Phil Schiller Says November 2016 Had the 'Highest Monthly Sales Ever in App Store History'

[truthertech]

I hope you're right but the recent dropping of the popular and critically acclaimed Airport products is a very bad harbinger for me of where they're headed. I don't think they want to be in the computer business. They want to be a services and consumer goods company.

Good news is that Marc Gurman's report has never been substantiated by Apple and many observers believe it is misleading. Even if employees were transferred, Apple is still selling Airport products with no availability problems. Apple has spent how many billions developing wireless solutions and taking a lot of heat for pushing the market there ahead of everyone else. How many billions developing Siri and acquiring other exciting technology like Vocal IQ? How much in developing and pushing HomeKit? How much has Apple focused on security of which wi-fi and the IOT are integrally tied.

How likely is it that Apple is simply abandoning having a hub that would connect all of that together? It doesn't make sense. What is infinitely more likely, once you move beyond the click bait nature of Marc Gurman's article (no offense to him, but remember he was brought on solely because he had sources in Apple that would leak some things to him, not because of any journalistic writing skills, so he is under constant pressure to be "leaking" something that sounds dramatic), is that Apple simply doesn't need those many and particular employees to do any further work on the Airport. And that is great news, I believe it means that they will soon be releasing a product that combines their advanced wi-fi with Siri and HomeKit, and possibly Apple TV.

Clearly Apple could have come out long ago with a competitor to Amazon's Echo or Google's Now, but remember that Apple doesn't like to do "me too" products. They look for differentiators which I believe is the integration I mentioned above along with some method to allow multiple users for Siri. Siri is a personal assistant and is much more powerful than Alexa, but the current challenge is having her on a speaker with multiple users in the room. Whose voice does she respond to? Whose email does she read, etc? That's probably been the biggest hold up. Another likely partnership is with Sonos. They have fantastic sounding speakers with terrific wireless connectivity. Would be a great for Apple to buy them and then integrate their competencies for great sound and Siri/Homekit throughout the house.

 

[snakes-]

most apps are boring....
and wont heare anymore words like magical or best month ever bla bla bla

there try to hold stock value high with words best month ever thats all...

 

[NewtonAurelius]

Phil always says that the most recent thing was the biggest best ever. He needs to actually do something and stop saying.

There is a legal motivation for always saying something is "good", "best", and "better", because these words are subjective they have to official legal meaning. A company can say every product is their "best", and no legal action can be taken against them.

But I do agree, Phil's marketing techniques are laughably predictable at this point.

 

[imola.zhp]

Do "sales" include free apps? It would be interesting to know.

On a completely unrelated note, I paid for 0 apps in the month of November.

 

[Icaras]

Good job Apple. Keep it up!

 

[Doctor Q]

And dongle sales

It may be a pain to have to buy all these dongles for Macs (I just ordered one today, in fact), but I try to think of them like the accessories for iPads and iPhones. We have to outfit our Macs and iOS gadgets with what we happen to need, but we have lots of choices and it drives a huge third-party industry with its own record of innovation.

 

[truthertech]

Existing Apple customers are still buying. So no surprise there. I wonder how much more was spent. It's his job to put out this pointless info and make the company "look good".

Talk to me in a year or two, especially if there is no change in current product trajectory. It just seems to me like this is more hot air blown into the bubble.

Services is growing at an amazing rate and is now 24% of revenues. In fact, this "pointless" category revenue is greater than all of Facebook's revenue combined! This year it will grow so large as to constitute a Fortune 100 Company all by itself. The App Store, Apple Pay, iTunes, iCloud, etc., they all put lie to the claim that Apple "is terrible at Services."

Great hardware, great software, great services. The triumvirate Apple advantage.


LOL my friends.

 

[kdarling]

Remember that most of that money goes to developers, large and small.

Over half the money goes to the top two dozen game maker companies.

The rest has been spread over ten years to hundreds of thousands of developers, of which something like 60% never made back what they put into an app.

Apple's own "Job Creation" page claims 380,000 US developers, who had been paid $8 billion since 2008. That's an average of about $3,500 per developer per year... although of course most of that went to a minority as well.

Could you make a living? If you're really lucky and you come up with something that cannot be instantly cloned by ten other developers.

 

[truthertech]

Over half the money goes to the top two dozen game maker companies.

The rest has been spread over ten years to hundreds of thousands of developers, of which something like 60% never made back what they put into an app.

Apple's own "Job Creation" page claims 380,000 US developers, who had been paid $8 billion since 2008. That's an average of about $3,500 per developer per year... although of course most of that went to a minority as well.

