple’s stock has taken a beating over the last six months. It’s legitimate to debate if this is warranted or not. Much of the downturn has been driven by analyst attempts to guess the companies future products and the possibility of “the next big thing”.
There’s only one entity that knows for sure what the future product pipeline has in store, and that’s Apple. How do they feel about the future? One need look no further than their announcement of a $60 billion stock buyback.
Insider trading is illegal, unless you’re the company itself. They have all the insider information you could ask for, and they’re buying. Big time.
Looks to me like they’re taking Warren Buffet’s recently offered advice.
“You can’t run a business to push the stock price up on a daily basis. Berkshire has gone down 50 percent four times in its history. When that happens, if you’ve got money, you buy it.” “When Steve (Jobs) called me, I said, ‘Is your stock cheap?’” Buffett said. “He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Do you have more cash than you need?’ He said, ‘A little.’ I said, ‘Then buy back your stock.’ He didn’t.” “But if you could buy dollar bills for 80 cents, it’s a very good thing to do.”
Indeed.
Apple has announced company earnings for the second fiscal quarter of 2013. You can read the press release yourself for more details. The bullet points are as follows.
Quarterly Revenue: $43.6 B
Quarterly Net Profit: $9.5 B
Gross Margin: 37.5%
International Sales: 66%
iPhone: 37.4 M
iPad: 19.5 M
Mac: 4 M
The stock is trading up in aftermarket trading, but I don’t expect it to last. Apple is going to continue to pay a price for their obscenely high gross margins a year ago. Most companies, and every hardware company, would kill for gross margins in the mid to high thirties. It’s approximately where Apple has operated for much of the last decade, but they somehow managed margins in the forties for a few quarters and now the geniuses on Wall Street expect that to continue. It can’t, so there will be blood.
I think it’s worth taking a look to see exactly what the perfect storm was that allowed gross margin to climb to the levels it. I wonder if it might be somewhat cyclical based on product or the market.
Apple will report company earnings tomorrow, and there has been no shortage of dumb things written about the bear case. Benedict Evans has written a nice piece about a possible tipping point that could be fast approaching. Worth checking out.
There’s little doubt Samsung has played dirty against it’s competition in the past. There’s some evidence to suggest it may be doing so now against Apple. Philip Elmer-DeWitt posted a story on the topic to his Apple 2.0 blog. He follows up today with a post about the reaction to that story.
To borrow a phrase. Don’t be evil.
Marco Arment has written a nice piece talking about customers and markets on his site today. Check it out.