Matt Richman

While that number is incredible in and of itself, it’s even better when you remember that the iPod touch is a stepping stone for the iPhone. It’s only a matter of time before people get the real thing.

The most interesting part is the part that hasn’t been covered:

Apple has always believed in the simple, not the complex. This is evident in the Company’s products and the way it conducts itself. In this spirit, Apple has recommended to the Obama Administration and several members of Congress — and suggests to the Subcommittee today — to pass legislation that dramatically simplifies the US corporate tax system. This comprehensive reform should:

• Be revenue neutral;

• Eliminate all corporate tax expenditures;

• Lower corporate income tax rates; and

• Implement a reasonable tax on foreign earnings that allows free movement of capital back to the US.

Apple recognizes these and other improvements in the US corporate tax system may increase the Company’s taxes. Apple is not opposed to such a result if it occurs in the context of an overall improvement in efficiency, flexibility and competitiveness. Apple believes the changes it proposes will stimulate the creation of American jobs, increase domestic investment and promote economic growth.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt takes down Joe Nocera’s piece in The New York Times on Tim Cook’s Senate appearance, proving, if nothing else, that Steve Jobs was right.

David Kocieniewski, reporting for The New York Times:

Like some of the nation’s prominent chief executives, Apple’s Timothy D. Cook has a simple proposal to help spur the economy and encourage corporate tax compliance: give American companies a tax break to bring to the United States untaxed profits parked overseas.

[…]

Apple is one of about 20 major corporations that have been pushing for a fresh tax break, known as a “repatriation holiday,” which would allow them to bring the money to the United States at a drastically reduced rate. John T. Chambers, chief executive of Cisco, has led a sustained lobbying effort for such a policy, promising that it would act as a stimulus to encourage investment and increase jobs in the United States.

Chambers may be lobbying for a repatriation holiday, but Cook isn’t. In his testimony on Tuesday, Cook made clear that he would like to see a complete overhaul of the corporate tax code — even if it resulted in Apple having to pay more in taxes — not a repatriation holiday.

Sloppy reporting.

This explains a lot.

Nathaniel Popper and Nick Wingfield relay some Toni Sacconaghi wisdom through The New York Times:

Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research, said that if Apple developed a clear plan to use some of its cash to pay dividends to shareholders it would help the company’s shares, perhaps lifting them 10 percent or more. But that will not return Apple shares to their glory days. He said the bigger problem bearish investors saw with Apple’s shares was more straightforward: growth is stalling.

There are two problems with this analysis. For one thing, dividend payments do not at all correlate with — yet alone directly cause — an increase in share price. As I wrote nearly two years ago:

As Horace Dediu pointed out, when technology companies institute stock buybacks, they don’t create a lot of shareholder value, if any at all. Microsoft has spent a little more than $97 billion on buybacks since 2004 and its share price has gone up less than 10 percent. Over the last 10 years, it has spent over $170 billion on both buybacks and dividends while MSFT has gone down 19.92 percent. At the same time, networking giant Cisco has returned $50.7 billion to shareholders since the beginning of 2004 while its share price has dropped 35.58 percent. Additionally, RIM’s stock price has plummeted 21.16 percent since it announced a share buyback program less than 30 days ago, on June 16th. Though other factors certainly could have played a part in the depreciation of the share prices of the aforementioned companies, using cash for stock buybacks and dividends clearly isn’t the best way to increase shareholder value.

The other problem with Sacconaghi’s analysis is that, contrary to what he asserted, Apple’s growth is not “stalling”. In the last year, Apple’s bottom line — it’s profit — has grown at 0 percent, 24 percent, 21 percent, and 93 percent compared to their corresponding previous-year quarters. And the no growth quarter doesn’t count, because, as Apple itself stressed, its first quarter of fiscal 2013 was 13 weeks long whereas its first quarter of fiscal 2012 was 14 weeks long. You can’t properly compare the two.

Revenue growth is the same story: 18 percent, 27 percent, 22 percent, and 59 percent.

I seem to remember that the rate at which Apple was growing was itself growing at a few points in time. That may no longer be the case, but just because the rate at which the company is growing is itself not growing anymore does not mean that Apple’s growth is “stalling”.

Some quick back-of-the-envelope math reveals that the company is still growing.

For a while now, I’ve been meaning to write a piece about old media (e.g. The New York Times) and how it will have to change in order to survive going forward. But I think John Herrman and Ben Smith sum it up extraordinarily well:

The media’s new and unfamiliar job is to provide a framework for understanding the wild, unvetted, and incredibly intoxicating information that its audience will inevitably see — not to ignore it.

Quentin Hardy of The New York Times aptly summarizes Intel’s problem:

PC sales are now collapsing, as users are relying more on mobile phones and tablets that rarely contain Intel chips.

There’s one problem with the article, though: ARM isn’t mentioned, not even once. How any reputable publication — let alone The New York Times — published an article about Intel’s dilemma without mentioning ARM is truly beyond my comprehension.

The title of this piece is misleading. Samsung doesn’t actually report how many smartphones it sells. There are estimates from outside firms, but they’re never actually confirmed by Samsung itself. Without more data, it is impossible to prove, as the headline asserts, that Samsung sells more smartphones than any other company. It’s simply not possible.

This event backs up John Gruber’s theory that “The desire for the ‘Oh, how the mighty Apple has fallen’ narrative is so strong that the narrative is simply being stated as fact, evidence to the contrary be damned”. A publication like BusinessWeek should know better. That it doesn’t simply proves Gruber’s point.

This seems similar to Apple’s Jobs-to-Cook transition. Obviously this has been planned out, and the incoming CEO obviously has the support of the outgoing one.

News, but not really.