John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

Apple Will Pump $11 Billion Into Capital Expenditures Next Year

Here’s a noteworthy data point from Apple’s recent 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission: The company has budgeted $11 billion in capital expenditures for fiscal 2014 — 57 percent more than the $7 billion it spent in 2013. What is Apple planning to do with all that additional money?

Approximately $550 million of it is budgeted for retail store facilities — some 30 new stores and remodeling of approximately 20 existing ones. The rest — all $10.5 billion of it — is allocated to “other capital expenditures,” specifically “product tooling and manufacturing process equipment, and corporate facilities and infrastructure, including information systems hardware, software and enhancements.”

So Apple continues to invest in its ability to build certain products and components in-house, or in cultivating that ability in its manufacturing partners by outfitting them with tooling equipment and whatnot. It’s also likely pushing money into new data center capacity to bolster its iCloud and iTunes back end; the company is still hard at work building its massive new data centers in the Pacific Northwest and Reno, Nev.

Standard stuff, I suppose. Apple’s just spending quite a bit more money on it than in years past. The company’s capital expenditures budget for fiscal 2010 was just $1.9 billion. Today it’s more than five times that.

Of course, as Carl Icahn would be quick to remind us, it’s not like Apple is short of cash.

Twitter’s Tanking

December 30, 2013 at 6:49 am PT

2013 Was a Good Year for Chromebooks

December 29, 2013 at 2:12 pm PT

BlackBerry Pulls Latest Twitter for BB10 Update

December 29, 2013 at 5:58 am PT

Apple CEO Tim Cook Made $4.25 Million This Year

December 28, 2013 at 12:05 pm PT

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik