I have alluded to my expections for Apple's margins to improve in the coming quarters as we enter the most profitable phase of their product cycle, especially with the cost savings they will realize with the iPhone 5c.  

Apple surprised us today by discussing revenue and margin guidance along side the iPhone sales numbers.  The likely implication of this is that there have been material changes to management expectations since the original guidance was offered.  There are two potential causes for this.  One would be that component costs for iPhone and iPad have already come down more than expected.  The would be that the new products have margins high enough to impact the current quarter materially even though they will only account for a minority of current quarter sales.  

Either way, it is great news for Apple.  This likely means that margins in the holiday quarter and through the first half of 2014 will be even better than I was already expecting.  This is perhaps the most significant and positive surprise for me in today's numbers (all of which should seriously call the bear case into question).

Benedict Evans has a very potent and concise presentation of why mobile OS adoption figures have extremely significant implications for the evolution of mobile platforms.

This issue makes it hard for Google to drive the agenda for new mobile technologies within Android: it will take at least a year after announcement before a meaningful part of the base has access to anything new. Hence the focus on Google Play services and on the cloud with things like Google Now - moving everything several layers up the stack from the intractable fragmentation problem, and making the hardware OS less relevant. But of course, this reduces further the reasons to upgrade your OS, and makes it much less likely that third party apps will do anything on Android that they don't do on iOS (system utilities and other minority interests aside).  

Conversely, a developer can use anything that Apple announced in iOS7 and be confident it will work on all their users' devices. So anything innovative Apple does takes effect right now.