CCATP_2025_02_06
Jason Snell discusses creating impactful charts for Apple's financial results, focusing on visual clarity, aesthetics, and automation in data visualization. Insights into his design process and influence from Apple's branding are also shared.
Automatic Shownotes
Chapters
0:13
Introduction to Chit Chat Across the Pond
0:56
Jason Snell's Charting Journey
2:50
Historical Data Insights
4:01
The Art of Data Presentation
6:15
The Evolution of Charting Styles
7:43
Gathering Apple Financial Data
13:37
Chart Creation Process
16:10
Numbers vs. Excel for Charts
19:53
Understanding Year-over-Year Changes
27:20
The Importance of Rate of Change
31:03
Analyzing Apple's Business Strategy
38:33
Visualizing Profit Margins
42:38
The Value of Data Visualization
44:55
Automation in Chart Management
50:46
Behind the Scenes of the Script
52:44
Exploring Jason's Online Presence
Long Summary
In this episode, I'm thrilled to welcome Jason Snell from Six Colors, known for his expert analysis and visually compelling charts on Apple's financial results. We delve into the art and science behind creating these renowned charts, which have garnered attention for their vibrant design and clarity. Jason shares his journey into chart-making that began over 15 years ago during his time at Macworld, where he first started to capture Apple's earnings data with charts that evolved over the years.
We discuss Jason's methodology for gathering data directly from Apple's earnings reports, including the manual process he employs to input the quarterly figures into his meticulously designed spreadsheets. With a comprehensive view of Apple's revenue dating back to 2011, he explains his decision to limit the displayed data to the last five quarters for clarity and relevance. Jason highlights the importance of visual representation in making complex financial data more accessible, pointing out that juxtaposing individual quarterly results against a rolling average can reveal essential trends.
As we probe deeper, we explore the intricate balance between aesthetics and functionality in data visualization. Jason acknowledges the crucial role of design in making charts legible and appealing while ensuring they convey accurate information. He candidly discusses the challenges he faced in creating charts that meet these criteria, recalling how initial feedback from both friendly and critical viewers helped him refine his approach over time. He also elaborates on some of the quirks of chart design, such as the decision to start axes at zero to provide an accurate context for interpreting the data.
We pivot to a fascinating discussion about how Jason chooses colors for his charts, drawing inspiration from Apple's iconic rainbow branding. The colors not only serve a visual appeal but also help categorize Apple's revenue streams. Jason muses about the impact of changing product lines on his visual design, especially as wearables and services gain prominence in Apple's portfolio, a shift that has necessitated adjustments in how he presents this data.
Towards the end of our conversation, Jason reveals the behind-the-scenes automation that streamlines his process of publishing charts to the Six Colors website. He has crafted a sophisticated script that converts his data into images effortlessly, drastically reducing the time spent on what could be an arduous task of uploading images manually. This innovation showcases not only his technical capabilities but also his commitment to efficiency, allowing him to focus on the analytical side of data representation.
Our discussion is a treasure trove for anyone interested in data visualization, analytics, and the nuances of presenting financial results in an engaging manner. For those who want to see Jason's work in action, you can find his charts and commentary at sixcolors.com, alongside a plethora of additional insights he shares through his writing and podcasts. The rich conversation with Jason offers a clear glimpse into the meticulous work that goes into making sense of data for a broad audience.
We discuss Jason's methodology for gathering data directly from Apple's earnings reports, including the manual process he employs to input the quarterly figures into his meticulously designed spreadsheets. With a comprehensive view of Apple's revenue dating back to 2011, he explains his decision to limit the displayed data to the last five quarters for clarity and relevance. Jason highlights the importance of visual representation in making complex financial data more accessible, pointing out that juxtaposing individual quarterly results against a rolling average can reveal essential trends.
As we probe deeper, we explore the intricate balance between aesthetics and functionality in data visualization. Jason acknowledges the crucial role of design in making charts legible and appealing while ensuring they convey accurate information. He candidly discusses the challenges he faced in creating charts that meet these criteria, recalling how initial feedback from both friendly and critical viewers helped him refine his approach over time. He also elaborates on some of the quirks of chart design, such as the decision to start axes at zero to provide an accurate context for interpreting the data.
We pivot to a fascinating discussion about how Jason chooses colors for his charts, drawing inspiration from Apple's iconic rainbow branding. The colors not only serve a visual appeal but also help categorize Apple's revenue streams. Jason muses about the impact of changing product lines on his visual design, especially as wearables and services gain prominence in Apple's portfolio, a shift that has necessitated adjustments in how he presents this data.
Towards the end of our conversation, Jason reveals the behind-the-scenes automation that streamlines his process of publishing charts to the Six Colors website. He has crafted a sophisticated script that converts his data into images effortlessly, drastically reducing the time spent on what could be an arduous task of uploading images manually. This innovation showcases not only his technical capabilities but also his commitment to efficiency, allowing him to focus on the analytical side of data representation.
Our discussion is a treasure trove for anyone interested in data visualization, analytics, and the nuances of presenting financial results in an engaging manner. For those who want to see Jason's work in action, you can find his charts and commentary at sixcolors.com, alongside a plethora of additional insights he shares through his writing and podcasts. The rich conversation with Jason offers a clear glimpse into the meticulous work that goes into making sense of data for a broad audience.
Brief Summary
In this episode, I engage with Jason Snell from Six Colors, where we explore his expertise in creating visually striking and informative charts that analyze Apple's financial results. Jason recounts his journey into chart-making, which began at Macworld, and explains his meticulous process of gathering data from Apple's earnings reports. We discuss the importance of visual clarity in data representation, his approach to balancing aesthetics and functionality, and how feedback has shaped his chart designs over time. Jason also shares insights into his color choices inspired by Apple's branding and how shifting product lines influence his visual strategies. Towards the end, he reveals the automated processes he employs to streamline chart publication on Six Colors, showcasing his blend of technical skill and efficiency. This conversation offers valuable insights for anyone interested in the art of data visualization and financial analysis.
