Month: January 2021

Enlarge / Apple's global headquarters in Cupertino, California. (credit: Sam Hall/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The last 24 hours have been flooded with stock market news, from the normal to the nutty. But based on Apple's performance in recent quarters, the earnings the Cupertino company reported today for its first quarter of 2021 were very much on the normal side. And by that, we mean big numbers yet again.

According to the report, Apple crossed the threshold for $100 billion in revenue in a single quarter for the first time, and the company posted double-digit sales increases for every single one of its defined product categories. Overall, sales were up 21 percent year-over-year, despite many consumers' struggles in the pandemic-stricken economy.

iPhone revenue was $65.6 billion, surpassing analysts' expected $59.8 billion, and beating the same quarter last year by 17 percent. This coincides with the introduction of the iPhone 12 lineup (iPhone 12, iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPhone 12 Pro Max), which was the most substantial redesign and upgrade to iPhones since the iPhone X three years earlier.

Enlarge / The Model Y assembly line at Tesla's Shanghai factory. (credit: Tesla)

Tesla made a profit of $270 million in the fourth quarter of 2020, bringing the year's profits to $721 million. It's Tesla's first annual profit. The company posted a $826 million loss in 2019.

The strong financial results were aided by record vehicle production and deliveries in the fourth quarter of 2020. As we reported earlier this month, Tesla delivered 180,000 vehicles to customers in the quarter, bringing the year's total just shy of Tesla's 500,000-vehicle goal.

As a result, Tesla's revenue has zoomed upwards. Tesla's Q4 2020 revenue was $10.7 billion, up 46 percent from the $7.4 billion Tesla took in a year earlier.

Enlarge / Annika Keeton. (credit: Starship)

Last March, just as the Washington, DC, area was locking down for COVID-19, I traveled to George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, to eat a hamburger delivered by a robot.

The robot was owned by delivery startup Starship. Today, Starship announced it has completed 1 million deliveries. Annika Keeton, a college student in Bowling Green, Ohio, was Starship's millionth customer.

In recent years, a lot of hype has followed companies like Waymo and Tesla as they try to build full-size, go-anywhere self-driving cars. But designing these vehicles has proven fiendishly difficult. Tesla's self-driving software still requires careful supervision, while Waymo's driverless taxis are still limited to one corner of the Phoenix metropolitan area.