Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results (opens in new tab)

I suppose it could also mean increased investment in plant, R&D. aquisitions or reduced margins.

Isn't cash looses its value over time due to inflation? Why Apple maintains a cash reserve?

They have a lot of productive options to choose from, but it's either charity, or improving their products beyond being faster. Apple would sooner dump money into the ocean than do either.

Apple could hire more engineers to make it's software less buggy at least and to fix a lot of long time small annoyances. And to double their devtools engineer count to make the entire company and all of their external developers more effective.

This really should be the top comment under the OP's question. And Apple have stated this goal for a few years already. So this isn't new.

It's not a joke when the SEC isn't laughing.

This is very good news for them, since their services revenue looks to be at risk due to antitrust scrutiny.

Why does apple use aspx? Not only is that strange but does anyone really use that anymore?

I don’t think it is. The dividend yield was in the 1.5-2% range about 10 years ago iirc.

Dividends are not an efficient mechanism to return cash to investors. The recipient is forcefully taxed.

Share buybacks technically accomplish the same; the proportional increase in shareholder value should be the same. However, investors who do not want to recognize income that year do not have to; whereas investors who need the dividend income can sell a small number of appreciated shares.

Oops, I meant to say deccelerated. But it appears to be worse - stagnant at 14%. So, I think the real reason they need to ask themselves - why? They've tried a few things with low cost iPhone SE models to gain market share but it has failed thus far. Perhaps it is the inertia of switching OS/GUI, or perhaps it is an indictment of how bad the iPhone UI has gotten. Or, that Android and other phone manufacturers are offering mutually exclusive things that iPhone simply cannot satisfy. It surely isn't the shortages.

The phones also started stagnating in additional utility for new models. Smaller and smaller portions of people gain anything going from one model to the next. A $500 iPhone SE has plenty of camera and processing power for people, and it is basically an iPhone 8.

No, it hasn't been growing. It has been stagnant and stuck at 14% for quite a while.

Shouldn't we question whetever comes out of the shareholder's meeting? The classic is 2017 BTC boom that deluded NVidia's shareholders, no one questioned it and then in 2018, Jensen speaks up in the shareholders mtg that we're now in a Bitcoin hangover. Obviously, they've accelerated since then, but the point remains.

It's important to play a devils advocate even if you're wrong. No one in this thread seems to be doing that.

I really have no horse in this race, just putting out contrarian views from the herd.

Agreed but lots of Apple’s growing services don’t have low marginal costs - Apple Music - or they are investing heavily - Apple TV - so this seemed a bit surprising.

For some reason Apple seems to pay no attention to anything other than casual games. They completely crippled the mac gaming scene which was doing OK when they killed 32bit and never implemented vulkan support. IMO they can't embrace VR without going back and helping the game developer scene in getting the tooling they need to make mac support easy.

At some point, probably. Very unclear when and what it looks like at this point. Aside from niche commercial use cases, I certainly haven't seen anything that especially interests me.