Tags
Jason Snell
Six Colors
charts
Apple
financial results
data representation
visual clarity
aesthetics
functionality
data visualization
automated processes
Transcript
[0:00]Music
[0:07]Well, it's that time of the week. Again, it's time for Chit Chat Across the
[0:13]
Introduction to Chit Chat Across the Pond
[0:09]Palm. This is episode number 808 for February 6, 2025. And I'm your host, Alison Sheridan. Well, I couldn't be more excited to welcome our guest this week. It is Jason Snell of Six Colors. Welcome to the show, Jason.
[0:22]It's good to be here. Finally, I'm on a podcast. Hooray.
[0:26]No one ever asks, right? Well, if you've been on the internet before and you've heard of a little fruit company called Apple, then you've probably seen Jason's famous six colors charts on Apple's earnings calls. I asked Jason to come on today, not to talk about Apple's Q1 quarterly results, but rather how he creates these charts because, you know, I'm a data nerd. I'm into it. How's that sound, Jason?
[0:48]I love it. Finally, somebody asking the hard-hitting questions about how charts and graphs are made on the internet.
[0:56]
Jason Snell's Charting Journey
[0:57]Well, you've been doing this for a long time. How long have your world-famous charts been out?
[1:04]Well, okay. So the truth is we were doing, and I was generating or working with people to generate charts about Apple financial results when I was at Macworld.
[1:16]So this has been at least, I would say, 15 years and maybe longer. I know that all just sort of like it's been 10 years since i've been in mac world so that all just kind of fades away i i cannot remember you know exactly what happened those last few years but i'd say it's at least 15 years maybe longer um and i actually inherited an apple results spreadsheet that my old boss rick lepage used to keep from way back in the like mac week days so i i because he had historical data that was very helpful to also have um but obviously when i came over to six colors which started in september of uh 2014 i needed to make a new.
[2:00]Charting template right because i obviously had made uh i made a charting template that was ugly and then my art director rob schultz macworld made a a different one that was prettier and that i think for all i know they still use it um and uh so then i go on my own i'm like okay the data is all public data data is not a problem the uh charts should be original and so i built in numbers um a bunch of charts based on the theme of the site which is six colors the apple six color rainbow from back in the day and so i decided i would build them and also color code them using the apple rainbow colors as my cue which is why they are so very rainbow and not sort of what But I think all the Macworld ones were blue because that
[2:50]
Historical Data Insights
[2:48]was the color of the Macworld logo. But six colors ones are many colors. So a long time. And this particular spreadsheet has certainly been around since 2014.
[2:58]So do you have all the historical data all the way back? I mean, how far back does it go?
[3:04]I have, at this point, I have a separate spreadsheet called historical data that has, a lot of it is annual, not quarterly, and they've changed a bunch of stuff, including their accounting. So, it's not really useful to compare across all that distance. I'm just looking now. My spreadsheet now goes back to Q1 of 2011. 11 so that's 14 years of quarterly data in my spreadsheet but.
[3:36]You only you show what the last five rolling quarters right or
[3:40]Years four i i oh yeah i show i show a smaller section of um of years uh how many is that actually that's yeah it's it's uh i think it's i think you're right i think it's five yeah.
[3:54]Counting oh yeah because you're it starts in q right now it shows was Q2 2020 to Q1 2025.
[4:01]
The Art of Data Presentation
[4:01]Yeah. Okay. So that's it. Yeah. And I just slide that number. I don't, I don't, you know, because I could have them all the way back to 2011. And it's like, it's not, I sometimes will cart out the historical data, but mostly I'm trying to sort of say, yeah, what's been happening in the last five years.
[4:16]That's great. That's kind of another, that's a little bit of an artsy fartsy decision, right? Because you could be, well, I have all the data. I've got to show all the data. And then it doesn't look like information anymore.
[4:26]You know, the problem with charts and graphs is that there is an artsy-fartsy element to it, as you just said, and there is also a numbers nerd element to it.
[4:38]And they are sometimes in agreement and they are sometimes in deep conflict because, let me tell you, when I started doing these charts, I heard from a lot of people who were asking me for, why is it like this? You should do it like this. Some of those people were friendly. Some of those people were not friendly. I do know some people who are very good at and think a lot about charts like Karen Healy, who's a professor at Duke, who's a statistics professor. And he has consulted with me a little bit about some of this. Dr. Drang, who is a pseudonym for a gentleman who is an engineer, did a lot of graphs and charts and still does in retirement. And he and I talked about what my charts would be. And I guess everybody else who complained is more or less tired of it. So they've stopped.
[5:27]But I did have to progress it. And I want to, yes, I want, look, I want them to impart information that's useful for people. The whole point of doing charts and graphs is to use your visual sense to understand numbers in a way that maybe your brain, some people understand numbers in their brain. And that's great. But a lot of people really want to see like, oh, it went from this size to this size and it's going up or it's going down. And that's really helpful. So you want it to be, you want to impart that information and there's two aspects to it. And there's the artsy fartsy aspect of it, which is I kind of want it to look nice. And I, you know, I kind of want it to not just be gray and boring and drab at the same time though, there is that number nerd part of it, which is, I do want the information it's imparting to be accurate and not misunderstood. And so, you know, those are the conflicts that go on when you're building any
[6:15]
The Evolution of Charting Styles
[6:13]kind of a chart or graph system.
[6:15]I think that's a perfect lay-in for, remember when they first allowed us in Excel to make 3D bar graphs, and you basically got no information when you looked at them because it was too distracting to see that other dimension? You can use the artsy-fartsy stuff to make it completely unintelligible.
[6:33]Yeah, absolutely. Right. Because you can render those bars and then pivot it in 3D space. And now you can no longer tell the relative size of the different bars. Or the one I liked is, and it's too bad because it made some brilliant charts, but they had a way to do these charts where you're like, kind of like, they were like lines, but with fill under them. So they're like, you're building little mountains. And you can have a bigger one and a smaller one. So the one behind it, it was very clever looking because you could basically see like, here's a smaller set. And here's a bigger set and they overlap but it's okay because the one behind it is bigger um and i always laugh because you know sometimes you do those graphs and then a quarter comes along or a period comes along and the one in the back goes below and now you can't see it anymore and it's like that's why that's not the best graph to do but you know it's it's a it's a challenge and i'm not trained in any of this um and so i've had to kind of like find my way and also rely on the advice of friends.
