Apple now has more than 700 million paid subscriptions, which is up 150 million from last year, and is four times the number of subscriptions that Apple had four years ago.
700,000,000 paid subscriptions is the craziest metric in tech. That’s an absolutely insane amount of people paying Apple one way or another as opposed to being free users and just seeing ads
> Apple TV is the only service that has its unique style of content i.e. movie quality production values.
W... what? I don't even know how/why you'd quantify this, but Apple TV is not the only Apple TV. Or rather, Apple TV is not the only Netflix...
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If anything what your comment is doing is exposing why Apple is so ridiculously dominant when they dip their toes in anything.
Apple Music for example, had features no other app could have for years, like Siri integration (which didn't open up until Apple Music was well cemented)
So it didn't matter if the selection sucked, they could shove it down people's throats until it had traction.
Likewise, Gymkit is an absolute bear to integrate. It's not like integrating an SDK, Apple is practically entering a business agreement with you, and they have full power to stop your launch over icons not looking the way they want.
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All that being said, I use an iPhone, I accept the Faustian bargain, but let's call a spade a spade. Nothing about Apple's subscriptions is unique, if anything they're all kind of second place to other services... until you sprinkle in the insanely tight integration they have with the OS.
I had no idea what GymKit was after burning months on my life on it!
I said what I said.
An in-home fitness service using Gymkit to provide deep integration with streamed workouts.
Their non-equipment workouts work with Healthkit, but to have parity you need Gymkit too since Apple Fitness is not just about equipment-less workouts:
To that end it's more deeply integrated than Apple Fitness since Apple Fitness streaming content needs to target any Gymkit enabled (or really any hardware period) hardware of a given type with all the variation that entails.
This company is customizing the stream for a handful of Gymkit enabled devices which gives them more control over the workout experience
"unique style of content" is a strange way to describe a lackluster library. It doesn't even seem to be improving. There is not a lot of new content compared to 6 month ago (when I first checked). Unless you're very into one of few shows, it's not worth it. And it's not me speaking. They offer 1 year free trial! Who does this?
Microsoft has almost 300M paid subscribers for Office alone.
The comparison is certainly apples to oranges; just throwing it out there that 700M across a range of consumer offerings isn’t that crazy when a single business product can reach 300M.
This "single business product" has been dominant enterprise and small bussiness tech for 30+ years. 300M isn't that impressive given this. And it's not something users seek and opt, it's something business demands and buy in bulk for them. Plus it's losing ground, replaced by other SaaS.
Whereas Apple built their 700M from nowhere (near bankcrupt sub-2% market share in 1997, starting building their subscription offering past 2007, and more seriously, past 2012 or so).
For PowerPoint and Excel, I strongly disagree. People do horrific things with Excel that I think are far beyond its intended usage, but they love it for that. You can't pry Excel away from people in finance and a lot of quantitative/non-programmer roles.
Word is more debatable. Yes, if you use it just for taking notes or something, the alternatives are fine.
But if you want to make a nice-looking document, Word is still just a lot better. I've never seen a fantastic Google Doc, for example, even that my company's designers have worked on.
And LibreOffice is another, older generation of UI/UX that is far behind Office at this point.
300M is impressive, but we are missing the point here. Most of that count comes from involuntary herd signups by their enterprise customers. What Apple has done is impressive, (although they have equally questionable ways to retain customers). I am sure that at any point, a sizable chunk of Apple's 700M pie would be trial users, but still, it is a considerable number.
Everyone seems to miss that. Office was the original subscription for all intents and purposes, and with platform pricing in EAs, it was and is almost impossible to get rid of it.
Can you even buy a standalone copy of Word or Excel anymore? You can't subscribe to them individually and you can't buy them individually so what does it matter if there is 5 *.exes or 1?
And that's what Apple's subscription is selling too. So it doesn't make sense to say Microsoft's offering is a "single product" and Apple's is "a range of consumer offerings".
Well, Apple doesn't have a single subscription, they have several in totally unrelated areas (from Music to AppleCare, and from renewing your Iphone model every year leasing-style to Cloud backup). They do offer bundles for some, but not for others.
Apple One really feels like a great deal. I was already paying $10 a month for 2 TB of data storage. Now I pay $30 for their full package of services. It's amazing to have access to all of these.