Could you make a living? If you're really lucky and you come up with something that cannot be instantly cloned by ten other developers.

Your animosity towards Apple is blinding you to the success of whatever they do. In the past few days you variously tried to discredit the success of Apple Watch, Apple Pay and now the App store. We get it, you are angry at Apple for some unknown reason, high prices, failed product, whatever, but it doesn't justify being disingenuous again in your effort to mislead folks and you can't avoid the truth at the end of the day that Apple has put almost$60 billion dollars in the hands of men and women throughout the world.

Of course, not everyone plans on making a full time living as a solo entrepreneur, some do, but many don't. You are like the folks who like to disparage people who drive for Uber and Lyft by mocking those who just want to drive a few hours a week to make extra money. That doesn't take away from the hundreds of thousands of families around the globe who benefit from companies like Uber, Lyft and others giving them job opportunities. Similarly, that doesn't take away from the fact those that make a living via the App store.

The App store literally supports hundreds of thousands of part and full-time jobs throughout the app world, and almost two million total, some self-employed entrepreneurs, others employees of those business men and women. Yes, the employees who work for freemium apps or others are glad they have jobs as programmers, etc.

Where do you think that $60 billion dollars has gone? What are these companies, large and small made of: robots? No, they are real people that you are so easy to dismiss as "game companies." Who cares if some of them develop games? Get off your high horse. The money, direct and indirect that comes from the App store supports $60 billion dollars worth of jobs and benefits throughout the world.

Since you left off the key part about the App store,from Apple's job creation website, I will provide it

"Largely as a result of the App Store’s success, Apple is now responsible for creating and supporting 1.9 million jobs in the U.S. alone. Nearly three-quarters of those jobs — over 1.4 million — are attributable to the community of app creators, software engineers and entrepreneurs building apps for iOS, as well as non-IT jobs supported directly and indirectly through the app economy."


Time to let go. Apple is far from perfect, but attacking successful programs through false claims isn't the way to point out their flaws.

 

[ash150]

No one cares Phil. sort out the Mac

 

[Bubba Satori]

No one cares Phil. sort out the Mac

First things first.
Tell Phil what a Mac is.

 

[Cosmosent]

What Phil didn't mention is that while the GAME section of the App Store is doing fantastic (and probably accounting for 90% or more of all App Store sales), the NON-game section of the App Store is disintegrating, and has been since ~2011 ... prove me wrong Phil, how about releasing the Nov sales data by "Category," for the NON-game section of the App Store, along with the total numbers for GAMES and NON-games ???

 

[smacrumon]

Fix the AppStore search functions so customers can find apps easily by name. After failing to find the apps they want, customers leave WITHOUT purchases. Fix the AppStore search functions and Apple will break more monthly records.
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What Phil didn't mention is that while the GAME section of the App Store is doing fantastic (and probably accounting for 90% or more of all App Store sales), the NON-game section of the App Store is disintegrating, and has been since ~2011 ... prove me wrong Phil, how about releasing the Nov sales data by "Category," for the NON-game section of the App Store, along with the total numbers for GAMES and NON-games ???

Wonder why that is. Are customers just not interested in productivity or other categories, or are developers making poor products that customers don't want, or some other factor.
Interesting situation.

 

[dilbert99]

Man, this is shaping up to be a very depressing holiday period for the Apple haters. Record breaking sales of the new MacBooks; record breaking sales of the Apple Watch, and now record breaking App store sales. Not to mention Apple Pay reaching 75% of all US transactions, the iPhone reaching 90 plus percent of the entire cell phone industry profits and on pace to sell close to 80 million phones this quarter!

Don't give up though. Get out from under the bed and get back to trolling. Remember how therapeutic it feels! In case you've lost the notes, in the holiday spirit I've reproduced a few of the main ones you need for effective Apple trolling:

• "It's time for Tim Cook to go!"
• "All Apple cares about are emojis!"
• "Everybody I know is switching to Android"
• "Quit giving us gimmicks like the _________ when are we getting a new MacPro?"
• "The new ______ is the (computer, display, router, music store, paper clip, etc.) Apple should have made!"
• "Apple is just doing this to sell dongles!"
• "This just shows Apple's delusional fanboys will buy anything"
• "This is all about Jony Ive's obsession with thinness!"

and, of course, when you can't compose a coherent thought, but still want to respond to any topic, remember the reliable quick grenade for any social media situation: "Courage"

March on team, and remember Winston Churchill's famous words -- "Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy!"