[7:33]Yeah, that's great. Well, they definitely are. I find them really easy to read, easy to see.
[7:43]
Gathering Apple Financial Data
[7:39]And before I get too far into this, how do you gather the numbers? I mean, you don't type them out as the CFO talks, right?
[7:48]So at 1.30 p.m. on the designated day, once every three months that they do warn you about a month in advance, apple puts out a pdf at a uh at a guessable it's actually a guessable url um but you just have to sit there and keep hitting reload until it appears or until you get the press release or whatever like there are places on their website where you can find that data the numbers get posted at 1 30 p.m pacific on that given day i have written some scripts some shortcuts that are that try to pull the numbers out of the pdf but the pdf layout does change over time so i try that and i i need to do it again because it failed this time i try to do this thing where i can right click on the pdf and say put this on the clipboard and it just puts on the clipboard and i paste it into my spreadsheet, You know, half the time that works. The other half of the time, I just put the, you know, I open the PDF in preview on the left side and I have numbers on the right side and I, or maybe it's the other way around, and I will just input the numbers in.
[8:53]Oh, you look at them. You won't copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste.
[8:56]You can't, I mean, you could. I find it more, because time is of the essence there, so I definitely feel the time pressure. I find it more useful to see both so I can see the number and type it then to move my my you know pointer the cursor back and forth click select in a pdf which is kind of hard to select from and then paste and do that over and over again i think it's actually easier for me and i okay so think about me i grew up uh using computers first commodore pet and then an apple 2 that had uh you just type in programs um in basic and the computer magazines of the era.
[9:37]What they would do is they would just print the code in the magazine and then you just type it in. And as a result, I learned to type real fast. I learned to touch type in my own special system because I was looking at the code on the page and I need to get it right. And I couldn't look at my fingers and I got really good at typing in stuff like numbers. Cause especially in basic, there are lots of line numbers and there's lots of data statements that would happen at the end of the program where there was just a long string of numbers separated by commas that you'd have to put in. I got really good at that. So for me, I do orient because one of the things that's in their PDF is it's this quarter and the previous, the year ago quarter. And so I can orient a little bit where I can make sure that I'm in the right row by looking back a year at that number. Is that number the number over there? Yes, it is. Well, then this is the right place to start. And then I'll go and I'll put them all down there. Have I typed something wrong before and had to rebuild my charts? Yes, but usually not. And I would love to get a more robust system that could extract that number. I mean, if I could automate that process, I would. I keep trying. One day, maybe I'll succeed.
[10:39]I'm guessing that you're an extended keyboard, nine keypad person for the numbers.
[10:45]No, because I had an Apple II and I never had a number pad, I just used the numbers across the top. And in fact, to this day, as a mechanical keyboard enthusiast, my favorite keyboard style is, I think, is it a 75? It's basically, or a 65, the really small ones with no number pad. I don't like, honestly, ergonomically, as a right-hander, I want my trackpad right next to the keyboard. Me too, me too. The number pad kicks it out. Can't be way out here. So I don't use the number pad. And yeah, so on the Apple II, and the Commodore pad had a number pad, but the Apple II didn't. And so if I was typing big data statements or whatever, I was doing it one to nine and then zero on the top row of the keyboard. And so that's what I still do.
[11:34]Out of everything you're going to tell me today, I think that's going to be the most impressive thing. My mother was a touch typist, and on an IBM Selectric typewriter, the one with the little ball, she could type 96 words a minute. And I asked her once, I said, how did you learn to do the numbers? She goes, oh, I can't do the numbers.
[11:50]Yeah, the numbers are hard. It's true. We had that, my dad's office had an IBM Selectric with a ball. And if you wanted to do italics, you could take the Roman ball off and put the italic ball on it. Then you type italics and then you take it off.
[12:03]She was so excited when that came out because the regular one with the little arms that went up and down, it was too slow for her. She would jam it up. She couldn't type as fast when the Selectric came out, man. That was downtown. I'm trying to remember. I was watching a TV show. Just saw a Selectric typewriter in the trailer. They were showing one typing. No, it was in Columbo. It was in Columbo. That's what it was.
[12:27]Back a little ways. Yeah. So anyway, that's why. If you video my hands, you'll see that I am not using any typing system known to humankind. I literally just made it up as I went along. but I type up like 120, 130 words a minute.
[12:42]Holy cannoli. I taught myself to type when I had the Hong Kong flu and pneumonia at the same time. And I took my mother's 1945 typing book and taught myself to type. So I do it the proper way. Now, how do you feel about the shift lock?
[12:58]Uh, Caps Lock?
[13:00]Caps Lock, yeah, sorry.
[13:01]I use it, uh, ironically only, but I do use it. I don't remap it to something. I use it if I want to, you know, make a joke or something that's in all caps.
[13:10]Maybe like if you type NASA.
[13:12]I will cap it on. You would use it for NASA? I'll just hold the shift key down for that.
[13:15]Wow.
[13:16]That's not enough. I need, it needs to be like a whole sentence of caps before I will turn the caps lock on.
[13:20]Wow. I'm a big believer in the caps lock and these people that remap the caps key that just, I just think that's, I don't know, that's heresy. I have a big problem with that.
[13:37]
Chart Creation Process
[13:31]But that's okay. There's all kinds in this world. So let's, now you've got the data in. Let's go back to when you first started out on, let's say, I guess start with six colors would be a good place to start. And by the way, congratulations on a decade on your own. That's fantastic. That's really great.
[13:48]It's been great. Know whether it would work and it worked.
[13:51]Who would have known? You and Tom Merritt, it all works out. The uh so my question is when you first started doing this how did you create the graphs so you've typed in all the numbers now what
[14:01]Yeah so i've got i've got the data sheet so i chose to use numbers and not excel i had at that you know at that time you could use excel you could use numbers you could use uh google sheets um and although excel's charting has actually gotten better in the intervening decade i still don't think it looks great but it looks better numbers was all numbers made great charts i like i don't love numbers as a spreadsheet in fact i use i did i did stop paying for office um 365 last year and every now and then we hit something we're like oh my wife would be like what do i do with this i'm like you gotta open in pages sorry we don't have word anymore and it's a little bit weird but i just thought i don't think i need that money and and the really the moment was that for me was that excel didn't feel like home to me anymore it used to be that whenever I had a default sort of like anything, I would just do it in Excel.
