Last week Apple announced its fiscal fourth quarter results, setting another quarterly record amid a lot of concern on Wall Street about the standing of the tech industry. And as usual, I filled a bunch of numbers into a Number spreadsheet, ran my little chart script, and out popped out a bunch of colorful charts.
It being the fiscal fourth quarter, of course, means it’s also the end of Apple’s fiscal year. And that gives me the opportunity to cart out a separate set of charts, ones that take the longer view and show the changes in Apple’s business over an entire year.
(I sat down to write this story and looked up when I generated fiscal-year charts last year. Turns out it’s the same day, to the hour. I am nothing if not consistent.)
Anyway, let’s dig in to the charts, starting with the big one, overall Apple revenue for the last 24 years:
After the revenue rocketship that was fiscal 2021, this past year has been a little quieter. But it’s still remarkable that during a tumultuous time, politically and economically, Apple managed not to give back a dime of that $91 billion growth spurt and instead tacked on an additional $28 billion.
As you can see from this chart, the last two times Apple has posted a blow-out fiscal year—2015 and 2018—it has backslid the next year. That didn’t happen this year, as revenues were up 8% over the previous year.
Of course, the driver of half Apple’s revenue is the iPhone, so as the iPhone goes, so goes Apple:
At about 7% growth, Apple’s iPhone growth more or less matches the company’s overall growth. But it’s still a little bit interesting that Apple’s business overall grew more than the iPhone business did!
You can also see some of the gravity defying that Apple did this fiscal year. In fiscal 2015 and 2018, iPhone revenue spiked—spikes that align with the introduction of the iPhone 6 and iPhone X. In other words, major iPhone body redesigns.
The iPhone 12 was also a body redesign, and sales spiked in fiscal 2021—but went up further in 2022. Again, that’s not generally what happens, but it happened this past year.
Let’s look at the Mac, maybe the biggest success in Apple’s portfolio in 2022:
2021 was the Mac’s best year by a large margin. A lot of us nodded and said something about lockdown driving sales, but Apple kept saying that they felt there was still plenty of demand being driven by the Mac’s move to Apple silicon.
They were right. In 2022 the Mac added another $5 billion in revenue, a leap almost as huge as the one it made the year before. I don’t know how long it will last, but after a decade with Mac sales figures in the twenty billions, it lingered in the thirties for a single year before hitting 40. The Mac is riding high.
You know who’s not riding high? The iPad:
The iPad seems to me to be the product that really was affected by global conditions, including lockdowns and school closures, with a run of new sales that couldn’t be maintained into 2022. Still, as an iPad fan, I’m going to observe that $29 billion in a year is nothing to sneeze at and is a number that the iPad didn’t approach between 2015 and 2020.
Perhaps the iPad’s not going to regularly generate more than $30 billion in revenue every year. I don’t know. But this year was still the second-best year for the iPad out of the last eight. The real question is, does the needle move up or down for the iPad next year?
Now let’s look at the popular and growing Services and Wearables, Home, and Accessories lines:
As you might expect, they continue to grow. However, it’s worth noting that after a large step forward for both in 2021, both cooled off in 2022. This is something to keep an eye on because either Apple will need to revive these categories or they’re going to have to find some other category to point to when Wall Street demands growth.
(I’ll also point out that at $41 billion, the Wearables, Home, and Accessories category has surpassed total Mac revenue—even during the Mac’s best revenue year ever!)
This brings us to the final chart, which I run here every year just to put all of Apple’s product lines in the proper context. When I run the numbers as individual charts, they all seem more or less the same. But they are very definitely not all created equal. (It’s still impressive to see Services lift away from the others, though.)
Let’s meet back here next year for more charts, okay?
Dave Zatz, media blogger and former Sling employee, is the perfect person to mark its passing:
Welp. It’s come to this. Slingbox servers will be shut down forever come November 9th. At which point all remaining devices will be bricked….
While it’s fairly easy to replicate Slingbox functionality these days for over-the-air antenna TV (Tablo, HDHomeRun with Channels or Plex, Slingbox-descendent AirTV), for better or worse we’ve moved away from remote (IR) control of that cable box.
