Nope - the days people buying expensive Android phones are gone - Apple still does mighty fine selling expensive phones. They do so fine, they sold as many of their expensive phones as the largest manufacturer of Android phones, which judging by their profits, sold far less of their high-end phones than before - and by units sold also less of their cheap ones. And Apple did that while increasing the average selling price of their phones.

Question is: when everybody in the third world has replaced their ten year old cheap feature phone with a cheap Android, how long will they wait until they buy a new one? The market for cheap smartphones may be large, but its also easily saturated.

And whether Apple without Steve Jobs is just like Microsoft remains to be seen - he trained enough people to say no to half-baked products.

Well, Apple is increasing profits by selling more of its products. The oil companies are raising their profits while selling less.

When has the US government ever spend tax to make workers skilled? Talk about "kind of dumb" - you are the worst kind of dumb.

Boohoo, Apple is the only computer company that actually makes notable profits - how are they going to survive that? In 5 years, non of the manufacturers now selling more PC will still be making PCs. Apple will. Suck on it.

Surprise - it does. They paid more than 10 billion in taxes last year. That's more than 2.5% of total corporate income tax (federal + states).

So what was your "I'm sure that Apples margins on software products is comparable" about?

You are confusing the margins on the devices that Blackberry sells with the fact that they sell far to little to make a profit. Apple has those high margins because they sell so many. As for Microsoft, they sure as hell sell hardware, but either at low or negative margins.

Yeah, they've only outgrown the rest of the PC market for almost all quarters during the last couple of years. Total failure.

Suuuuure

Oh, wait, you still have a CRT TV, right?

Err-hunh. Yeah. That's why Apple has been fined for not paying their taxes. And no, Apple hasn't said they paid those taxes, they said they provisioned that amount for taxes. IOW they stated what taxes they would have to pay for all of their profits, but only actually paid out to the IRS that which they owed by not repatriating foreign profits. Which is not only legal, it is required by tax accounting rule APB 23 unless you plan to invest those foreign earnings abroad permanently.

The only difference to most other companies is that Apple doesn't pretend to keep it there in their statements (even if they don't actually want to without a repatriation holiday), while others pretend to do that to make their profits seem higher (even if they then actually have to bring back those earnings). Recent example is eBay which "paid" over 300% taxes first quarter last year because they repatriated "permanently invested" foreign earnings of $9 billion.

Are you actually going to blame Apple for the cluster-fucked up tax (reporting) laws in America, just because they are not only smart enough to make a profit, but because they also actually pay taxes?

BTW, Apple reports how much taxes they paid (in total) under the all to obvious moniker "Cash paid for income taxes, net". Which for FY 2014 comes to $ 10,026 million - most, but not all as federal income tax.

Gee, do you really expect Apple report to their annual numbers when they just have finished their 2nd FQ? Not even to mention that the tax they will be actually paying 2014 will be actually mostly for the actual year before, because that's the actually way paying corporate tax works?

So Cook can't innovate because he's a he has an MBA. While Jobs couldn't innovate because he didn't even master in Fine Arts. Both are however smart enough to hire people who can. Suck it up.

So the only innovative thing Apple has done last quarter was the fucking thing driving up their revenue to insane levels. What losers. It's left to the reader if that means Apple or the people whining.

Errm, most don't even offer any memory upgrades. Many even stopped offering SD, like Google itself. Because that fucking doesn't work as well as people like you keep claiming.

You seem to completely have missed the numbers for Samsung and Blackberry. Probably because they defy your narrative.

The often lamented fact that Apple takes 30% of the iTunes revenue for itself (boo-hiss) means its actually has to be less than 1/9.