An internal Apple memo has been posted that states that Apple has just paid off its remaining $300 million in debt and is now debt-free. This concludes an amazing journey that has taken the company from a debt of $1 billion in Apple’s darkest days to the current cash reserves of $4.8 billion.
It’s nice to see some GOOD news in the tech industry once in a while. No company deserves success more than Apple.
Good job Apple and Steve Jobs
almost 5 large in the bank! sheesh! dual G5s for everyone!!
That’s really great for Apple! Congrats to Steve Jobs!
Apple is not a particularly virtuous company by any measure except the Objectivist one. Maybe they provide a valuable object lesson in how you can’t succeed without becoming as evil as your competitors.
Hot Damm this is great news!
No OS flame wars. They’re not allowed.
Apple is debt-free. Being debt-free is a good thing for any company. No problems there, right? OK, moving right along…
Jared
No flame wars? Perhaps you are not familiar with the site. It’s almost refreshing that you still have hope.
congrats to Apple !
Very good O.S. – briljant hardware – amazing upcoming line of 64 bit processors
Things couldn’t be better.
Very pleased to hear this !
that is debit free, and apple is the only system maker that is debit free.
this is big.
Way to go Apple! I see great things in the future for Apple and the Macintosh.
For Apple to really take off, they need to release a sub $1000 consumer-oriented desktop machine WITHOUT the lame built in CRT like the eMac, and with some expandibility.
…Congratulations Apple!
$4.8b in actual cash. Wow.
Just to give you some info on how they where;
Hm, so you want to be a macintosh dealer? Hm, we don’t like your carpet. Order some new carpet, this bordeau-red. Hm, We don’t like you to sell other computers as well, So kick those out of your shop. If you’ve done that, make sure you where a suit, with white underwear. Maby then we’ll come back to think about it.
That’s how they where in their early days when they where still the best available (At least, in the Netherlands they acted like this). It was nearly easier to start selling ferrari’s than Mac’s
I hope they really don’t start like that again.
That’s nothing. What’s important is that Apple market share is declining. This make Apple a loser.
Apple may have been the #6 ranked personal computer vendor in 2003 in terms of overall market share, but they’re only one of two PROFITABLE computer vendors in the top ten (the other being Dell). What good is having more market share if it costs you money to get it?
Regardless, Apple is still has 90% market share in the creative market. As long as they do the makers of pro apps for the creative market (e.g. Adobe, Quark, Steinberg, Digidesign) aren’t going to be abandoning the Mac platform any time soon.
But hey, Apple is dying, just like BSD, right?
(pun not intended, btw)
Think they’ll buy up all of their outstanding shares and go private again?
Too bad for everyone pegging Apple for demise.
I was joking! Everybody always says “market share is down for Apple”. That’s good news!! Debt free company. This says everything to who says Apple is bad/old/nonsense/noninnovating/etc.
Gets $1 a year salary.
What? More like $90 million
That $1/year salary ended a long time ago, and that didn’t include all the perks and bonuses he got.
I’m very very very very happy! Two times! 😀
I love this company! X-D
sub $1000 ain’t gonna cut it.
it needs to be pretty nice little standard box at $1000.
if it’s gonna be their bottom of the line slow box, then it needs to be $600 or less.
Good job guys!
I can’t wait to get my G5. lol
We all know you well enough, so we need not *really* tell you why they need more market-share: With 1,8% and declining (Gartner from august figures), there will be a point where Apple may still make revenues, only, not as a computer manufacturer any more. You have seen it with MS Office-issue about its future development for Mac, you have seen it with Office-localization for hebrew, you have seen it with IE for Mac, etc, etc… if they decreese a tiny bit more, they’ll end up in the same curious situation as Be Inc: Having an OS without apps. And they know (unlike you) — that is why they start to develop all sorts of own stuff — because soon nobody else will. That is what you need market share for, my friend.
Hm, We don’t like you to sell other computers as well, So kick those out of your shop.
They’re not too much like that in the States now; walking into CompUSA I see Mac’s sitting in their own section, which is next to the Wintel HW section.
Maybe they’re like that if you’re a small retailer, dunno.
If market increases yearly of 2% and your market share declines of 0.2% you actually sell more PC and you may also be get revenue and be profitable. It seems Apple is doing that, as it was able to get out of debts. About SW, only MS seems getting out of the business (and I would not be so sure). The rest is well and alive.
if they decreese a tiny bit more, they’ll end up in the same curious situation as Be Inc: Having an OS without apps.
