ByDon

Dear Friends,

It was a long trip up to Daytona using the “avoid highways, avoid tolls” feature of Google Maps. I was using my Blue Ant Pump Lite Bluetooth earbuds connected to my iPhone in my pocket. I not only got the turn-by-turn directions from Google Maps but also some great tunes from my playlists. I even was able to take a phone call, although I pulled over both for safety reasons and so I could hear better. We travelled through Florida’s farm belt, orange groves (hey, their trees are full of oranges!) and Lake Okeechobee before we headed towards the coast.

It is official, Apple has sent out notices for the special “Let Us Loop You In” event on Monday. It is expected to see some new iPhones and iPads and perhaps other announcements. For those of you with a 4th Generation AppleTV there is a new app called “Apple Events” that you can download for free to watch the event which starts at 10AM Pacific time. The live stream will also be available on Macs and iOS devices through Apple’s event website. iOS 7 or OS X 10.8.5 with Safari 6.0.5 or later is required. We are excited to hear about the latest from Apple!

I am going to talk about Time Machine and Time Capsules a bit in the article below, however, this week as a Kibbles & Bytes exclusive, I am featuring the Apple factory reconditioned 2 and 3 TB Time Capsules. You can save a bunch on these Time Capsules that have a 1-year Apple warranty. Normally, the 2 TB Time Capsule, new is $299.99 and the 3TB Time Capsule is $399.99. With $20 off for Kibbles & Bytes readers, the 2TB Time Capsule is only $159.99 and the 3TB is $259.99! This is a great way for you to have automatic wireless backup and the superior Apple Airport Extreme wireless access point!

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  • Apple Stands Up The Street

    $50.6 Billion in revenue, $10.5 Billion in net profit and $235 Billion in the bank. Let’s get one thing straight, 99.9% of the companies in the world would love to have those kind of numbers. And while this fell into the range of Apple’s forward-looking guidance, it did fall short of the expectations of the analysts.

    This was the first time in 13 years (!) that Apple posted lower year-over-year sales. Apple saw lower iPhone sales than last year at this time. However, keep in mind that was when the iPhone 6 was at its peak. Nevertheless, Apple sold 51.1 million iPhones and said they are having difficulty keeping up with the demand for the recently released iPhone 5se.

    Mac sales and iPad sales also declined as expected with Apple selling a bit over 4 million Macs and 10.25 million iPads. On the bright side, Services revenue increased 20% to almost $6 billion and “other” products which include Apple TV, Apple Watch, Beats and iPod generated $2.189 billion which is 30% growth.

    Apple’s board of directors both increased the dividend paid on Apple shares to $0.57 which is about a 10% raise and increased their share buy-back program. With Apple being so widely held, this dividend increase makes Apple one of the largest payers of dividends in the world. Since the start of their dividend and share re-purchase program, Apple has returned over $163 billion to shareholders, the majority of that being in the form of share buy-backs.

    Apple’s guidance for the current quarter which ends at the end of June also projects a year-over-year decline in revenues. They forecast sales in the range of $41-$43 billion which is also lower than analysts predicted.

    There is no sugar-coating these results which were for the most part, a miss. Forecasting demand, revenue and margin is tricky and there are a bunch of factors that enter into this calculation and a bunch more that are ready to blow up the forecast. International monetary trends, new product introductions are all a bit of a wild card.

    There is some good news hidden in the report. Apple said that the iPhone enjoys an unprecedented 95% loyalty rate, Apple Pay is seeing 1 million new users a week, 13 million people subscribe to Apple Music and Apple’s installed base is 1 billion devices and growing.

    Apple had a huge hit with the iPhone 6 and that did push sales to a peak level last year. It was an anomaly, however, and Apple’s business is still incredibly strong, just a bit more down to earth. You can’t hit home runs every time at bat! Tim Cook says the product pipeline is strong and I believe him.

    Hey, I didn’t have to come up with a new adjective to describe what Apple did to the street this quarter. That’s a fringe benefit. Putting this all into perspective is important. It is not like Apple is losing money or losing customers. In fact, the opposite is true. In three short months, they made over $10 billion in profit and sold millions and millions of iPhones, iPads and Macs! Now, if Small Dog could just do a tiny fraction of that…