Apple Music is the only thing holding it back for me right now. It's still a long way behind Spotify at the same price point. I have tried to switch multiple times but keep coming back.
For many of us, Apple Music is good enough. I just don’t care enough to bother with Spotify. If it matters to you that’s great. I’m just pointing out that a lot of us will go with the default if there is no compelling reason to add something else.
I can't imagine anyone with an Apple TV+ subscription that doesn't also have an iCloud subscription of some kind. Perhaps Apple TV owners? But there's only 25 million of them.
The number is crazy for sure but then it includes stuff like the $0.99/mo iCloud storage subscription which is basically mandatory if you own an iPhone. Would be far more interesting to see the broken-out numbers for Apple Music, TV+, Apple One etc. if they ever share them.
Even if all 700 million subscribers are $0.99/month it is still an $8.3 billion per year business. That's enough to be #362 on 2021 Fortune 500.
If you really drill into all the different numbers they release over time as investment / corporate strategy analyst you can get a pretty reasonable mix on revenue streams this size.
I don't dig in on Apple as I'm a B2B focused person so speculating a bit here based on parallel experience.
I don’t know why this comment is downvoted?
My parents, in their late 60s and the opposite of tech savvy, have an iCloud storage subscription. The default 5 gigabyte is laughable small.
I think it would be great to know Avg revenue per subscription to make sense of this massive 700m subs number. FWIW, Apple has range of services from iCloud starter plan ($1/month) to Apple One bundle Premier plan ($30/month) and a lot of services in between.
Apple is known for effective branding. Not inventive branding. Look at their other names: Music, TV, Fitness, News. I think Apple’s priority here is simplicity and getting the idea immediately across rather than being “creative.”
Damn - Net income for 90 days jumping from 11B to 22B. For 9 months from 44B to 74B!
Nuts. Margin growth too. So revenue and margin both going up.
Apple can afford to invest / pay for almost anything at this point (supply chain / chips / screens etc).
I'm interested in where they land on the car - if it's going to be an electric box with a flat screen, give me a big carplay that works with the iphone.
Honestly, all I really want is Carplay on my iPhone. Vehicle sensors aside, there's no reason they can't deliver 90% of the functionality I (and probably most people) use, in a Carplay app. Bluetooth gives me the stereo and speakerphone integration already.
This would be a huge sell for all of us driving cars that are just a bit too old to have a stereo with Carplay, and/or whose head units can't be replaced for technical reasons.
I want the reverse: a car with good stand-alone phone capability.
With all other gadgets, I want them independent. I want a printer that connects directly to the network, but one that requires a print server. I want a thermostat I can program on the device itself, not one that requires a phone just to program. I want a streaming device with its own remote, but one that requires a phone to work it. And for appliances like washers and refrigerators, well, I don’t want that connecting to a network or other devices at all.
So I don’t want the carmakers giving up on having decent infotainment built in to the car. I shouldn’t have to plug my phone into it. With cheap 5G the car should connect to the network on its own. It doesn’t help that I find Carplay underwhelming: stabbing and swiping a screen while driving is a bad experience.
Honestly, it should be a dedicated iPad like device that's weather resistant that Apple can sell that you can mount as a head end. BT speakers support would be great - we do that all the time for our old minivan that has crap builtin system.
However, that doesn't give Apple a cut of the new vehicle margin.
Oh yeah, I know there are, but I don't want to have to install something when i've got a perfectly good device that will keep itself up-to-date in my pocket all the time that moves from car to car. Who wants to blow another several hundred on a device that only works for me while I'm in the car?
(I also pointed this out originally but I have now owned two cars in the last ten years with head units that couldn't be replaced because the vehicle integration was too tightly coupled.)
Humidity fluctuations and temperature fluctuations alone are a big problem, Teslas LCD screens stop working for people in hot locations, batteries fail if they're not on the right charge when heated up or cooled down (voltage goes out of spec and causes extra wear, or fire if bad enough).
Technology likes the environment to stay the same, which is impossible in a car.