What is the justification for your argument? What is the evidence that the Apple platform is losing support? Are we currently seeing a decline in application support for the Mac platform? All I’m really seeing is low-end products (i.e. Adobe Premiere) squeezed out of the market by pressure from higher quality applications like Final Cut Pro and Avid Xpress DV.
As long as creative professionals continue buying Macs almost 10:1 over PCs, as I stated in my original post, the developers of pro applications will not abandon the Mac platform. Apple essentially has a monopoly in the creative market, and while some are experimenting with Windows systems, the overwhelming majority are sticking to the Mac platform.
And they know (unlike you) — that is why they start to develop all sorts of own stuff — because soon nobody else will.
That’s truly ridiculous… the only notable example is Sherlock 3/Watson fiasco. In regards to FCE/FCP, this was a mid-level video editing application which Apple purchased, and while FCP has gained pro market share, the majority of video editing is done in Avid programs like Avid Xpress DV/Avid Xpress Pro.
The creative market is not switching away from Macs, and while they may only be a niche in the overall computing marketplace, as long as they prefer Macs the Mac platform will always be the primary focus of pro application developers.
As I understand it, although Apple’s market share is down, it’s shipping more units and therefore its user base is growing, or at least may be growing. It seems that’s a scenario that may appeal to software developers. Yes, you don’t have as many potential buyers, but nor is your product competing for the Mac market with as many other vendors as it would/does in the Windows market. So if your company is the only one selling a program that can do task X to Mac users, whereas you’d be one of 10 if you were selling it to Windows users, then you may actually do better by selling a Mac version. And you certainly could be more targeted in your marketing/advertising.
As for MS, I figure it will continue to develop for the Mac, to ward off anti-trust lawsuits if nothing else.
$4.8 BILLION in cash. The sign of a dying company. Stupit me for putting some of my IRA into Apple.
And if you want to talk *seriously* overpriced hardware + hemoraging money and marketshare, I’ve got three letters for you: SGI
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Its nice to see that this company isn’t doing quite so bad as it used to be. They make wonderful stuff.
I understand why people like to see a company without debt. But in fact a company with debt can be more profitable from a businnes administration point of view. Debt is in fact Tax deductible, and therefore a leveraged company (a company with both debt and equity) can make a larger profit (up to a certain point) then a company that is financed with just equity. It is good for apple to show that it’s financing is in order, but they could do beter.
Yours trully M. Ypma
(Not to say i don’t love apple 🙂 )
Right…
And Apple has the backing of IBM, who could buy Microsoft. Whats your point?
they have a lot of options to invest that money into.
ipods
other consumer electronics
sales efforts on enterprise
sales efforts on server/work station/scientific
Pick up SGI (market cap $700 million)
pick up palm source (market cap $245 million)
make a phone.
pick up palmone(market capt $500 million)
Buy steinberg (cubase)
so many choices. i wish apple could buy out sun but at $19.1 billion market cap i don’t think so. Palmone makes sense to me as well. The treo is a very apple-like device.
they could try to buy steinberg from pinnacle as well. if they did that and closed off cubase to the PC world, they’d kill the pc as a multi-media (or at least audio) platform.I use a pc for audio but i’d enjoy seeing it killed. its evil to wish this i know but MS deserves a taste of its own medicine.
I think they should spend it on sales efforts to enterprise and server/big iron users. they might pick up someone small with a good in at enterprise sales.
“You have seen it with MS Office-issue about its future development for Mac, you have seen it with Office-localization for hebrew, you have seen it with IE for Mac, etc, etc…”
Why is this all Microsoft products? 🙂
Anyway, there are many news: Office:mac 2004 will be again italian localized, not like Office:mac v.X; never more MacUser use IE, we use Mozilla or Safari by time; Mail of Mac OS X is better than Outlook Express; Final Cut Pro and Avid Xpress are better and faster than Adobe Premiere.
If you show that you can pay easely your debts, you can obtain better conditions for new debts. If you can’t pay your debts, you can’t obtain new debts. “It’s the base of the economy”, my economy professor said. 🙂
So if your company is the only one selling a program that can do task X to Mac users, whereas you’d be one of 10 if you were selling it to Windows users, then you may actually do better by selling a Mac version. And you certainly could be more targeted in your marketing/advertising.