[14:52]Um, with tabular data and then, and then get it out into BB edit or whatever, but I'd start in Excel. And I realized that my default is now Google sheets or sometimes numbers and it's never Excel. So I, um, I, I'm not a huge numbers fan, although I use it some and I use Google sheets a lot, but numbers makes beautiful charts. I mean, that's the bottom line is that, is that numbers for whatever reason, Apple really focused on building flexible, pretty charting. I think part of it is that Excel, given, and this is old computer history again, but given Excel's legacy.
[15:32]As a, you know, it came from the Mac, but it came in a very early era. It is a grid. That's the whole premise, right? You open an Excel file and it's a grid. And you open a numbers file and it's a canvas with a grid on it. That's disturbing. And you can have like multiple grids of data on one tab of a numbers file. It's a very different paradigm. And it's weird. It is weird. But one of the things that that means is that it's very easy from the beginning, it was built to be a canvas on which there could
[16:10]
Numbers vs. Excel for Charts
[16:06]be data and on which there could be pretty images from the data. And so I think that that is probably part of the source of numbers being something that was designed to generate nicer charts than Excel would.
[16:22]You know, it's ironic to me that numbers is very good at making pretty charts, but I find numbers very difficult to format that tabular data. I've got a lot of, I was just fighting with it yesterday where I wanted a dark black border around these four cells, these four cells, these four cells. And I couldn't do that in one fell swoop. I had to select four cells, give me the dark border, select these four cells. I couldn't command select either and do that. It would grab the whole thing.
[16:51]I've gotten better with numbers over the years. It is still odd. It's better than it was. Even on the iPad, it's actually pretty good. But it's a little bit odd. Like I said, it's odd, but in some cases, it's an advantage that it's odd. And I think the charting. So I took my big grid of Apple data, and then I built a chart and a bar chart, and tried to figure out like how far to go back and i'm i'm sure that i didn't start with five years but i ended up there um i chose the colors for the product categories based on the colors in the apple rainbow so mac is blue and ipad is yellow uh services is purple mac is i've had or mac is sorry mac is yeah mac is green iphone is blue right um ipad is yellow and uh services is purple and then apple revenue is the color of money and wearables is red so i i just i picked i picked those and wearables used to be other and i'm not even sure if i did used to do charts of it but i had to at some point add the add those in so i think you said they could do a product category yeah and it would be orange which is so close to yellow that i'd really rather that they didn't but if they did that would be what we would do um but i did choose sort of like a dark green color of money for the overall apple revenue and sometimes people ask why is it green my answer is money is why.
[18:19]And so I built one and, you know, mess with the fonts. And over the years, I mean, we redesigned the site a couple years in and used a single font everywhere.
[18:31]So we decided we would, we would make that Proxima Nova, we would make, I decided Proxima Nova would go everywhere since that was the font for the site. I, there was a whole period where people like Dr. Drang wrote to me and said, On seasonal businesses like Apple's, the bars are sometimes detrimental to understanding overall trends because they're seasonal. And what you could do is try to chart a four-quarter rolling average of that, which actually kind of makes sense, right? Because it really is like, how are they doing in the last four quarters? And I tried to build a chart of that, and I didn't really like how that looked. And I eventually settled on what I have now, which is there's a four-quarter rolling average, line graph overlaid, it's at the same scale, overlaid on the bar graph so that you can see the rolling average as well as the individual thing. So it emerged over time, but it started with one that I would then, when I was sort of happy with it. I copied it, you know, and changed what data it was pointing at. And from that came one, and then eventually, I guess, two primary kinds of charts, because there's also a change chart, because investors especially really care
[19:53]
Understanding Year-over-Year Changes
[19:52]about year over year results. And so I created bar charts that are year over year revenue change to go with a gross revenue numbers.
[20:00]Backing up to the one with the line, that was actually going to be one of my questions was whether i thought that was a trend line and you know like a best fit and uh the fact that it is a rolling average that makes a lot more sense because it was
[20:13]Yeah and or it's.
[20:14]Got little points sometimes
[20:16]And what's funny about it is numbers lets you generate um yeah the points usually happen when there's a holiday quarter that's really big and it resets versus the previous holiday quarter that it's a lot more and so it kind of goes up um but it's it's a you know smoother kind of idea yeah um yeah numbers lets you automatically generate a uh four quarter like a rolling average chart but the problem is that its scope is boy this is nerdy but like it will only do the average based on the data that's in the chart that's being charted which means that it starts four quarters in because it doesn't have a four quarter average until then so what i have is a calculation set of fields in the data that calculates a four-quarter rolling average, which is why when you see where the four-quarter rolling average starts in Q2 of 2020... It's using the four previous quarters, even though you can't see them because the chart's got, I mean, the tabular data, it exists. So I have to do that manually and it's dumb, but that's just how it has evolved.
[21:24]No, that makes sense. So when you're doing this, then I'm trying to picture the spreadsheet itself. Apple numbers has these grids, like you call it on a canvas, and then you can also have separate tabs. Do you have a separate tab of the data for total apple revenue on one tab and then its chart and then the next tab over would be total apple profit in a grid and then its chart or is this one massive scrolling canvas i
[21:50]Have a tab with quarterly data going back to 2011 in it and that's all that's there it used to also have the charts in it but at some point i moved the charts into their own tab.
[21:58]Okay so all the data is in one place all the columns all
[22:03]The columns everything It's just a huge thing. And then separately, I actually have an annuals tab that has the annual fiscal year total numbers so I can generate some annual year by year charts instead. Those are in a different tab. But yeah, so that it's a huge – I mean, I can – let me – I'm going to go over there. I mean, it is –, Let's see here. Sorry, I'm making some mistakes. It goes out to column BF. So there's a lot. That's healthy, yeah. Only 69 rows. Nice, but way out there BF in terms of. And I'll get BG will be next quarter.
