Apple earnings - FT.com Are there any mushy bits at all in Apple? If there are, the company's latest quarterly results, released on Tuesday, conceal them well. Take it one bite at a time: ● IPhone: revenues up 85 per cent from the year before. Was the latest upgrade a bit thin on new features? No sign that buyers cared much. Then there was the worry that carriers would tire of paying fat subsidies to Apple, leading to price pressure. But so far, iPhone prices - defying every known logic of gadgetry - are not falling one bit. ● IPad: revenues have now doubled, or better, for four quarters in a row. Another product upgrade critics found ho-hum that consumers have gobbled up. Prices fell about 8 per cent, to about $560. Units jumped 150 per cent. They'll take that trade. ● Mac: a first quarter in some time that growth fell below 10 per cent. But again, the pricing story is astounding. Average Mac prices have been between $1,200 and $1,300 for years now. Apple has mastered offsetting the price-killing effects of Moore's Law. ● Total revenues and margins: in sum, sales were up 59 per cent, which, for those of you following at home, is 15 percentage points better than what Facebook managed in the March quarter. Sales have just about tripled in three years. Net income has nearly quadrupled. Margins hit an all-time high in the quarter. ● Balance sheet: another $12.5bn in net cash materialises, making the promise to pay $10bn in annual dividends (a payout ratio of about 25 per cent on trailing earnings, and a yield of under 2 per cent at current price) seem tight-fisted. The only worm in the Apple is the fact that growth like this cannot go on forever, and margins like this must be competed away. But what can you do about a company whose problems exist almost purely at a theoretical level - other than owning the shares?