Yeah it seems like the screen should at least be shrouded somehow. Most infotainment displays are at least a little bit sunken into the dash. Tesla sticking the LCD screen out exposed is pretty dumb honestly. Has no one in their engineering department gone on a road trip with their phone on the dash and had it overheat on them? Evidently not. Makes me wonder about all the other considerations these engineers at Tesla miss.
I wonder if the new widgets capability in iOS 15 will allow you to get close to that. I’ll have to make a screen for that when it’s out of beta to see.
This won't ever get first-party support because of the legal complications with the use of mobile devices while driving (that legally doesn't apply if it's permanently bolted to your car)
I don't mean that Apple (or Google) can't legally do it, they obviously could. The legal complication I'm referring to is the patchwork of laws regarding their customers' use of mobile devices while driving.
Android Auto running on Android is different -- it has a 50 state legal purpose: Android is a popular OS for in-car infotainment. Apple CarPlay runs on Android too, that's how it was implemented in my car from the factory.
iOS, by contrast, is not used for car infotainment systems, only Apple's mobile devices. Apple is unlikely to go out of their way to make a product for their mobile devices that is intended to be used while driving that could only be used on a mobile device.
AFAIK, Android Auto on phone launched before Android OS was used for in-car infotainment. Besides I am still not sold on your explanation. You can use Apple OS based phone to navigate while driving.
Yes, but these were Android tablets fitted into head units. Not Androind Auto - a UI specifically designed to be used while driving which would make the Android OS liable for legal issues.
> It's really just my opinion that Apple wouldn't go out of their way to port software to a different platform with no PR-friendly purpose.
They don't need to. The ask in this comment thread was to have the CarPlay UI on the phone itself - the phone being an iPhone.
It was a test, appreciate you pointing it out. Stemming from a conversation about different net censorship approaches. It had to be basic (and deliberately crude, hence wording) to compare forum responses to such inappropriate and unsuitable posts. The hard part was that one couldn't use a burner account. The YC response is wonderfully effective, yet almost muted. One place banned/terminated outright (though not everyone), muted for varying days, or suggested the post was deleted.
I think they can probably outright buy TSMC barring national security concerns for Taiwan. Market cap is $570B for TSMC. Of course that would never happen but interesting to see how much cash AAPL has.
I think smart move for them here would be to buy them now, before they finish building fabs in Arizona - TSMC value will skyrocket after those factories are operational and getting the yields similar to Taiwanese ones.
Yeah the Arizona factory isn’t going to come anywhere near the Taiwanese one by any metric. It’s just for show to make the american government feel a bit better about the huge national security risk that not having capabilities to manufacture chips is.
> It’s just for show
> the huge national security risk
Which is it? I'm not up to speed on the details of the factory but on the surface ensuring local fab capabilities seems like a reasonably justified national security concern.
from a US perspective it is clearly a natsec concern, but Taiwan understands pretty much their whole value as an entity to the US is TSMC. As long as they depend on the US, they have to walk a fine line of giving enough away so that the US continues to protect them, but not so much that the US does not care to defend Taiwan anymore
like the parent said, this is moot. TSMC is not for sale, for reasons of geopolitics and Taiwanese national security. it is Taiwan's biggest bargaining chip
They've been known to front load order / commit with cash upfront to key suppliers to both lock in supply and basically fund supplier capital purchases.
Are you SURE that they haven't done that with TSMC?
They can back up their commitments with cash to help suppliers deliver the capacity / volume they need (which is high). This then pays off in terms a more predictable supply chain (ie, they want to launch iphones in fall with generally absolutely cutting edge process nodes).
>Are you SURE that they haven't done that with TSMC?
Back around the time Apple was looking at single sourcing chips from TSMC, TSMC's CEO started publicly saying that deals that dedicated a fab to a single customer made sense.
>The world's leading foundry chip maker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. is considering operating single-customer wafer fabs, according to chairman and CEO Morris Chang.
Chang, speaking to analysts on a conference call to discuss the company's second quarter financial results, said that the market is tending to produce fewer higher volume customers and some are so large they need their own dedicated fabs.
AFAIK they put a massive order with TSMC and paid upfront to get all the production of their new line for a while, but I haven't seen anything indicating that Apple owns the machines. At least in this case: they did own the production lines in other cases, such as screens at some point IIRC.
