Weekend Wrap-Up: Apple Has a Big Quarter, Will Ship Apple Watch in April
Welcome to the Weekend Wrap-Up!
This week wasn’t a bad one for tech news, especially if you’re into the financial side of things. Apple, Google and Twitter all made headlines in the past seven days; Apple and Google for their numbers, and Twitter for a new feature it unveiled.
Let’s dive in and learn more.
Apple Breaks a World Record for Quarterly Profit, Announces the Apple Watch Will Ship in April
The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are the biggest iPhones that Apple has ever sold. And, fittingly, they’ve helped Apple post the biggest quarterly profit numbers ever — like, in history, for all companies. This past quarter, Apple made a staggering $18.04 billion profit, surpassing the previous record held by Russian energy company Gazprom.
And that’s not all. On its quarterly earnings call, Apple finally gave us a more specific time frame for the release of its highly anticipated Apple Watch. The device will ship this April, which means we can probably expect some kind of announcement/event in March, with pre-orders opening up in March or early April (should Apple choose to release the wearable toward the end of the month).
Google Announces Some Big Numbers, Too
Not to be outdone, Google released some impressive quarterly earnings numbers, too. The company pulled in $18 billion in revenue in the previous quarter. There’s an important distinction to be made between “revenue” and “profit,” though. While Google raked in a lot of coin, it wound up making $4.76 billion in profit when all was said and done. That’s impressive, but it isn’t “Apple’s $18 billion in profit” impressive. Still, a solid quarter from Google.
Twitter Unveils ‘Video on Twitter’
As Twitter continues to experiment and look for different ways to monetize, the company has seemingly tasked itself with eliminating competition from third-party services — in this case, YouTube. The company unveiled Video on Twitter, a new feature that enables users to shoot, edit, and publish videos within the Twitter app. The obvious line to draw here is toward video ads showing up in streams at some point — we’ll see how the feature is received first, though.