by,

Suzanne Coleman

Apple (AAPL) reported its holiday quarter earnings today and they were pretty much in line with expectations.  You can get those details anywhere, so I will talk about some observations you might not.

“The Wall Street Journal” reported in its earnings blog that one billion Apple devices are out there.  That means that about one out of every seven living human beings world-wide uses an Apple device.  What?!  That is crazy.  The impact that the “i” products have had on the world is anyone’s dream.  To be so wide-spread and utilized as to become household names, categories within yourselves in our languages, is amazing.

Tim Cook says that the Apple Watch had its best quarter ever.  That correlates with my personal observations that the watch is spreading throughout the populace.  I see more and more as I move around society.  I think that the key to the watch is a slow but persistent adoption rate, which will be greatly boosted by an untethered device which I hope they do have and release this upcoming holiday quarter.  I believe that the watch will become a part of everyday life, while not for as many as the iPhone has.

In the future I would like to see new devices, which I will not detail here but Apple is free to contact me to discuss ideas.

Samsung had a bad quarter, Apple is holding steady with its high sales numbers world-wide.  Will this be the relative end of Samsung?  This comparison should give some perspective to the doom-sayers out there who think Apple has become rotten.

Tim Cook (CEO) goes on to discuss that Apple is looking to the future with long-term growth in mind.  China still has room for significant growth due to an exponentially expanding middle class.  I wonder if this factors in China’s overall growth retraction though.

He mentions an important note, 60% of iPhone users are still in the iPhone 5 category, so there is signifiant room for switch-0ver there to new products, plus the 6+ billion potential new customers and carrier-switchers.

Wow, as I finish up my report, I review other sources’ articles from this evening.  Yikes.  It’s interesting how manipulative “journalism” has become just to get clicks.  Readers, please review the numbers for yourselves, don’t get sucked into headlines which are inaccurate or misleading.  Apple had a record year with their 6-series phones last year, they are not breaking out of that this year as they did not release a similarly-new phone product.  They aren’t falling apart, they are doing amazingly well for the current world-wide market conditions, and as that stabilizes over the next 2-3 years and the market again booms (at least relatively) they will boom as well I expect.

Oh yes, I still own Apple shares, but I’m no institution 🙂

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Sources for the earnings report information are the WSJ and Marketwatch.com’s blogs plus my own analysis.