If you remove enough bricks from jenga it eventually falls over
I didn't wait and switched from mac to pc.
Maybe you are happy for Apple to be just a phone seller, I'm not.
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OK, understand that, but you do realize that Apple has been on a huge accelerating R and D push for the past few years and is now spending more on R and D than but a handful of companies in the world, over $10 billion per year. That tells me that they continue to massively prepare for the future and have a bunch of great products in the pipeline as tens of thousands of engineers with tens of billions of dollars are undoubtedly working on some pretty cool things other than emojis

I prepare for storm season, doesn't mean I'm going to be successful when the storms come.

 

[MacBH928]

its interesting since there is nothing really new or innovative happening

 

[melendezest]

Services is growing at an amazing rate and is now 24% of revenues. In fact, this "pointless" category revenue is greater than all of Facebook's revenue combined! This year it will grow so large as to constitute a Fortune 100 Company all by itself. The App Store, Apple Pay, iTunes, iCloud, etc., they all put lie to the claim that Apple "is terrible at Services."

Great hardware, great software, great services. The triumvirate Apple advantage.


LOL my friends.

The deal is that the "trumvirate" is completely dependent on hardware sales. If people start buying alternative hardware, the bubble will pop.

Given Apple's current product lineup and their primary focus on iPhone, coupled with the mobile industry's homogenization (devices that are somewhat equivalent to one another in capabilities), I believe it to be a matter of time before things start to plummet.

But we'll see, since Apple is the best marketing machine on the planet and have built up a huge reputation (as evidenced by this Jimmy Kimmel vid):

Amazing how accurate he turned out to be.

 

[truthertech]

If you remove enough bricks from jenga it eventually falls over
I didn't wait and switched from mac to pc.
Maybe you are happy for Apple to be just a phone seller, I'm not.
[doublepost=1481182866][/doublepost]
I prepare for storm season, doesn't mean I'm going to be successful when the storms come.

That's the point. Instead of rushing out relatively meaningless updates to satisfy the pundits need to have something to talk about, Apple is putting out products when they feel they are ready, while they continue to build a solid foundation as you would advise them to. It's not sexy for the press, and they don't understand it, but Apple has spent years and hundreds of million developing an all new file system APFS that is incredibly important and will allow Apple to make significant advances in the next decade. Apple has also spent the past several years and billions building its own "base map." Mapping is a foundational element to much of Apple's future. 99.9% of the world doesn't even know what a base map is, but they will appreciate the advances that Apple starts to roll out when the base map is completed, reportedly in 2017.

You should be sanguine about Apple's future--they are spending over $10 billion a year on R and D and deploying tens of thousands of engineers to develop more than emojis. Stay tuned for an incredible 2017.

 

[dilbert99]

That's the point. Instead of rushing out relatively meaningless updates to satisfy the pundits need to have something to talk about

With all due respect, Apple is releasing no updates. Any release at this point would be meaningful.
Apple is not an Artist, that needs to release new songs when they are ready. They are an iPhone company that has neglected their computer business and needs to put out new machines on a regular basis. Why is this? Well when you have a 3 year old machine, the last thing you want when shopping is to have old tech on the shelves.
Perhaps a bad analogy but if you were going out to buy clothes (or insert item here) would you want 2 year old clothes from Apple or the latest thing from other companies?

Apple is putting out products when they feel they are ready, while they continue to build a solid foundation as you would advise them to.

Problem is Apple is not releasing products everything is always in the pipeline at this moment.

but Apple has spent years and hundreds of million developing an all new file system APFS that is incredibly important and will allow Apple to make significant advances in the next decade.

And they can't seem to get that one out the door because they are too busy on the iPhone or XYZ. Apple needs an internal restructure with dedicated teams for each line of business, then they can focus.

Apple has also spent the past several years and billions building its own "base map." Mapping is a foundational element to much of Apple's future. 99.9% of the world doesn't even know what a base map is, but they will appreciate the advances

Yet tell me how long it took apple to add toll avoidance to its maps?
Apple maps is a joke as a navigation app.
The borders are too large
The fonts are too small.
The app is hard to use.
It is a navigation system that is like it is from the 90's yet everyone else has moved on.
Compare it to something like Waze and you will see what I am talking about.

Apple starts to roll out when the base map is completed, reportedly in 2017.

I won't hold my breath.

You should be sanguine about Apple's future--they are spending over $10 billion a year on R and D and deploying tens of thousands of engineers to develop more than emojis. Stay tuned for an incredible 2017.

I feel sad for Apples future. To me it looks bleak.
Apple cannot sustain in the long term a phone that costs as much as a laptop.
Apple cannot spout for ever that the pipeline is full
What use is a pipeline that never produces anything