Which would make sense - the scale of these orders / capital commitments is enormous and this allows Apple to get value for its cash and use that as a competitive advantage against random joe blow companies without nearly the capital resources apple brings.
Apple definitely has pre bought TSMC’s entire new process runs, but the poster above was talking about a different arrangement, where Apple buys and owns actual machinery that is located on a supplier’s factory line.
This is the same idea cash flow wise - front load cash for a supplier so you have capacity / get production.
You'd only do title on actual specific equipment if the supplier was a fair bit smaller than you are normally - but the transaction / cash flow story is the same. Upfront cash to help supplier deliver your supply reliably and at scale you need.
functionally it's the same if you look at cash flows - the title to machines matters usually only if the supplier you are funding into is substantially smaller than you are. TSMC is large as well, so they don't need to do the title dance on any specific equipment.
> Now if only they paid more than 10% income tax I could have a road without potholes
Apple paid 14.4% in income taxes in fiscal 2020 and 16% in 2019.
Do your roads now lack potholes?
What if we increase that tax rate to 18% or 20%. Would the potholes go away? (nope)
The potholes have a lot more to do with vast government mismanagement of spending and a failure to raise gasoline taxes to fund infrastructure (at least in the US), than they do with a few billion dollars in tax revenue re Apple.
The federal + state + local government systems of the US have spent something like $70+ trillion over the past ten years. How much of that did they allocate to infrastructure?
They spent our trillions of dollars in infrastructure money occupying and blowing up Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. A couple of billion dollars from Apple is just about the least of our problems.
I thought People buy Apple products all over the world? Not just at Cpuertino?
Jokes aside, I want to point out that the money is made from selling to people. The profit does not come from air. They were from people. You can argue how justified that the profit belongs to the company. But it ultimately comes from people, and should be used on them as well.
The obligations of the seller are over after the point of sale barring warranty and after-sale support. The tax bill is due at the point that the State requests payment. If the State receives the money and opts not to pursue more money before the statute of the limitations expires, the obligations to the State are satisfied.
So why is the seller then obligated beyond prior agreements to expend the profits of the sale on the buyer? Where is your logic?
Simply put, point of sell is a micro transaction. But profit coming from people ought to be used on people, that's a macro concept.
Just like you won't service intelligence by focusing on individual neurons activity, you won't buy the idea that collective the profit should be used on the people as a whole.
So, why apple profit should be used on people?
Because apple depends on the whole society providing the materials talents social constructs for its profit making. For example, without us military, you can ganrantee that apple will need to pay a lot more in tax to other countries (not saying that's wrong). And without the education system, there won't be enough highly skilled engineer.
And you might ask, the exiting system already extracted tax from Apple business.
That's right.
But the investors of us military and education are not organized as stock based ownership, so that part of value creation was never reflected in Apple' ownership at all. I mean, why someone invest in actual captital be able to grab certain percentage of companies, far larger than the employee of the firm? Wasn't employee do 99.99% of the work instead of shareholders? Let's say us military and education system decide, collectively, Apple should grant certain amount of share from the company, do you think it will work?
No, that's because the system cannot support such mechanism.
Back to the original argument. If the system could not correctly assess the actor's contribution to the profit, then it has to be that the profit needs to be pulled together for the people. And I am sure that Apple took more than their fair shares of economy profit for a smaller group of share holders.
That’s senseless unless you see the government as a profit-seeking entity, which is also senseless.
A purchase has a buyer and seller who are making an exchange, both of whom in the United States and the majority of the States are already paying tax on their income. The sale itself may be subject to sales tax. The surplus from the sale at a price agreed upon by buyer and seller, after expenses are accounted for, is profit. This profit becomes taxable income to the seller, and the tax rate set in advance of the reporting period by elected representatives in respectable countries.
The State, both the State of the sale and the United States but referred to generically and collectively as “the State” so as to keep this discussion open to other countries and jurisdictions p, is responsible for its own revenues to cover costs (military, education, or whatever) which include taxes.
So when a seller’s tax obligations are satisfied, which is revenue to the State to cover the government’s costs, what obligation does the seller retain to the buyer beyond warranty and prior agreed-upon support service?
