Weird week to be a person who cares about tech news instead of stock tickers. Apple reported earnings Wednesday afternoon and it was, by any normal measure, an enormous story: first quarter in company history over $111 billion in revenue, iPhone sales way up, Mac revenue up over 20% year over year. Tim Cook got on the call and basically said the 5G iPhone 12 cycle is playing out exactly like they hoped. And I'd bet most of the people reading this didn't hear a word about it, because every single tab open on every device in America this week has been GameStop, WallStreetBets, and Robinhood.
I'm not going to write another GME post. Genuinely everyone and their uncle has a take on the short squeeze right now and I don't have anything to add that fifty finance Twitter threads haven't already said better. What I do want to talk about is the Apple number, because it's actually kind of remarkable that a company can post a record-breaking quarter and have it register as a footnote.
Some of that $111 billion is boring and predictable, iPhone always does well in the December quarter, thats not news. But the Mac number is the one that got my attention, because I'm part of it. I bought an M1 MacBook Air back in December, the base model, 256GB, and I genuinely did not expect to like it as much as I do. I've been buying Macs since 2009 and this is the first one where the fan has never once turned on. Not once. I ran a two hour video export the other day just to see what would happen and the thing stayed dead silent and barely got warm. My 2017 Intel MacBook Pro used to sound like a hair dryer just for having Slack open.
Anyway. Point is, that laptop is a small piece of why Mac revenue jumped, and there are apparently a lot of people who made the same call I did, which is nice to see reflected in a number even if it's a boring reason to feel validated about a purchase.
The other thing buried in the call that I think is more interesting long-term than the quarterly number itself: Apple's Services revenue also hit a new high. App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, all of it. People love to dunk on Services as the "we ran out of hardware ideas" category, and maybe there's something to that, but it's also just an enormous recurring revenue stream that doesn't depend on convincing anyone to buy a new phone every year. That's the part I'd be watching if I were an analyst instead of a guy with a blog.
Meanwhile back in the chaos — and I said I wasn't going to write about it, but one detail is too good to skip — Discord banned the WallStreetBets server on Wednesday, the same day as the Apple call, citing "hate speech, glorifying violence, and misinformation," and insisting the timing had nothing to do with the stock stuff. Sure. Maybe! I have no idea what actually happened in their mod queue and neither does anyone tweeting about it. But the optics of banning a 100,000+ person server on the exact day it becomes the most talked-about community on the internet are not great, regardless of the actual reason, and I think that's a more interesting story about platform moderation under pressure than another "here's what a short squeeze is" explainer.
I mostly just felt bad for whoever runs Apple's PR calendar this quarter. You spend a year building the best MacBook in a decade, you post the biggest revenue number the company has ever had, and the news cycle doesn't even blink because a subreddit full of people posting rocket emojis is busy trying to blow up a hedge fund. Feels like a preview of what most weeks are going to be like from here on out, honestly, the actual news happening somewhere off to the side of whatever's exploding on Reddit that day.
Fan's still off, by the way. Writing this whole post on it.