So Apple dropped their quarterly numbers this week and I've had the tab open since Tuesday night trying to figure out how to write about it without just regurgitating a spreadsheet. 35.1 million iPhones. In one quarter. Revenue of $39.2 billion and profit of $11.6 billion, which if you say it slow enough starts to sound fake. That's up something like 88% year over year on the iPhone number alone. I dont think theres a company in history thats grown a single product line that fast at that scale, and Im including the original iPhone launch years in that, because this is a company that was already enormous before this quarter even started.
The stock did what you'd expect, it jumped hard the next day, clawing back over $600 after spending most of April sulking in the $560s. Funny thing is I remember when $600 felt like a psychological ceiling people were nervous about back in the winter, and now its just a Tuesday. I dont own AAPL and Im not going to pretend Ive got some genius reason why not, mostly its just that I bought a chunk of a much boring-er dividend stock two years ago and havent touched my brokerage account since. Sometimes not paying attention to your portfolio is its own strategy. Dont take investment advice from a guy who writes a blog about USB cables in his spare time.
What actually gets me about the report isnt the iPhone line, its the iPad number tucked in underneath it. 11.8 million iPads sold, and remember this is the quarter right after the third-gen iPad launched in March with the Retina display. Im still running a first-gen iPad 2 over here and honestly it does everything I need, so I keep reading these numbers with a little bit of bafflement about who all these millions of buyers are. My working theory, and I have zero data to back this up, is that a huge chunk of iPad sales at this point arent people upgrading, theyre first-time buyers who waited out the "is this thing just a big iPod touch" debate and finally decided the tablet thing is real. Which, fine, it clearly is now. I was skeptical in 2011 and I'll cop to being wrong about the trajectory even if Im personally happy with my aging hardware.
The other thing worth flagging from this week, and its a lot less fun to write about, is that CISPA passed the House on Thursday. If you havent been following it, its the cybersecurity information sharing bill that a bunch of civil liberties groups have been sounding alarms about for weeks now, mostly because of how loosely it defines what companies can hand over to the government and under what protections. It still has to get through the Senate and the White House has already signaled they're not thrilled with it as written, so this isnt over, but after the whole SOPA and PIPA blowup back in January it feels like we're right back in the same fight with a different acronym. I dont have a tidy take on this one other than that I wish these bills got the kind of plain-English breakdown treatment that SOPA eventually got, because CISPA barely made a ripple outside of tech circles and it probably should have.
Anyway. Two very different kinds of "big tech week" happening at the same time, one measured in billions of dollars and one measured in votes in a committee room, and I think thats sort of always how it goes now. The product news is the fun stuff to write about and the policy stuff is the stuff that actually matters five years out, and I'm bad, like genuinely bad, at giving the second category its due attention on here. Something to work on I guess.
One last small thing since Im already rambling: if you're the type who reads quarterly earnings calls for fun (there are maybe six of you), Tim Cook apparently spent a good chunk of the call fielding questions about a possible dividend or buyback given how much cash Apple is sitting on now. No announcement, just a lot of "we're actively discussing it" hedging. Given the stack of cash they're apparently sitting on at this point, Id put money on something happening there before the year is out. We'll see.