If you want to discuss tax rates, that’s a whole other discussion and definitely not one I’m keen on. What I’m getting at is your idea that profitable businesses remain indentured to their customers beyond the point that their prior obligations are satisfied. They do not.
You are repeating your point without acknowledging my points.
Discussions cannot have meaningful progress like this.
As I said, in this existing system, one cannot measure the investment value of other parts of the economy. Therefore one cannot justly determine the profit sharing in such system.
If you insist on tax collection is enough to justify the profit ownership, then you are not acknowledging the fact that I totally agree, in the existing system, where there is simply no other alternatives.
But my point was that the system is the problem itself. I.e., this system cannot justly assess the profit ownership. The case in point is that the military and education are not treated as investment like other capital investment.
All luxury brands make products that have incredible satisfaction metrics. That's not what makes them luxury brands. The meticulous brand image crafting is.
If you look at Apple as if you were to acquire them (in some alternate universe where you had that financial capability), then yes I'd agree with you that their brand is their single biggest asset.
However, I agree with the parent - you actually have to have great products and services that delight to become big and relevant... and stay big and relevant. This enables your sexy branding to be effective. Your sexy branding doesn't make your products and services better. It just lures consumers in, but that only works for so long unless you deliver on your promise. A brand is a promise kept as the old saying goes.
"the rise of brands was a response to an information-poor environment. When consumers had to rely on advertisements and their past experience with a company, brands served as proxies for quality; if a car was made by G.M., or a ketchup by Heinz, you assumed that it was pretty good. It was hard to figure out if a new product from an unfamiliar company was reliable or not, so brand loyalty was a way of reducing risk. As recently as the nineteen-eighties, nearly four-fifths of American car buyers stayed loyal to a brand."
"Roku, a maker of streaming entertainment devices, has thrived even though its products have to compete with similar ones made by Apple (which is usually cited as the world’s most valuable brand)."
So let's say you buy Apple (just the name and branding and nothing else) - you still aren't going to be shit without everything else.
We aren't in an information poor environment. Consumers would know the brand was sold and that the quality could not be trusted.
Is Apple a luxury brand? Their products are priced about the same as their competitors. Just the raw value for money is often better on Apple products than on others. Every other luxury brand I know has very poor value for money.
That's really impossible to say until you better define the criteria for success. Most profitable? Most units sold? Greatest dominance in its category? Longest reign? Most cultural relevance?
I don't think iPhone will win any single one of them individually. Grouping together some or all of them...maybe, but probably still no. Heck it might not even the most successful mobile phone ever.
Off the top of my head I cant remember ever seeing a quarterly report in the last 10+ years that did not mention "Record revenue and/ or sales and/or services revenue". At some point, it just seems the messaging is spun for optics. On the other hand it does seem that they are expanding the business and that services is a great way to increase margin. Maybe its my selective memory at work, but have they had a suboptimal quarterly result in recent history? Im glad I am a shareholder, but can a company grow continuously forever?
Apple has had the price of their stock drop at least 40% on 3 separate occasions, the most recent of which was 2013. So you are right that they have had a strong run for almost 10 years straight. They do frequently post record profits, and you are also more likely to see that head line than when they just have an average quarter, skewing perceptions a bit.
IT allows almost economies of scale to keep scaling longer than ever before. I don’t see a reason apple cannot push into new markets and eye a $5 or $10T market cap in the next decade or two.
Apple's revenue numbers the past 15 months really seem to conflict with management's statements that their staff needs to be in-office in order to produce optimal results.
Yes, everyone went into remote work with a lot of momentum. It will very interesting to compare something like the iPhone 14/15 with previous deltas. But even more so, I think the new product lines and early stage products will take the biggest hit to their schedule.
Maybe with those numbers they will be able to afford recalls for 15 inch flexgate in 2016 and 2017 models now instead of fighting its own clients in court.
The TL;DR is that Apple often goes down after great earnings, with little or no discernible reason. But since you asked..."Whisper numbers", which were higher than the analysts actual guesses, which were lower than the actual numbers (but the actual numbers were still lower than the whisper numbers). Or it was "already priced in".
All bullshit phrases to allow some to pretend to know more than they do, when they really don't know any more than you or I. Now, that's not to say there isn't some truth in my first paragraph. But if someone utters those same words, it doesn't mean it's true. At the end of the day (or after the end of the day, in this scenario), it is what it is.
