Apple Announces Record Q1 2017 Results

Today Apple announced their earnings for the first quarter of their 2017 fiscal year. As is normally the case now that the iPhone has moved to a fall launch, Q1 tends to be their big quarter, and this one was the biggest yet for revenue, with Apple announcing $78.351 billion in revenue for the quarter. This is up 9% from a year ago. Gross margin was not as strong though, down $247 million despite the almost $2.5 billion more in revenue, but as a percentage it is still a strong 38.5%. Operating income was also down for the quarter, at $23.359 billion, compared to $24.171 billion a year ago. Net income was down 2.56% to $17.891 billion, but thanks to the share buyback program, Apple has less outstanding shares, meaning Apple set a record for earnings per diluted share of $3.36, despite the drop in net income. Apple has announced a dividend of $0.57 per share as well.

With the launch of the latest iPhone 7, there was certainly controversy over the loss of the headphone jack, but that did not stop people from buying it. Apple sold 78.29 million iPhones this quarter, up 5% from a year ago. This is a new record for iPhone sales in the quarter, up about 3.5 million units, which is a good sign for Apple after had several quarters in a row of slowed iPhone sales. We’ll see if they can keep it up for fiscal year 2017. As far as revenue, iPhone is still the juggernaut of Apple’s financials with $54.378 billion in revenue for the quarter. That is 69.4% of all of the revenue for Apple.

iPad continues to struggle, at least compared to the rest of Apple, with sales dropping another 19% this quarter to 13.081 million, and despite the higher priced iPads in the lineup, revenue dropped even further to $5.533 billion, which is down 22%. That puts an average selling price of just $422 on the iPad, down from $439 a year ago, despite the addition of the 9.7-inch iPad Pro last year with it’s $100 higher asking price of $599. New iPad models haven’t really saved this segment from continuing to contract, but with the addition of the larger iPhone I suppose this makes some sense.

Mac sales for the quarter were up 1% only, despite the launch of the refreshed MacBook Pro models in October, but they were not shipping in volume until later in the quarter, so there may be some impact from that. Despite the sales only being up 1%, revenue was up 7% to a new record high of $7.244 billion this quarter, and the Mac has slowly worked itself back up to being the second largest source of revenue for Apple. But I don’t think that’s going to last for much longer.

Apple’s Services segment, which includes digital content from iTunes, app revenue, AppleCare, Apple Pay, and other services, is now the fastest growing segment of Apple, with revenues for the quarter of $7.172 billion, which is up 13% from last quarter and up 18% from last year. At this rate, it will overtake the Mac revenue next quarter, depending on how Mac sales go. This has been a very strong market for Apple over the last while, and I would think the addition of Apple Music must be helping as well.

Other Products include Apple TV, Apple Watch, Beats, and accessories, and although the segment overall is down 8% to $4.024 billion, Apple did announce they sold a record for Apple Watch revenue, although they’ve never announced numbers for that.

Apple is projecting revenue for next quarter of $51.5 to $53.5 billion, and margins between 38 and 39 percent.

Source: Apple Investor Relations

The Huawei Mate 9 Review

Huawei has steadily improved its flagship Mate phablets while adhering to the same blueprint: large screen, slim bezels, aluminum chassis, excellent system performance and battery life. They’ve also shared some of the same shortcomings, namely u…

Xiaomi Announces the Redmi Note 4 in India

Just before Hugo Barra announced he was leaving the company, he and Xiaomi on Thursday introduced its latest phablet, the Redmi Note 4, in India. The design of the smartphone resembles that of the Chinese version, but the internal architecture has changed. Instead of the MediaTek Helio X20 SoC, the Indian version of the Redmi Note 4 uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 625, which is a shift from a tri-cluster 10-core A72/A53/A53 design to a full A53/A53 eight-core SoC. Meanwhile, despite the hardware switch, the concept of the device has not changed: the high-end flagship phone will retail at price-points below $200.

Hugo Barra, former chief marketing officer of Xiaomi, published specs and prices of the Redmi Note 4 phablet that will be available in India. The company has changed a lot about the device both inside and outside, possibly because the newcomer will eventually be available globally and thus will have different competitors than it does in China. In general, the new Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 remained the same: it is a 5.5” smartphone that comes in a metallic unibody chassis with rounded edges and antenna separated from the rest of the back cover using polycarbonate strips. The new Redmi Note 4 lineup will include matte black, matte gold and matte gray smartphones.