Yes, and furthermore, if your customer base is 100,000 users, 90,000 of which own Macs and 10,000 of which own Wintel systems, are you really going to consider leaving the Mac platform?
“they have a lot of options to invest that money into.
ipods
other consumer electronics
sales efforts on enterprise
sales efforts on server/work station/scientific
Pick up SGI (market cap $700 million)
pick up palm source (market cap $245 million)
make a phone.
pick up palmone(market capt $500 million)
Buy steinberg (cubase)”
Or:
– Alias from SGI, to become the leading 3D graphic platform on the world with Shake and Maya;
– Corel, to make its own office suite, to support directly OpenOffice.org formats;
– Macromedia, to become the leading internet graphic platform on the world.
5 billion sure is alot of bling-bling
Also…
Has anyone gotton an Ipod to work in linux? I heard all I had to do was mount it like a HD.
“Yes, and furthermore, if your customer base is 100,000 users, 90,000 of which own Macs and 10,000 of which own Wintel systems, are you really going to consider leaving the Mac platform?”
Yeah! There. Is. Not. One. Computer. Market.
There are many different kinds of users and there are many different market share. “All is relative”, Einstein said.
“Buy steinberg (cubase)…
they could try to buy steinberg from pinnacle as well. if they did that and closed off cubase to the PC world, they’d kill the pc as a multi-media (or at least audio) platform.I use a pc for audio but i’d enjoy seeing it killed. its evil to wish this i know but MS deserves a taste of its own medicine.”
That would really annoy the faeces out of me and other artists who cannot afford the Apple prices. There’s no way I could make music without the discount building my own computer affords me. Apples are just too expensive for my budget. I dislike MS too BTW.
If Apple wanted to kill SGI’s desktop workstation market they’d need 3 compiles to get it done.
1) Compile OS X to 64 bits.
2) Compile Shake to 64 bits.
3) Compile Final Cut Pro to 64 bits.
Dual Proc box stuffed full of ram, plus some special hardware to get video in and out — the G5 Special Edition.
Market it only in industry trades. $9k for a maxxed out 64 bit Unix based workstation.
$9k gets you *started* at SGI.
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I don’t know if buying SGI would be the best move for Apple. I think in 2000 SGI had a net worth of 2 billion. Now they’re about $975 mil.
Serious cash hemmorage.
On the other hand, I could make a case to buy them for the tax write off, support all legacy SGI hardware, and move in to locking up the “render farm” market. Their workstations are OMG overpriced, but when it comes to geology research, weather research, or rendering FX, SGI’s still got a huge advantage and brand loyalty.
… but this sounds retarded to me:
“There’s no way I could make music without the discount building my own computer affords me.”
You wouldn’t be able to make music AT ALL if it weren’t for, say, $400 in savings?
Baloney!
P.S. I’m reporting my own abuse.
anyone know if a g5 laptop is going to happen any time soon? I want to buy a latop, but i dont know if i should wait for the g5 laptops
This is pretty good news. I’m more than happy to support Apples income.
I just bought an ibook. w00t!
I’ve always wondered what this would be like. Not only would Apple acquire Alias they would also acquire a lot of IP and all of SGI’s customers and contracts. This would give Apple a lot of credibility in the field of high end visualization hardware and software. SGI is already preparing to sell Alias.
What would Apple do with IRIX?
Probably you heard this triviallity a thousand times:
“If market increases yearly of 2% and your market share declines of 0.2% you actually sell more PC and you may also be get revenue and be profitable.”
You also get more INVISIBLE in the overall market! You are a tiny niche corner, albeit one with “more units sold”.
However, standards, decisions, compatibility etc are decided at the market share level, not at the “units” level.
2% of the worlds computers in nothing when someone considers what platform to catter for, EVEN if it is a large number. The other 98% is EVEN LARGER! So, why bother?
Do your math, people, it is the RATIO that counts in such decisions.
The only saving grace for Apple with its declining market share, is not the “more units sold” but that it actually still holds A LARGE MARKET SHARE in niche markets (design, music, multimedia). When it looses this too, there’s no return.
I keep hearing this argument that it is market share that matters. Certainly, having a large market share is a good thing. Unfortunately, that does not necessarily mean that low market share is always a bad thing.
If you are going to make this argument, you need to support it with more than “do your math people”.
