“Walk round the shopping centre near where I live, and one shop is always heaving. It’s the same in London’s West End. Others are seeing OK business; one is guaranteed to be packed,” Chris Blackhurst writes for The Independent. “It’s the Apple Store. Based on this alone, I can see why Apple is smashing all profit records. Apple reported the biggest quarterly profit ever made. The US technology giant recorded a surplus of $18bn (£11.8bn) in the last three months, topping the $15.9bn made by the oil major ExxonMobil in the second quarter of 2012.”
“In their letters to Father Christmas, the younger ones’ top requests were all for Apple products. When the Apple Watch is launched in April, the clamour for that will be deafening,” Blackhurst writes. “No wonder Apple refers to the help counter in its stores as ‘the Genius Bar.’ Genius is not the word for a company that now enjoys revenues bigger than those of many countries (Greece is the latest to be overtaken).”
MacDailyNews Take: The rest of the article quickly devolves into confused pap lamenting, among other things, why old devices can’t work with the newest OSes and software, as if Blackhurst’s original iPad, for example, is supposed to just grow its own gyroscope or something.
“There should be caution here for Apple and its CEO, Tim Cook. Beating all-comers is fine, but history suggests there is only one way ahead after that – and it’s downward,” Blackhurst writes. “Why, for instance, aim for a profit margin of 40 per cent. Won’t a lesser number do? What’s Apple going to do with all that cash? At present, it’s simply building and building. To what end, is not clear.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Ah, Apple record earnings, yet again. They never fail to lure those who lack basic understanding of Apple Inc. (or capitalism in general) to write about Apple Inc (and capitalism in general).