When Xiaomi introduced the Redmi Note 4 in China several months ago, the company used Mediatek’s deca-core Helio X20 in a market where core-count can matter at this price-point (as in, it affects buying decisions). For the new version, Xiaomi uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 SoC that features fewer general-purpose cores, has a single-channel memory controller and a modem with more bands. More importantly, the chip is made using Samsung’s 14LPP (14 nm FinFET, low-power plus) manufacturing technology and presumably has generally lower power consumption when compared to the Helio X20 made using TSMC’s CLN20SOC (20nm planar) fabrication process. In any case, Xiaomi says that the Redmi Note 4 with its 4100 mAh battery lasts 25% longer when compared to its predecessor (the Redmi Note 3 with a 4050 mAh battery), an indicator that the new unit uses components with lower power consumption.

On the other hand, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 Pro is powered by the Snapdragon 650 that features two high-performance ARM Cortex-A72 cores as well as four low-power ARM Cortex-A53 cores, compared to the quad A53+quad A53 of the Snapdragon 625 in the Redmi Note 4. The octa-core A53 configuration will result in lower performance for this version of the Redmi Note 4 compared to the Helio X20 version and the older Redmi Note 3 Pro, especially for bursty workloads like web browsing.

In the last generation of mid-range smartphones, a number of companies were happy to take a ‘hex’ core design: big.Little using dual A72 and quad A53. This allowed the SoC to offer good peak performance, using some of the highest performing cores available at a high frequency, and move to the small cluster when in power saving mode. However, these designs were on 28nm – a popular but not leading edge process node. So far this year we’ve seen a number of devices announced that are ditching the pair of A72 cores for another set of quad A53 cores, on SoCs built on a 14nm node. The performance of the cores doesn’t change with process node, but the power consumption does: using a 14nm S625 over a 28nm S650 means that battery life is up and up (on all else being comparable) however peak performance is generally down. The interesting intersection is if they compute the same amount of work and how much power is required: it is generally considered that a 14nm S625 still wins that one as well. This is despite the fact that the chip probably costs more, by virtue of the 14nm process. It would seem that vendors are willing to take the hit on price and performance in exchange for battery life (other devices announced include the honor 6X, Huawei Nova/Plus and the ASUS Zenfone 3 Zoom). Another downside of these S625 devices seems to be that some don’t support 802.11ac. 

The Redmi Note 4 phone has a 5.5-inch FHD IPS display covered with 2.5D Gorilla Glass for protection. The Chinese version of the Redmi Note 4 claimed to have a maximum brightness of 450 nits, a contrast ratio of 1000:1, 72% NTSC color gamut as well as a special technology that improves visibility of the display outdoors, but we do not know whether the Indian version has the very same display panel too.

As for imaging capabilities, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 uses a 13 MP sensor with f/2.0 aperture, PDAF and a dual LED flash on the back as well as a 5 MP sensor with f/2.0 aperture on the front. Audio features of the Xiaomi RN4 include built-in speakers as well as 3.5-mm TRRS audio jack on top. Meanwhile, for local connectivity, the phone features 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1 and a microUSB port. Now, while we understand that the Snapdragon 625 supports LTE, WCDMA, CDMA and GSM, but so far, Xiaomi has not announced specific bands for the Redmi Note 4 smartphone. In the best-case scenario, the handset supports everything the SoC does, but the manufacturer has not confirmed that yet.

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 uses Google’s Android 7 with various enhancements by Xiaomi, including new security features of the MIUI 8 designed to simplify usage of the fingerprint scanner.

The Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 was up for sale in India as of the 23rd January. For the prices, they will vary from Rs. 9,999 ($146) for the entry-level 2 GB/32 GB model to Rs. 12,999 ($190) for the high-end 4 GB/64 GB SKU.

Gallery: Xiami Announces Redmi Note 4 in India: 5.5 Inch, Snapdragon 625, 4 GB/64 GB, 4100 mAh

Related Reading:

• Xiaomi Launches Redmi Note 4 in China
• CES 2017: Xiaomi (Not) Live Blog
• Xiaomi Announces the Mi Note 2 (Snapdragon 821, 6GB RAM) and Mi MIX Concept Phones
• Xiaomi Mi 5s and Mi 5s Plus Announced