Slingbox was amazing because it let you watch your own home TV wherever you were in the world. I tuned into a Pac-12 After Dark college football game while waiting for a very early-morning flight in Sweden. TV critics had friends set up Slingboxes on the east coast so they had access to shows in advance of the west-coast feed. Sports fans got friends to put Slingboxes in their houses so they could watch their far-away baseball team’s games. It was a thing… but it was ephemeral.
Slingbox got bought out by Echostar (its brand lives on in the Sling vMPVD service, and as Dave notes, part of it lives on as the watch-from-anywhere feature of the Sling Hopper DVR. But the moment has passed. These days I can watch the vMPVD equivalent of cable (in my case, Fubo TV) on any device I own, from anywhere.
Still, it’s also worth remembering that OG Slingboxes technically still work. They stood alone. It’s the later models that required a cloud service—and when you buy any hardware that requires a cloud service, you’re risking the death of that product when the cloud service goes away:
Interesting, early Slingboxes/software did not actually require Sling Media servers in the mix and home IPs could be hardcoded. We were simply in the mix to provide a dynamic DNS service, facilitating the client-to-box connection. But, some time after we were acquired, the powers that be began dabbling in ads (ugh) and subscriptions – which do indeed require that permanent intermediary.
In any event, Slingbox was a brilliant idea from the late Blake Krikorian and for a moment it gave TV watchers the power to roam and still watch what they wanted.
Services and products we just can’t quit, our cringiest status splurges, whether advertising works on us, and the fate of Twitter under its new management.
In total, this cost me about $3 in Google Collab compute time to produce over 200 images from 70-80 prompts over the course of a couple hours. I never posed for any photo, all the illustrations and photos here were generated from the model. You can view a larger set of them randomly arranged on Flickr in this album. I removed the less successful ones where I had 15 fingers or three rows of teeth, and a lot of the cartoon prompts I tried ended up in total nonsense.
There’s a line I like to use a lot when I’m responding to people who expect Apple to release low-cost products that appeal to the widest swath of the masses: “Apple’s never going to be the low-price leader.” While people frequently complain about the prices of Apple products, in general, they confuse being unwilling to reach down to the lowest price categories with being a bad value.
Yes, you might pay a little more for an Apple product than a product from the competition–but you also get more. Still, there’s no denying that Apple’s products are on the pricey side. As it has become one of the most profitable and valuable companies in the world, its skill in maximizing revenue growth has served it well.
But as Apple sees slowing revenue growth in most of its product categories, I have to wonder just how willing Apple might be to raise prices on its products in order to wring even more money out of its customers. The recently increasing strength of the dollar has given Apple an opportunity to experiment with what happens when the price of Apple products increases.
Once again, it’s the sPOooOOkiest time of year at Apple Park: Yes, the end of the fiscal year. WooooOOoOoO! When financial analysts haunt Tim Cook and Luca Maestri in order to find out how much cash Apple has taken home from customers in its oversized plastic jack o’lantern: apparently around $90.1 billion dollars worth of fun-size Milky Ways and M&Ms. And if you very listen closely, you can hear the mournful howl of Gene Munster still sad about the Apple television set never arriving.
Of course, the analysts are trying their level best to gull Tim Cook into admitting something—anything—about the future of Apple’s products, much like ghouls and revenants who hunger for a mere bite of flesh. These damned souls are doomed to remain unsated, but perhaps this is where I may be of service to them. Here, then, is a list of what some in their blasted profession might calls the “puts and takes”, but which I am dubbing…the tricks and treats of the past Year in Apple to date.
Trick: Tim Cook saying that Apple is going into the holiday season with “its lineup set” and no new Macs having been announced.
Treat: Eddy Cue is, once again, the only Apple executive to show up to work in costume, this year as a mix between an Oktoberfest patron and an F1 race car driver, which nobody is brave enough to tell him is actually a kind of dangerous combination?