[22:45]Oh, okay. That's going across quarter by quarter. Okay, so all of the criteria, revenue and profit, those kind of things are in the left column. And then the columns out to BF are all of the quarters that you've done.
[22:59]Exactly.
[23:00]Okay. All right. And then each tab has its own spreadsheet. Now, is there anything in it that automates when the next quarter comes in? So you've just slapped in or typed in the first quarter 2025 results. Does that automatically change all the charts to now show that sliding one over?
[23:19]Would that it did. I have no idea how I would do that. And so a few days before the results come out, I spend half an hour clicking in each chart and making a new column and then clicking in every single chart and then moving to the other tab and then sliding the header because that will, if you slide the header, all the other selections will slide, which is a weird numbers thing where sometimes if I slide one of the things that I'm charting, the other one doesn't move. And so they get offset so the header row that is there for the labels actually will move all the data to which is just a weird quirk so i will do that every single one of those charts uh it's super repetitive it's really annoying and i have no idea how to automate that so i just that's a manual thing that and i search and replace the date right so it'll say whatever november 30th or I guess October 38, 31st, 2024. And I'll do a search and replace to January 30th, 2025. That's all the prep that I do for that. And I used to have to do more of it. I do have to...
[24:26]On the day, I have to make sure that my, because I set the height of the data and the chart manually. And so like, sometimes they have a huge record quarter and I actually have to reset the top because the top needs to be higher than it was before. Yeah. So I have to do those in the moment. And then I have a couple of charts where there are label text labels that are riding along with the data that sometimes if the data changes a lot, I need to move them a little bit to get them to be in the right place that they're readable. I used to actually have to do that with the pie chart, but the pie chart, you can do it automatically. And I do it automatically in the pie chart.
[25:02]That was something I was going to ask you. If I look at, say, the total app revenue, you've chosen to put the value down at the bottom. So it's a straight line across just above where it says Q2, Q3, Q4, it says 58.3, 59.7. You've got them across there. I love the white text on the dark background, beautiful, looks great. But on the next one, also great, total Apple profit, you've got the numbers at the peaks of the bar chart. What made you make that decision?
[25:30]I don't think there was a decision there, Allison. I think that literally, I just put them there, and it's inconsistent, and I should fix it for next time.
[25:39]Oh, no.
[25:40]Well, which one's right? Because I want it to be consistent, and I also want it to be more readable. And I think you could argue either way. I think having the numbers at the bottom means you can read them across. I think having to read the numbers at the tops of the bars, you have to go kind of up and down and up and down and up and down. And it's a little bit annoying, but I could see arguments for either one, but I have generally settled on having them at the bottom.
[26:02]Yeah. The bottom is pleasing and aesthetically, I do like that. I can just read, I can just read the peaks though. That's kind of, that's kind of a neat feature on that particular chart. But yes, I do expect that to be fixed by the next time.
[26:16]I'm on it.
[26:18]You're actually making a note on it,
[26:19]Aren't you? I'm doing it right now.
[26:23]I want my own version. So let's see, you also had to make decisions on where it's white text versus black text, like year-over-year total revenue change. You were starting to talk about that one, and I think that's a really valuable chart because just looking at the revenue numbers, it's just sort of like numbers all over the place, you know, these peaks and valleys and quarter to quarter. But when you look at the revenue change, that has a lot of information because you can see when it's down and when it's up.
[26:50]Yeah yeah i it's an important thing for in financial terms to see the change over time because you could end up seeing i know and then we're talking about derivatives basically but it's like when.
[27:03]You said derivatives i was so happy i was listening to you and dan talking about when you said derivatives to explain what a derivative is to people who didn't study calculus
[27:11]I took a year of college calculus in 1988 89 so i've forgotten it all but derivatives
[27:20]
The Importance of Rate of Change
[27:18]the idea there is that you're measuring the change and the change over time. The rate of change, yeah. And it is exactly. So in other words, when financial types will say things like, Apple is, like let's say services revenue is slowing. What they usually mean is that the rate of growth of services revenue is slowing. And so you've got to, if you look at the services chart, the purple chart, it is almost always up, And you would say, wow, that's a great business that's going great. But if you look at the year-over-year services revenue change, you will see that they used to go up 24, 27, 33, 26% per quarter year-over-year change. And then they went down to 12, 5, 6, 5, 8.
[28:09]So still growing, but the rate of change of the growth is slowing down.
[28:14]The rate of change of growth is slowing down. And that is, right? So the growth is still happening. it's just growing slower and that is it's very important for wall street people and i think that it frustrates a lot of people who don't think about it that way but that's basically it so you can get in you can make mistakes when you're trying to communicate this stuff where you start talking about down and what you mean is that the growth is down but the thing is still up it's just not up by as much as you thought and sometimes that can get frustrating for people who don't because what i do in a lot of my coverage is i don't own apple stock it's not i read about apple I can't own my Apple stock. That's my own policy. That was my employer's policy before that. I've never owned Apple stock.
[28:53]It might be in a mutual fund or something, but you don't buy the stock.
[28:55]It might be somewhere, but if it is, I don't know about it. And so, I don't view the world that way. I really cover Apple business stuff to think about the shape of Apple's business and why they make the decisions they make. If you're viewing it from the perspective of an investor, you have a completely different view of it. And that's fine. And I try to explain both to people. But that's why a lot of people who are really excited about Apple and Apple products will see like a record report come out of earnings and the stock will go down and they'll be like, why did they do that? That's so stupid. It's like, well, I can tell you why. It's because in the call and in the release, they did a projection of what their results are going to be next quarter. And it was less than the people who bought the stock thought it would be. And so the stock went down a little bit. That's it. It's just, it's a different kind of worldview. And the numbers, the revenue chart and the revenue change chart sort of reflected. Also, I think it can be useful. I mean, right now we're talking a lot about Apple. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg has been reporting a lot about Apple trying to push... Into new areas in the wearables home and accessory space, specifically in smart home and building new home products. And I think one of the ways you can understand why that would be the case is if you look at the year-over-year wearables revenue change, wearables home and accessories.
[30:11]Because it slowed down.