In then end, profit is always the most important factor. If Apple and the companies that produce Apple software can make a profit from the platform – market share is relatively unimportant. Sure, low market share can influence profitability but your accertion that market share is the only factor that matters is ill founded.
– I care about a platform with Zero virii last year.
– A Great OS
– A Highly Secure OS
– A wireless network upgraded to the latest security standards
– An encrypted home directory
– A great development platform.
– Borland’s JBuilder X Pro and Dreamweaver
Plus, I can get MS Office if I really need it.
There are too many advantages to running on a Mac to ignore.
But, I’ll let you lose sleep about market share.
Apple is like Phoenix…………
apple could also be very frugal in its use of this money. it has generally been pretty frugal regarding acquisitions and external investments. they could do the following things
1) create a safety net for a rainy day
2) protect against a takeover
3) buy back stocks.
Its really not the time for apple to be defensive, though. Apple needs to be frugal and offensive. Share matters and apple needs to carefully expand its own in some segments (maybe not desktop just yet) but its needs to do this in desktops sooner than later.
“I keep hearing this argument that it is market share that matters. Certainly, having a large market share is a good thing. Unfortunately, that does not necessarily mean that low market share is always a bad thing.”
No, but it NECESSARILY means that having *lower* market share is WORST.
Now, having INCREASINGLY lower market share is INCREASINGLY WORST.
After a while, the number of units however large by itself, is lost in the emerged ocean of total units.
After that, if portabillity is painful, your platform dies.
Heck, this can even happen if portabillity is easy!
A small example: Adobe has a product called “Photo Album”. It is written in QT. As such, it could have very easily been ported to Mac OS X (and Linux). But Adobe just doesn’t care.
So, Apple users are stuck with iPhoto, and that’s all. Fewer choices, users leaping out, etc…
I see we are yet again stuck in the market share loop!
“A small example: Adobe has a product called “Photo Album”. It is written in QT. As such, it could have very easily been ported to Mac OS X (and Linux). But Adobe just doesn’t care.
So, Apple users are stuck with iPhoto, and that’s all. Fewer choices, users leaping out, etc…”
Who really cares if Adobe cares or not? Besides, iPhoto is a great little ‘free’ application. Adobe is still smarting from Apple’s Final Cut slam dunk of Premiere! Apple’s own software offerings are far superior to other developer’s so I don’t see that as problem. Apple could come out with a Photoshop killer as well. I hope they do. Photoshop is extremely overrated and overpriced.
market share matters for two reasons
1) developer support, program optimization
2) supplier support (including the G5)
apple does not need 50% market share but more than what they have today. Everytime those developer hear 2-3% share of sales (yes sales not installed base) they might worry.
developer support is very very very very important as is the support of the processor manufacturer.
“A small example: Adobe has a product called “Photo Album”. It is written in QT. As such, it could have very easily been ported to Mac OS X (and Linux). But Adobe just doesn’t care.”
If Linux is so “cool”, why Adobe don’t support it, but support again Apple that develops many Adobe-killer apps and it’s so “no cool”?
Tell. Me. Why. NOW!!! ):-D>>
You are missing the point again…
It is not necessarily the case that low market share is worse than high market share. You keep jumping to that conlcusion w/o any evidence or support for that conclusion.
Market share does matter, but to say that low market share *must* be bad has been, thus far, unsupported.
As it relates to developer support: If a developer can make a profit from developing Apple software then they have an incentive to do so. Market share is one factor that influences potential profitability, but it is not the only one (and could be only one of many). I make a product for a company that only buys a few units a year. He is my only customer for that product. I make profit from doing so, so I do it. The fact that his market share is almost non-existent is not really important to me. If you make an “opportunity costs” argument, then it is potentially more important, but again “opportunity costs” can only be calculated relative to the profits.
As to supplier support: This is a much more valid point. However, if your supplier has a sufficiently large market when you add your share as well as others, then your individual contribution is less important. This is the reason Apple left Motorola – Motorola did not have a market outside of Apple for desktop chips. IBM, on the other had, has (will have) several markets for their chips. So, the pressure on Apple to drive unit sales is not as great.
It might be the case that Apple will have less influence of future chip designs. But again, without specific evidence, it is pure conjecture.
Apple have co-developed PowerPC G5 with IBM: 32-bit compatibility and AltiVec units are integrated by Apple.