Trick: Apple trying to convince us that Stage Manager is going to change everything for multitasking on the iPad.
Treat: The tenth-generation iPad finally moves the front-facing camera somewhere where you’ll have to actually work to put your finger over the lens.
Trick: Apple trying to convince us that Stage Manager is going to change everything for multitasking on the Mac.
Treat: You can finally share iCloud Photo Libraries with other members of your family! I’m sure my wife will really enjoys all my app screenshots.
Trick: Advertising is littering the App Store like discarded candy wrappers on the morning of November 1st.
Treat: The iPhone’s 48-megapixel camera is good enough to make out details on the ground while you’re flying in a plane. Eat your heart out, Gary Powers!
Trick: Apple services are getting small price increases, in an attempt to fuel that sweet Services revenue and also because Tim Cook is a mercurial deity who quietly eats dollar bills when no one is looking.
Treat: The Apple Watch Ultra cost way less than people expected at $799. Unfortunately, customers now have to pick up the very expensive habits of scuba diving and mountain climbing. Which Apple doesn’t currently take 30 percent of, but only because it hasn’t yet figured out how.
Trick: Apple continues selling the first-generation Apple Pencil for use with the tenth-generation iPad because when they first put in orders, someone added an extra zero to the end, and now Jeff Williams won’t leave the fort he’s built out of them.
Treat: Well, at least Elon Musk didn’t buy Apple.
Trick: Sure, silver is a “color.”
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
Apple and the Mac had another record quarter, but there are some serious questions about slowing growth in services and what it means for Apple’s future strategies. This leads naturally into a discussion of Apple sticking ads all over the App Store and changing its App Store guidelines again. And Myke has taken Stage Manager for a spin on macOS Ventura.
It’s only fairly recently that I’ve delved into the world of recording podcasts with multiple in-person participants1, but that’s what finally opened the door for me to switch from a USB microphone to a dedicated audio interface.
Having since passed over that threshold, I was intrigued to see the announcement a few months back of the Focusrite Vocaster Two. Focusrite is well known in podcast circles for its generally well-regarded line of Scarlett audio interfaces, though they tend to be aimed at a more traditional audience.
But the Vocaster Two (and its companion, the single XLR input Vocaster One) are designed from the ground up to provide a one-stop shop for podcasters, capitalizing on the explosive growth of that market in recent years.
Now, before going further, I have to be clear: most podcasters don’t need everything the Vocaster Two provides. Often times the bells and whistles that get added to products like this are purely superfluous; in the case of the Vocaster, I actually think that the power provided is impressive, though in most cases it will outstrip the average podcast host’s needs. But if you want true versatility in your podcast production, the Vocaster does have a ton of features, and mostly delivers them in a well-designed, easy-to-use package.
That power and convenience comes at a very literal cost: at a list price of $299, the Vocaster Two is among the more expensive two-input audio interfaces on the market, much more expensive than the EVO 4 that I’d been using prior.
But it’s also pretty nice.
Make sure you’re connected
Like most USB-based audio interfaces, setting up the Vocaster Two is pretty straightforward: plug in the included USB cable (the Vocaster uses USB-C, which is a plus, but cops out a bit by including only a USB-C-to-USB-A cable in the box—though that is understandable given USB-A’s remaining ubiquity), and you’re pretty much up and running.
Focusrite offers its own software, Vocaster Hub, but you don’t strictly speaking need to install it for general use; macOS’s built-in audio system will recognize the interface just fine. However, the app does provide access to a few features that you can’t otherwise use (more on which in a bit).
Vocaster Hub isn’t necessary for basic operation, but more advanced features are tricky or impossible without it.
The Vocaster also works with an iPad with a USB-C port, which works surprisingly well, though you’ll need an app capable of multitrack recording to get the most out of it.
While I’m not a stickler for audio quality, the Vocaster’s recordings sounded solid to me. I utilized both of its XLR inputs, one with a Shure MV7 and the other with a Pyle PDMIC58. The only odd audio issue I noticed is something about the way the MV7’s monitor sounded to my ears when connected to the XLR interface—but I noticed the same issue with the EVO 4, so it seems like that’s an issue with the mic rather than the interface. But that was more of a personal preference issue than anything that impeded the utility.