[30:13]For years, it was going double digits up, and then it was going single digits, and then all of a sudden it was actually going down by a little bit. And that's the kind of thing that you look at and say, oh, somebody at Apple is like, why are we not growing in that category anymore? And again, all those numbers that are down, they're still making a huge amount of money, right? It's still a huge amount of their business. It's bigger than the Mac or the iPad, in fact.
[30:43]But it's not growing.
[30:45]But it has not grown in two years. And so if you are thinking about that, that's the thing that is the red alert flashing saying, my guess is when they started hitting those down eight, down one, up two, down three kind of era, they're like, we got to do something here.
[31:03]
Analyzing Apple's Business Strategy
[31:00]And just, you know, more AirPods, isn't it? And the Vision Pro is not it. So, you know, maybe the home category is a place we can, we can, and I imagine that is one of the big motivators in them doing that.
[31:11]Now you switched, in this case, you do the numbers, the percentages at the tops and bottoms. There's no way you could put it across, just across the axis. This one makes sense.
[31:20]I don't think it would be readable. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the idea there is just I wanted it somewhere. So it's outside the bars and the span of the chart leaves enough white space at the top and the bottom so that it can be readable in that scenario. And, you know, this is one of the – it brings up one of the other issues of charting, which is what do you show like –.
[31:43]Bad charts don't show all the data at the bottom. And so you end up in a scenario where if you take a chart, like I've got the, let's say, you know, I take any of these. If we take the iPad revenue chart, and instead of having the bottom of the bar be zero, the bottom of the bar is four and a half billion. Then you've got a chart that looks like some quarters Apple didn't sell any iPads, which is not true. And it looks like any rate of change suddenly gets magnified where it's like, oh my god they doubled and it's like well they didn't double they went up 1 billion but you didn't see the other 5 billion below the waterline and so there are a lot of misleading charts you could do that way so sometimes so like the scale of my charts is not the same um but they all do start at zero and that's why is because you really just need to see the entire context of that number.
[32:35]Similarly you know i want to i want to position the revenue change charts in a way that is understandable i i would love if it would let me sort of like even draw a line at zero but it mostly you can see that it's zero is where the bars either go up or they go down and i try to position that where there's enough white space that you can see the the the words top or bottom and you can see the again that's one of those cases where i need to manually position the bottom of the chart so that um you can see how far down it goes for like there was a 21 down iphone And there was a 34% down Mac, and I need those to fit in the chart. So I just adjust those as we go.
[33:18]I hadn't thought about this white space you put in. You put in some of them at white space, but not all of them. Like wearables is showing a lot of white space above. Is that just because the numbers are fairly tight to the line, whereas in some of the other ones, it's way up?
[33:33]Yeah. And honestly, the wearables numbers were probably larger six years ago and seven years ago. and I calibrated it then and I'm just gonna, I'm gonna leave it until I need to change it again.
[33:42]Well, yeah, because that home category is gonna go through the roof.
[33:45]I mean, you never know. Yeah. So, but these are, honestly, a lot of these answers are, I don't sit and rethink every single chart every single time. If it's working, I kind of let it go and I don't worry about it. And because it is a manual process, that's sort of, it happens organically, let's say that.
[34:06]Yeah, I think that makes sense. I mean, unless it starts to misrepresent the information, I wouldn't think you'd need to change it. Now, let's talk about one of my favorite chart styles that can be really confusing if done poorly, and that's Serape charts, where you add up a bunch of different things together and it always goes to 100%. So as one goes up and down, it looks like a Serape. It's a Mexican piece of clothing that's got a design, I should say. And so you've got iPad across the bottom, then Mac, then wearable services and iPhone. Now, I'm guessing that there was a decision in what order those go in, because if you start with the most volatile one, then the information on all the other bands is harder to see.
[34:50]Yeah, that's it. The truth is, services is not volatile, and I should probably put it at the bottom. But it's also the second largest, which makes me want to kind of leave it where it is. Because what I'm trying to convey with this chart is mostly what are the ones with the most color? Because that's giving you, to come back to the fact that my charts are at different scales. If I charted every revenue source on the same scale, most of them would be unreadable because of the iPhone. And once a year, I do a chart in the annuals. At the very bottom, I do all my annual charts. Once a year, I do a chart. Of all of apple's revenue lines on the same scale and the chart is hilariously tall, but i do it so people can see hey look at the iphone and then way down there is everything else because the iphone is so huge so part of my purpose here with this is not really to show, a lot of detail over change over time because yes it makes services look spiky in a way that it's not it's actually the iphone that is spiky that's what i thought i do want to get across i do want to get across, wow, there's a lot of blue there. And then there's a lot of purple. And then there are these thin, you know, thin layers of wearable Mac and iPod, and that's it. But I might move services to the bottom because it is so stable. And that's part of the idea.
[36:20]Yeah. When I looked at that, I did interpret that as services being spiky, but of course, it's the iPhone that's causing it to look spiky. If you're taking votes, I would see it down lower, But you're right. Well, it would also show the rate of growth of services as a percentage of revenue, too, if it was on the bottom.
[36:42]Yeah, it depends on what you're trying to get across there. So, that's a thing for me to think about.
[36:48]Whatever is at the top right before iPhone is going to look spiky.
[36:52]Yeah, it's absolutely, because the iPhone is so seasonal.
[36:54]So, if you move it, wearables is going to look spiky. You can't win on that one. Um let's see what else did i want to ask you about so far i am getting that this is really easy to do and doesn't take any skill talent or patience right
[37:09]Oh yeah super easy.
[37:12]Oh i did love that you referred to the soropet chart you called it a parfait that might be an even better name with the with the colors that you've chosen yeah
[37:22]Sure. I mean, it's layers. That's what we're doing here. Just making layers.
[37:28]It's all layers. Well, one of the things I really liked, you've probably always done this, but I made sure to watch in Jason's post about the revenue for Q1 2025. He's got a video of him and Dan Morin discussing the charts. And that's the real value. I could follow a lot of it in the charts, but when I hear you talk about it, that's when I can find out, like, to me, and I said I wasn't going to talk about the current information, but the gross margin change from five years ago at 38.4% to 46.9%. That's something that comes out in the chart if you look at the numbers, but I almost think, like, a big red arrow going, holy cannoli right there.
