pwatsonwailes

There's a Shakespeare quote from Julius Caesar which would seem appropriate.

It's written by an AI. That's why it's a bit shit.

In most ways, it isn't meaningfully. It became what it is now, but in the same way a 600 year old oak isn't anything like an acorn or a sapling, what exists now isn't meaningfully that.

They're a monster. Vastly impressive stuff.

Short version:

Reported quarterly revenue: ~$111 billion, so a 17% year-over-year increase.

Diluted earnings per share: ~$2. 22% increase compared to the same quarter last year.

Operating cash flow: surpassed $28 billion. Record for a March quarter.

iPhone: Record March-quarter revenue of ~$57 billion, heavily supported by demand for the iPhone 17.

Services: Hit an all-time high revenue record of ~$31 billion.

Capital Allocation: The board raised the quarterly cash dividend by 4% to $0.27 per share and authorized an additional $100 billion for share repurchases.

More generally, we're seeing a transition in their financials away from hardware dependence. At this point we can pretty conclusively say that Apple is now a hardware manufacturer mainly, backed up by a high-margin services ecosystem. Services revenue has grown consistently, providing a smoothing function against the more spikey revenue from the hardware product cycles.

Overall they've managed to maintain an ability to deliver double-digit growth, despite creating categories of product which haven't succeeded, providing enough free cash flow to continue their insane (in terms of scale) capital return program (dividends and massive buybacks in the main).

Terra Mystica, Brass Birmingham, Scythe, Root, ARCS and its expansions, Nemesis: Retaliation and SETI would all get shouts from me for that sort of thing. Slightly depends on your definition of complex and sophisticated, but I'd put all of those in that list.

You may want to check out Siromer tractors depending where you are. Similar idea.

Doesn't seem to do anything on custom game.

A product being good enough isn't enough. At some point you also need to price it, and communicate it's existence persuasively to the market and win market share, and it has to be distributed effectively.

Most businesses fail because they solve for the easier bit (product) and then have no idea about the rest.

My mistake. Nice catch.

That being said, AirPods use a steel frame construction to get the weight up for the same reason. There's a whole thing with weight in neuromarketing for luxury and luxury-adjacent products. There's fringe benefits acoustically to using it, around resonance mainly, but mostly it's to get weight and influence perception. Same reason as the knock-offs, different mechanism.

1. They have steel weights in them to make them that heavy so they feel more premium.

Both built by Claude Sonnet 4.6

Doesn't need to be a single person, but yes, all good products come from someone or a (generally) small team, spotting something, and fixing it.

As for the marketing department - depends on definition, but assuming you mean (as it mostly is nowdays) comms, it's two things:

1. Making sure that potential future customers know you exist, so when they enter the market to buy, they know you're relevant and can purchase from you.

2. Making sure that when someone is in the market to buy now, that they're more likely to buy from you, because you have a compelling reason for people to pick you, and not the other brands in the space that they can think of.

Mostly 1, some of 2, if the marketing team is good. Ratios vary as to how much though by more than you'd think, depending on industry, customer lifecycle, brand maturity and so on.