I’ll also note that the Vocaster Two essentially “takes over” your Mac’s audio output: output volume via the OS is disabled and the volume keys on your keyboard, for example, won’t work. The same goes for input level. That’s dissimilar from the way that the EVO 4 works, where adjusting the gain or volume on the hardware unit also confusingly adjusts the system level. I prefer the Vocaster Two’s approach, which also meant I spent less time fiddling with levels in multiple places.
Do change that channel
When I first set up the Vocaster Two, I didn’t do any tweaking: just set it as my input and output, and chose what I thought were the correct channels for my main mic in Audio Hijack.
It wasn’t until several days later that I realized something weird was happening. When I started recording in Audio Hijack while on a Zoom call, my remote co-hosts often noted that they could hear themselves for a moment. While I was on one show, I moused over a video on Twitter2 and realized belatedly that the audio from my computer was being piped to everyone else.
Whoops.
After looking closer at the documentation for the Vocaster Two, I realized what the issue was: the Vocaster Two actually offers an astounding 14 channels of input. The default is a mix-minus option which includes Loopback inputs from your computer—not what I’d been looking for.
Using that channel breakdown, I was able to isolate just the inputs for the two local mics and specify those in Audio Hijack (channels 5 and 6, as it turned out). I also created a virtual audio interface in Rogue Amoeba’s Loopback software to let me specify just the mic inputs, but you can also accomplish something similar with Apple’s Audio MIDI Setup app; Focusrite helpfully provides instructions about how to configure that, though you may have to read between the lines in terms of getting it set up just the way you like it.
The Vocaster Two provides a slew of I/O options, including two XLRs, 3.5mm jack for a phone, outputs to stereo speakers, and more.
Those channels also include a 3.5mm jack to bring in a phone (complete with a mix-minus that feeds back to the person on the phone), outputs for stereo speakers, an output to a video camera, and even Bluetooth for pairing a phone. Most of those are features I don’t need, but they do contribute to the unit’s versatility.
One thing that this did spur me towards was chasing down whether this panoply of inputs, particularly the Bluetooth, would let me achieve that holy grail of recording a podcast entirely on my iPad. The answer is a qualified yes: if you have an iPad with a USB-C or Thunderbolt port, you can plug in the Vocaster Two and use it to record not only your own mic, but also remote participants in some VoIP apps; I was able to get it to work in Zoom using one of the interface’s Loopback channels. But it still feels like a bunch of hoops to jump through for something that should be easier to do on an iPad itself with no additional hardware. Given all the equipment you’d have to haul around with you just to make this work, you’re still better off with a Mac for now—functional though it was, this was more of a novelty.
Design is how it works
Perhaps my favorite aspect of the Vocaster Two, the one that really sold me on it as an audio interface, is its design. That starts from the most basic level: Most audio interfaces keep their controls on the front, as if they expect to be rack mounted in a professional studio. But if you’re sitting at a desk and your interface is in front of you, front-mounted controls aren’t the most convenient or visible.
Instead, the Vocaster opts for a flat design with the controls on top and at a slight angle. Not only does it make it easy to see the meters at a glance, but adjusting the volume or gain knobs is a snap. I also appreciate that those controls are large and easy to access; you won’t accidentally hit the wrong knob. More to the point, in an advantage over the EVO 4, there are both two 1/4-inch headphone outputs and two volume control knobs, rather than one sharing double duty.
The Vocaster Two does, however, often a single gain knob for adjusting both XLR inputs; you have to toggle which one you want to control with buttons at the bottom. That said, there are always-active discrete gain meters for each input, which obviates some of the downside of sharing a single control, and you shouldn’t have to adjust the gain too much once you have it set to your liking. There are also independent controls for muting each input, which is a big feature lacked by many other two-input interfaces. All the controls are also backlit; hit the mute button and it turns red (and the gain meter for that input pulses red—basically you can’t miss it).
