RUSH: Now, this was really kind of… I don’t know, it’s funny, and it was a little cute, a little heartwarming at the same time. I’m in here busily prepping today’s excursion into broadcast excellence and Snerdley walks in with a pot of coffee. He walks in with a pot of coffee, and he says, “Boy, I bet you’re not feeling too good today.”
I said, “Why?”
“The Apple news. I know you love Apple. We all love Apple, but, boy, financial report really, really, really bad quarter. I mean, are they in trouble? Gee, what happens if they stop making iPhones?”
I said, “What in the world are you talking about?”
“Well,” he said, “The quarterly earnings report.”
I said, “What do you mean, quarterly earnings? They had an up quarter year over year. They were up.”
He said, “Well, the media…”
I said, “Ahhh, I know what you’re talking about.”
What happened was Apple announced their quarterly earnings yesterday in a conference call to journalists and so forth, which ought to tell you something. And what happened was, they didn’t meet Wall Street expectations of their performance. Apple’s like every other company, they issue guidance for investors, what they think their next quarter is going to be, and they always undershoot it. They always have low expectations so they can show blowouts. And Wall Street, like every other company, has their own ideas of what a company is gonna do, based on what their experts think, and they had these expectations for Apple of $10 a share and $40 billion of profit.
So Apple comes in with $35 billion of profit and $9 a share. They were up year over year. They had a record number of iPads sold, 17 million. They sold, what was it, 26 million iPhones, and there’s gonna be a new one in two months. And everybody knows there’s gonna be a new one in two months. Well, let’s see. Yeah, they’re gonna announce it in September. And so rumors are holding down sales. I think the problem with Apple is they’ve blown the doors out for so long that everybody’s expectations are way up. When they have a blowout, but not up to their standards, people start getting concerned. But that’s the problem. It’s like the expectations of this program. That’s why meeting and surpassing all audience expectations every day, that’s no mean feat. When the expectations are way up there it doesn’t take much below “way up there” to have people think, “Uh-oh.”
But I thought it was cute. Snerdley was concerned about me and what my frame of mind was gonna be. (interruption) No, it’s not the first time in their history. It’s the first time in recent times that they haven’t met Wall Street expectations. It’s okay. So they drop 30 bucks a share in after-hours trading. Wait ’til you see their fourth quarter. They’re gonna have stuff, new mini-iPad, new phone, new computer, they’re gonna blow it out in the fourth quarter and all this is gonna be a memory. This isn’t bad anyway. I just wanted to share with you Snerdley’s concern for me ’cause he knows how much I love Apple and rely on their stuff. Rely, like, love, all the same.