As a side note, I've seen Apple (a stock I've been trading for over 15 years) take a dive in after-hours, only to come roaring back in the morning at market open. Or maybe it gets pounded the next day, but comes roaring back next week. And one more thing: guidance is often "we can't keep this up for ever!", and some people believe them, despite the fact that Apple has been saying that for at least a decade.
Many money managers will sell the news, take profits, and reallocate. Catalysts like this cause a bunch of managers to do it at the same time, thus a dip. But look at it as a temporary discount.
Many money managers will sell the news, take profits, and reallocate. Catalysts like this cause a bunch of managers to do it at the same time, thus a dip. But look at it as a small sale.
I just got an ipad for the first time. I spent more on digital purchases for that thing than I have in years on my android. Theres something about how big it is.
Services revenue increasing is just scary. A single company owning everything from the silicon to the device to the OS to the app gateway, web browser and software services is going to backfire for users in the long run I think.
For me its the fact that they have still not solved the update problem more than a decade later. All Android devices get 3 years updates max. While my 7+ year old iPad Air 2 is getting iPadOS 15 soon.
Google has had numerous proposed solutions for this but yet their own devices do not get more than 3 years updates.
Google excels at apps and web services where Apple fails. I still use the google services on my iphone because they have native apps on more platforms and their web versions are better while icloud web hardly has 10% of the features it should.
I’ve been an iPhone user for the last 5 generations and recently swapped it for a Google Pixel for a 5 day trip just as an experiment. If you substract off all the things that just work “differently vs better”, there are still many things that I found shocking with Android:
* 3rd party app (Charles Schwab) was not usuable to execute an options transaction. App usability bug.
* QR codes would not scan, but would scan fine on my gf’s iPhone. Hard to imagine a Google Pixel camera can’t see these well?
* Battery drain was way worse than iPhone. Had lots of anxiety about this
These are not just differences. These are tablestakes things that should just work without any education between Android vs. iPhone.
> * 3rd party app (Charles Schwab) was not usuable to execute an options transaction. App usability bug.
Seems like a Charles Schwab problem.
> * QR codes would not scan, but would scan fine on my gf’s iPhone. Hard to imagine a Google Pixel camera can’t see these well?
Wouldn't scan with the default camera app? A different camera app? Because the ability to read QR codes is an app function, not a camera function. Works fine on Samsung Android phones.
> * Battery drain was way worse than iPhone. Had lots of anxiety about this
Pixels have relatively small batteries. Which iPhone? Hardware makes a difference.
It is a 3rd party app compatibility problem. It is a glaring issue with a core user journey. This does not happen on iOS. 3rd party app compat is particularly bad on Android.
Also, your follow up questions sound exactly like the kind of questions an engineer who makes an Android phone would ask and not a product person who understands an average user and their expectations.
And? For better or worse Android is an open platform. It's the vast majority of phones world-wide, it's extremely functional and can be a very good experience depending somewhat on the handset maker.
Apple can control their quality to the degree they want, but it's also not an open platform and there's limited hardware choice.
I'll take Android any day, and most people I know do too.
Also, while we're talking about user experience, Google's cloud everything is far better than Apple's. Google services are amazing too.
Switched to iPhone from Android. The wearables game and integration makes Android a non-starter. I now have an M1 Mac + Apple Watch + Airpods Pro + iPhone + iPad and this is a way better technological ensemble than the Intel Mac / Linux Desktop + Samsung Watch + Jabra buds + Pixel 5 + iPad solution I had previously.
The only exception is that I preferred the fingerprint reader to the Face Unlock and the Jabra buds stayed in my ear easier.
Does it? TV is a product category and not an individual product line. So if we look at smartphones in general, I would say there are far more smartphones sold globally than there are TVs. Currently there are 0-1 TVs per household typically while there are 1-4 smartphones in a house on average.
Smartphones also get replaced on a much shorter timeframe than TVs while costing about the same.
700,000,000 paid subscriptions is the craziest metric in tech. That’s an absolutely insane amount of people paying Apple one way or another as opposed to being free users and just seeing ads