Trust me: you will not forget that you are muted.
I also appreciated that the Vocaster Two has a power switch on the back; it’s a little thing, but I like to turn my interface off at night so it doesn’t just have light blaring around my darkened office.
If there’s a button on the interface that I’d ditch it’s the Enhance toggle. This activates an audio processing preset, which you have to specify using the Vocaster Hub software on your Mac: you can choose between Clean, Warm, Bright, and Radio. I can understand if you’re putting out a live show that tweaking the sound of your audio can be desirable, and that it might be tempting for some beginners who just want a button to make themselves sound a particular way. For me, though, it’s just wasted space on the interface, as I prefer to make these kinds of changes in post-processing.
And if there’s one feature that’s missing from the Vocaster Two, it’s a hardware option to adjust the mix between my monitor audio (i.e. hearing myself through my headphones) and the audio I’m hearing from my computer. That is adjustable—admittedly in a fine-grain fashion, along with levels for all the various channels—in the Vocaster Hub software, but that’s hardly convenient for a quick adjustment. Fortunately, the balance seems pretty good by default, and I’ve largely been able to leave it as is.
Vocaster Hub does provide one handy feature: an auto-gain option that will set your input to the correct level after hearing you speak into it for a few moments. The results on that were pretty solid, and it can take the guesswork out of adjusting the levels on your own.
Conclusion
Stacked up next to the EVO 4, my previous two-input interface, the Vocaster Two is far more capable and features a nicer, friendlier design; it’s really no contest.
The main question, then, becomes one of price. At $130, the EVO 4 is less than half the price of the Vocaster’s $299 retail price. Heck, the Vocaster Two is also $100 more than Focusrite’s popular Scarlett 2i2 interface. But the Vocaster Two’s podcasting-aimed features—mute buttons, inputs for Bluetooth or a phone, separate volume knobs and headphone jacks, and the top-down design—do definitely make it more appealing to anybody doing multi-person in-person podcast recordings.
Add in the impressive amount of channels in the Vocaster Two, and its ability to provide loopback audio to the iPad, and this device truly offers a lot more power than some competitors: it’s more like a studio in a box than just an interface.
Whether or not you need that power, though, is another matter. For me, the versatility and user-friendly design was enough to make a compelling argument—enough so that even before I’d finished writing this review, I went out and bought my own.3 I certainly don’t think everybody who wants to start a podcast needs the Vocaster Two, but if you’re looking for a nice upgrade, it offers a lot for its price.
You can hear the result on A Complicated Profession, the Star Wars TV show recap podcast that I do with my friend Tony Sindelar and my wife Kat over at The Incomparable. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
My thanks to Daylite for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
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Apple results, iPad value, and macOS Ventura
Apple’s confidence in delaying product launches, the good stuff about the 10th-generation iPad, and a fairly undramatic (but incomplete) macOS launch.
On Thursday, Apple announced its fiscal fourth-quarter results, and the results were predictable–another record quarter. But of course, Wall Street had already anticipated all of this and had moved on to deciding that a lot of Apple’s growth was not quite as growy as they expected. It happens.
Still, from the broader perspective of looking at Apple’s financial disclosures as indicators of how Apple is doing as a business, there were interesting tidbits amid the stacks of cash and the wailing of financial analysts seeking endless growth. There always are.
As always, Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri spend an hour talking to investment analysts about the company’s just-completed quarter. And as always, we’ve got a transcript! Here it is, as it happened…
Apple announced results for its fiscal fourth quarter on Thursday, with a fourth-quarter revenue record of $90.1B in revenue. Mac revenue was way up (to an all-time record!), iPad revenue was flat sequentially but down year-over-year, iPhone revenue was up, services revenue was down sequentially for the second straight quarter, and wearables returned to its winning ways.