[38:17]Yeah. And I thought about actually making that a stack, which I don't have as a style because, because or, or some finding another way to get across the idea that products
[38:33]
Visualizing Profit Margins
[38:30]gross margin is up a little bit and services gross margin is up a lot. And also services is growing a lot, which means that a higher percentage of the gross margin is services. And so that lifts that, but like, So I'm thinking about it every now and then. But for now, this is actually one of my newest charts, if not my newest chart. And I think I had a two profit and gross margin charts.
[38:55]And it's an interesting thing to track, which is just, you know, what's Apple's profit margin? And it's enormous. I mean, the company is almost making 50% profit on everything it does. And it's actually what it is, is it's more like 30-something percent profit on its products and some ludicrous 70% or whatever on 80% on its services. It's a huge number. So, yeah, I try to think about things that could be visualized that are in the data that I can get out. And every now and then I try something. And a lot of times it never sees the light of day because it's not anything worth anything. But that and like i said this is one i'm actually grappling with because i realize that this chart is misleading in the sense that it it could imply that all apple's margins are up a lot and that, like i said earlier it's more complicated because it's mostly driven by the services margins so i need to i need to find a way to visualize that and present that in a different way yeah.
[40:00]I think one of the challenges is you're working with a company that changes the rules. I mean, first of all, let's just say 38% profit margin on product is banana pants. That's incredibly good. But knowing that services has gone up into the 70% kind of range is also changing the rules. Because when you started doing this, services wasn't a big thing, right? So now all of a sudden The graph has to exist that didn't need to exist back then.
[40:30]A lot of things have changed. In fact, I wrote, there's a chart that I now generate that I generate because I wrote an article, I think three months ago, it might have been six months ago, when one of these things happened. And it got some pickup. It was kind of interesting. And I approached it in a very kind of calm, analytical way. I knew that some people were going to freak out about it because that's the internet.
[40:57]All I was observing is that one of these quarters, Apple's profits will derive more from services than products. And my question was, at what point does this change, if it does, change how we perceive Apple as a company? If they are actually making more profit from services than from the products they sell. Now, there's a lot of complicated thoughts there about the fact that the truth is the services revenue. You could pretend that it's unhinged from the products, but it's not true. Every bit of services revenue is coming from somebody who's bought and uses, you know, at least one and maybe multiple Apple products. So it's really not like that. But still, I was thinking about it. And so I made a chart. I actually charted out profit over product and services to see if I could see what it was looking like. And the answer is on those big spiky iPhone holiday quarters, it's nowhere near. But in the third quarter of last year third fiscal quarter when i wrote this article that's when it was they came really close together wow and i have this chart now so that i can observe when that if if it if it ever crosses over um the total profit coming from services instead of product one.
[42:14]Of my favorite
[42:15]I mean so sometimes i chart because i'm thinking about it i did there was a period in there where I challenged myself. And for about a year, I did a chart every week of something I called a fun with charts, I would sit down on a on a Friday afternoon, and I would think what chart am I going to make? And some of them were good. And some were super dumb. But it was an interesting exercise to do that.
[42:38]
The Value of Data Visualization
[42:35]That's that is really fun. I think that's why I know you're my people. Because to me, working in a spreadsheet and Charting things, to some extent, gives you information that you don't see when you just look at the numbers. I got to ask you, are you a pivot table fan?
[42:50]No. And in fact, I am not a data wonk at all. And I don't feel truly comfortable in a spreadsheet. I know how to drive them. But I am one of those people for whom staring at the numbers does not impart information. And so I feel like it is necessary to find ways to visualize it so that people can understand what is going on. But that's how I approach it.
[43:18]I look at that in the same vein, but the pivot table gets me to a spot where I can then chart it and see what it means. So, for example, I was playing with there's some data available from the U.S. Government where you can download everything there is to know about everything about electric vehicles, like charging stations for like what are they for light duty trucks? Are they for buses? Are they for what kind of vehicles? What companies have which chargers? How many? It's this massive data set. So if you download it, you can't learn anything. But if you do a pivot table on it, you can say, okay, what if I restricted it by this and this and this? Could I get a data set that then now I could graph it and see what it means? I take the top 10 in this category and then make a graph of that, and then I could see what it means. For me, it helps when there's too much information to be able to make a good chart. And that's where it kind of jumps out. So I think pivot tables are the bomb.
[44:16]All right yeah so they haven't i i view it all much more utilitarian where if i find a need for it i'll learn how to do it but otherwise i'm just gonna kind of i'm a very two-dimensional table table uh person okay.
[44:28]Well if you ever get to that point you could definitely call me i'll teach
[44:31]You how to now i know somebody who loves them they're.
[44:33]Super fun well i gotta say your six colors charts are a national international treasure and if people wanted to learn more about them they would go to six colors.com i'll have a link in the show notes directly to the latest ones with the video with Dan Morin. Is there anything else you'd want people to know, follow you online, anything like that, or just read everything you write?
[44:55]
Automation in Chart Management
[44:52]Yeah, I mean, that's great. Sixcolors.com links to everything I want. There is one thing that we have not talked about that I'm going to mention because it was a lot of work, and we've gotten to the end, and I feel like I need to mention the final method by which this gets on the website.
[45:08]Oh, yeah.
[45:11]Because, Allison, where we left this, I have a tab in numbers full of charts. And yet somehow on my website, there are charts as images in a webpage. Oh boy. I used to take a screenshot of every single chart and then name them and then upload them by hand via FTP to my website. And then generate the HTML with the image tag. I don't do that anymore. So what I did was I, there's not a lot you can automate really well in numbers, but you can, one of the things you can do is tell it to print a PDF. And so I actually have a script. There's an Apple script version and there is a shortcuts version that works fine too.
[45:59]It tells numbers to output a PDF of the document. Uh, all one, each tab on a, on its own page, it deletes all the other pages that aren't the page with the charts on it. And then it runs that through a PDF to image, uh, command that generates a giant ping of all my charts. And then the script walks through the ping. And based on numbers that i have calculated out i've got little rules on my uh on my chart invisible rules that i use to like measure the pixels i generated a grid by xy coordinates uh and it and it grabs each single one in that grid and slices them and saves them out as pings at the right size optimizing the ping, and my favorite thing that i added it actually looks at the file size and if the file size is below like 100 bytes so it's an empty square because they're not all full it just deletes that one it doesn't make that one um, And then it walks through the output, or it's been saving the output as it's been writing them.
