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           LittleBITS: Should We Continue Covering Apple Financials?

   Adam Engst

   As you can read in '[1]Apple's Q3 2024 Record Revenues Surprise Tim
   Cook' (2 August 2024), Michael Cohen and I have covered Apple's latest
   earnings report, as we always do, and the broad strokes'Apple rakes in
   billions! iPhone down! Services up!'have become somewhat repetitive.

   Hence my question: Do you find these quarterly financial roundups
   interesting? TidBITS seldom covers Apple business news, but I see these
   roundups as a sort of scorecard that gives some insight into why the
   company might be paying more or less attention to one product line or
   business segment. Register your vote in the poll in the comments, and
   tell us if there's something that would make this information more
   relevant or interesting to read.

   From my perspective, I rather enjoy maintaining and publishing the
   charts that Josh Centers started for us some years back, but Jason
   Snell does [2]many more of those at Six Colors. Neither Michael nor I
   have significant financial backgrounds, so even if we thought the
   TidBITS audience cared deeply about free cash flow margins and the
   effect product mix has on gross margins, we're unqualified to comment
   on such things.

   My main enjoyment from these articles comes from listening to Tim Cook
   and Luca Maestri list out the company's financial successes and
   troubles. I always get a kick out of Cook's rhetorical contortions to
   smooth over negative results or immediately counter an obvious negative
   with a positive. Along with the evocative and increasingly common
   phrase 'foreign exchange headwinds,' which gives me visions of Cook
   tacking a schooner into a stiff breeze of Chinese renminbi notes, I
   love sentences like these:

     In iPad, revenue for the March quarter was $5.6 billion, 17% lower
     year-over-year due to a difficult compare with the momentum
     following the launch of M2 iPad Pro and the tenth-generation iPad
     last fiscal year.

     Wearables, Home, and Accessories revenue was $8.1 billion, down 2%
     year-over-year, a sequential acceleration from the March quarter.

   You have to be impressed by Cook's May 2024 pairing of 'difficult
   compare' with the 'momentum' from the 2022 launch of the M2 iPad Pro,
   plus his use of 'a sequential acceleration' to indicate that the
   revenue decline in Wearables was less bad than the previous quarter.

   I also like listening to the analysts try to get Cook and Maestri to
   reveal something'anything!'that wasn't in the prepared statement or
   previously announced. With very few exceptions, Cook meets all
   questions with a recap of what he just said and one or more boilerplate
   statements about how Apple isn't going to get out in front of its
   announcements, how it's too early to say anything, or how Apple can't
   wait to see what amazing things developers come up with. It's a master
   class in not answering the question, and every time, the analyst has to
   thank him for it.

   But I'm not having so much fun covering these earnings reports to keep
   doing it if you, our readers, are skipping the articles anyway. So
   register your vote in the poll in the comments, and feel free to add
   some color in a comment.

References

   1. https://tidbits.com/2024/08/02/apples-q3-2024-record-revenues-surprise-tim-cook/
   2. https://sixcolors.com/post/2024/08/apple-results-quarterly-record-all-time-high-in-services/

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