I’m as prone as anyone to grumble about the state of this social network platform or that one. Hating Facebook has always been cool. Hating Instagram is more recently cool. Hating Twitter? Well, what time is it? I’ll let you know how I feel after I read the news. All of that to say, I use social platforms for work and entertainment, but it’s a grudging thing because the platform owners don’t prioritize the same things I do. I am the product, not the customer.
But see, I like socializing online. I like talking to friends I’ve made or kept via the Internet. I like browsing their lives that way and giving back little pieces of my own. I like picking up links to new, funny things.
But this isn’t a story about how I wish evil companies would stop doing things to make more money that also happen to wreck my happy social playground. It’s actually a story about a platform I wish was more a part of my social existence: Apple Music.
After wandering in and out of subscriptions to Apple Music for a number of years, I decided to make the service a permanent part of my life sometime in 2021. I don’t need to blame the late-middle pandemic, but if that feels right to you as an explanation, be my guest. I just decided I liked being able to call up the latest Beyonce or the original Broadway cast recording of “Kiss Me, Kate,” and I like integrating it with my existing music library. It’s been fun.
And then I remembered the last time I’d been really excited about Apple Music and why. It was 2010, and Apple had announced Ping, a social network for iTunes. It was mostly intended as a way to keep up with artists, but I was excited about connecting with friends. I have a Spotify account precisely because several good friends put curated playlists there, and I like checking out what they think is cool and comparing myself unfavorably. Having an Apple UI and integration with iTunes on top of that sort of thing seemed even better. Alas, Ping did not. It went away barely two years later, and Apple Music, which has grown a lot since then, only retains the barest social hooks.
And I’ve realized as I’ve been swimming in Apple Music again – making playlists, finding and saving new stuff from artists I like, and sending the results to my phone, Sonos, Echo, and even the smart TV – is that just as I never host a party without a lit soundtrack, I don’t want to use Apple Music without a robust social component.
Here then, is my somewhat tongue-in-cheek social wishlist for Apple Music.
Shared Playlist Creation. When I threw a birthday party for my husband, our friend Tim was a huge help. He power-washed our patio, for goodness sake. But we also collaborated on the playlist for the party, and his suggestions were good. I seem to remember exporting an iTunes playlist and emailing the file to Tim, like an animal! I’d much rather collaborate, a la Keynote or Pages, with one or more friends to build my party soundtrack.
Who’s My Best Friend. Dana, who used to live across the street, argues with me about whether or not she introduced me to the music of Eleni Mandell. She’s wrong. I found her myself. But Dana and I do share some freakishly in-tune music sensibilities. What if Apple Music could tell me, by library holdings or play counts, which friend of mine is most musically compatible? Or least, for that matter? No, that Apple would never do.
Who Loves This Song. I was at karaoke a while back, searching for a song to sing next, knowing that only two singers remained before it was my turn. And my mind froze. What, in the wide world of songs that are popular enough to have karaoke versions, should I sing? I know—I’ll ask one of my friends to duet with me on something we both like. If I could only figure out what that is. Besides the narrow lane of karaoke singers who are blocked, this feature could also provide a fun way to find out who in your friend group might care that Neko Case has a new record and want to chat about it.
A (Somewhat) Free Tier. Look. I’m a realist. Apple doesn’t give stuff away. Maybe the 5 GB of iCloud storage, but that’s about it. But it’s figured into the price of your device, and it’s gone in a flash of backups and family photo shoots. For a social network to work, everyone has to have some level of access to it. All the collaboration and music-sharing features I want will do me zero good if Tim, Dana, and my karaoke pals aren’t Apple Music users, too. Sure, I can share a playlist via a web link, so they can see what I like, but they can only preview the tracks. There’s no means to subscribe or comment. Spotify gives me that option at the price of more advertising than I’d like. So this desire of mine, at least, is fully made of pie in the sky.
I’ll just keep publishing playlists I think some friend or other might like, though I’m not assuming that checking in on such things is part of their social rounds. For most folks I know, it is not. And for most folks, Ping is just a funny memory.
I’m not sweating the new $1 per month price hike for Apple Music, but I’d feel so much more cheerful about it if the service provided the social satisfaction I crave.