[47:17]And then it uses those file names that it's generating to generate a blob of HTML code, which has like the figure tag and the image tag. It's what I use on six colors. And actually based on the location, because I know that now, it puts alt text in saying what chart that is. And so what happens is when I get all my charts in good shape, I double click on this automator action on my Mac or a shortcut on my iPad. But only when I'm traveling am I doing that. Basically, I'm using this automator action. And it's called Apple Charts Export and Upload. The reason it's called that is I can never remember the name of it. And I always type Apple. So Apple is the first thing.
[48:00]And it runs it it does all of that it sections them all off it spews them all out onto my desktop and then it ftps them or now it uploads them via a web xml interface to wordpress which is what i use now um and puts the result on the clipboard and then it beeps and then i put it in my post so and if there's a problem and i need to do it again i also have a version called apple charts export only that will just spew new versions onto my desktop and i can upload those manually to fix a typo or something that I did wrong. So that took a long time to build. But let me tell you, I probably built that like eight years ago. It's paid off. It is really paid off. So I wish there was a better way. That's the other thing I will leave you with is I've thought about using other systems to build these charts. And the problem is I would have to rebuild everything. And I got to be honest.
[48:51]Most of it, like their websites that'll do it that I don't like the output. I'm not happy with the output. I think that there are lots of different, like I could build a Python script that would generate charts. They would not look as nice. Or if they would, I, I just, I have not seen charts from those kinds of outputs that looked good enough to replace the charts that numbers gives me. And so I would love to automate this even more, but I'm in a pretty good place where it's only a few things that I have to do by hand. And so just anyway, that's the piece de resistance of the entire thing is I have a script that sections it all out and posts it. So I don't have to do taking screenshots because taking like 20 screenshots when you feel like you're under the gun and it's.
[49:39]Oh, and they're never the same size and they're just. Yeah, exactly.
[49:44]Unless you get the marquee right there. They're all a little bit too tall or a little bit too wide. And then they go in a column and they're resized. And they're not, all that is done for me now. I sat down one day and yeah, I output that image and then I counted the pixels. But now it just, and in fact, if you looked at my numbers file, it's got horizontal and vertical rules. Those are the slices. I know that those are where the slices are. So if I make a new one, I make sure it's positioned. And in fact, one of my little areas, there's an orange rectangle. And the orange rectangle is literally something I created eight years ago or whenever I did this to say, um this is how big a chart should be oh it's literally just a placeholder of like this is what the chart size is for all my scripts and everything so anyway that's the that's the non-charting yet super relevant part of this is if i if i oh if i didn't have that um that script i'd be real sad that is.
[50:41]I'm really sad that i didn't think to ask that question that is the obvious
[50:46]
Behind the Scenes of the Script
[50:45]question. That is super nerdy. Now, how do you feel about sharing the contents of that script to put you on the...
[50:53]I may have written about it at six colors. I would have to go look, but I would bet you that I have.
[51:00]Because I'm sure as proud of it as you are, you would have written it up to go, look what I figured out.
[51:05]I try. Yeah, I try to do that when I do user scripting stuff on my website. But basically, it's, you know, the Mac version that I use most of the time, it's an automator with, you know, there's an Apple script that exports the PDF. There's an automator action that renders it as an image and then there's an apple.
[51:25]Script that that's the piece that i want to see is how it finds the charts
[51:28]That's crazy i mean it's like i literally have a an array called the columns that's uh the pixels of the column, locations where the where they start and i have an array that is the rows that is the pixel of where the rows start and then it just, repeats through those arrays as X and Y coordinates and slices them all out.
[51:55]No, you can't worry that anybody would steal this because they could never, theirs would never look like yours, so it wouldn't work on anything else.
[52:02]This is not the part that anybody would steal. Yeah, it's fine. I tend to post this stuff because I think you too You may have a problem where you're like, how do I get things out of numbers or whatever? And then the answer is with great difficulty, but it can't be done.
[52:19]But if you do it once, yeah, no, that is so dirty. I love it.
[52:23]I wish there was a web-based tool. I wish there was something that was more accessible than a flat image, which, you know, if you use a screen reader or something, it's basically empty. You can't see it. I wish there was something that was like that, that also satisfied me in terms of the presentation, but I've never seen it. and every couple of years I look and I just shake my head and I go back to my charts.
[52:44]
Exploring Jason's Online Presence
[52:45]Well, they do look fantastic. And now I already said all those nice things at the end. Is there any place people should look beyond sixcolors.com?
[52:52]I mean, I've got podcasts, upgrade at relay.fm and the incomparable.com is where my pop culture podcasts are. But if you go to six colors.com slash Jason, you can actually, that's a page with literally everything I do.
[53:07]Great. This is so much fun. I really appreciate you taking the time and I enjoyed the heck out of learning all about the six colors charts.
[53:14]I'm happy somebody cares because I just keep this all on the inside, Allison. I don't, nobody cares except me, but I do care. So thank you for asking about all the stuff I do to make the charts.
[53:26]I was hoping that's how you'd react. I have a feeling the audience is going to like it too, but thanks again.
[53:30]Sure, thank you.
[53:31]I hope you enjoyed this episode of Chit Chat Across the Pond. Did you notice there weren't any ads in the show? That's because this show is not ad supported. It's supported by you. If you learned something or maybe you were just entertained, consider contributing to the PodFeed podcast. You can do that by going over to podfeed.com and look for the big red button that says support the show. When you click that button, you're going to find different ways to contribute. You can donate one time through the big donate button with a credit card or Apple Pay, or you can use PayPal. If you want to make a recurring contribution, click the Patreon button. Keep in mind, I don't charge Patreon for chitchat across the pond or program by stealth episodes. just once a month for the nocilicast.
[54:12]That keeps it simple.
[54:13]If you want to contact me for any reason, you can email me at alisonandpodfeed.com and you can follow me on Mastodon at podfeed.com slash Mastodon.
[54:22]Music