Look, Adorno, No financial analyst worth anything compares consecutive quarter-to-quarter because seasons are different. You just compared the CHRISTMAS quarter to the post christmas quarter and tried to come to a conclusion on CONSUMER numbers... idiocy. You can only compare year over year. That IS spin, based on twaddle. Analyst take wild-eyed guesses. . . and those you quoted were more wild-eyed than usual, and ignored Apple's own guidance which was based on what the company was planning. Why? Who knows? I am an educated as an economist. . . with a minor in FINANCE. YOU obviously are not. Quit trying to spin Apple into being in trouble. It won't work.Every other metric in Apple's financials for last quarter was a record breaker and you are cherry picking one of two that was negative. The other was iPod sales, which are being subsumed onto iPhone and iPad sales.
You also have to look at what was happening in the previous year ago quarter to see what historically was occurring. A year ago, iPads were being stocked into the sales channel. Not so this year. Business Insider states, quoting Apple's CEO Tim Cook in the Apple Financial Conference call:
"For last quarter in particular, he said the company reduced its iPad channel inventory compared to the same quarter last year, so sales were actually in line with the high end of Apple's internal expectations.Speaking on the iPad business as a whole, Cook made some really interesting points to remain bullish. First, he said the iPad is Apple's fastest-growing product in the company's history. Apple has sold 210 million of them so far, which is almost twice as many iPhones Apple sold in the same period of time.
Cook also made a strong case for the iPad in the enterprise market. He cited one study that said 91% of tablets activated in the enterprise are iPads.
Now, Adorno, you can go on ignoring the time-honored, proper way to analyze financial statements by comparing quarters against the previous year's similar quarter, or you can do what you did, compare against the previous completely dis-similar sales of the immediate previous quarter to obfuscate and cry wolf, or you can be honest and do it correctly. I quote you where you state the truth "YoY quarters don't look so bad. . ."—an interesting way you comment on the 2nd best quarter of ANY COMPANY in history and bettered only by Apple itself; talk about left-handed compliments! "don't look so bad", my ass!—but then you proceed to do the obfuscation with the false comparisons with unlike seasonality. . . comparing a heavy shopping holiday season with a non-holiday season, and try to make a serious conclusion from those mis-applied data, with "the more important trend can be what's happening on a quarter-by-quarter basis, and in that regard, Apple's sales are not that impressive, and in fact, they could be worrying Apple." That is spinning. In fact, that is false.
YoY comparisons are good indicators, but, even they aren't that great for some of Apple's products, with iPhones being the only product that showed good YoY results.
Then you go on with a flat out lie. Macintosh computers are at their highest sales in history. Yet you flat out lie. Why? What point are you trying to distort? Mac Market share is at the highest it has ever been. I repeat, no financial economist looks at quarter over quarter sequentially. They are useless data because of seasonality due to sales trends, tax due dates, and a host of other seasonal effects. You are spinning. The only trends that are useful are year-over-year in the long run when you are talking about companies the size of Apple and markets the size of Smart phones and tablets.
You want to talk about imaginations, you are the one who is imagining things, not me. You are the one having to make up ways to do comparisons that are not mainstream to get the results YOU want, to make your argument. . . and to hide the real facts.
As you so saliently said: "A lot of things are relative to how one wants to view the numbers, especially those from Apple." You want to believe that Apple is in trouble, so you look to see how you can spin the data. You had to compare unlike quarters to do it.
I suggest you look at the chart on Statistica — Global Apple iPhone sales from 3rd quarter 2007 to 2nd quarter 2014 (in million units), keeping in mind that Apple's Fiscal Year and its fourth Quarter ends on the last Saturday in September, to really see how irrational you are in trying to compare quarter-over-quarter and expecting to make any kind of rational conclusion based on numbers of product sold or financial results. It is just meaningless.
Incidentally, if you want to worry about a company, you should be worrying about Samsung, LG, and Nokia, not Apple:
Top Five Mobile Phone Vendors, Shipments, and Market Share, Q1 2014 (Preliminary Results, Units in Millions)
|
Vendor |
1Q14 Shipment Volumes |
1Q14 Market Share |
1Q13 Shipment Volumes |
1Q13 Market Share |
Year-Over-Year Change |
|
Samsung |
108.9 |
24.3% |
109.3 |
25.3% |
-0.3% |
|
Nokia |
50.5 |
11.3% |
61.9 |
14.3% |
-18.4% |
|
Apple |
43.7 |
9.7% |
37.4 |
8.7% |
16.8% |
|
LG |
16.0 |
3.6% |
16.2 |
3.8% |
-1.2% |
|
Huawei |
14.6 |
3.2% |
10.9 |
2.5% |
33.8% |
|
Others |
214.9 |
47.9% |
196.1 |
45.4% |
9.6% |
|
Total |
448.6 |
100.0% |
431.8 |
100.0% |
3.9% |
Source: IDC Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker, April 30, 2014
Note: Data are preliminary and subject to change. Vendor shipments are branded shipments and exclude OEM sales for all vendors.
As you can see, Except Apple and Huwei, they ALL lost market share in quarterly year-over-year data! They should be worrying, not Apple. By-the-way. it came out in testimony and subpoenaed testimony in last month's patent infringement trial that Samsung's vaunted 83 million "smartphones" shipped aren't so smart as 2/3rds of them aren't smartphones at all, but are instead low-end "feature phones," lacking some or all of the capabilities required to be considered smartphones such as the ability to download apps, connect to the internet, use WIFI, etc. That really reduces the numbers of the phones Samsung has been shipping they counted as "smartphones shipped" to under 30 million. All of Apple's phones are smartphones. Just more of Samsung's patterns of untruths.