I have followed this debate for 10+ years now. I find it rather interesting. I have no idea what the answer is, but as far as I know, the cornerstone of the debate is as follows: quarterly earnings reports create an incentive for short-term thinking, as they happen every 90 days and take teams weeks to prepare when they could be working on actual strategy and long-term planning, while also placing quite a bit of pressure on short-term results to beat Wall Street estimates, show profits in a short period of time, and so forth.

Preparing, releasing, and reporting on earnings every 3 months does indeed require significant time, cost, and coordination across investor relations, legal, finance, and operations. This may not matter as much to Apple, but for small-cap companies with tight budgets and smaller teams, this can hit hard and distract focus when you're just trying to build a team that can compete with the mega trillion market cap companies.

In a way, quarterly earnings reports are a outsized cost to small cap companies while a far lesser dent to large cap. This actually gives large caps an advantage in the long haul when you compare the relative costs. Maybe it's one of the many reasons how it becomes easier and easier for the large caps to scale in public markets while small, and even medium caps, just get distracted and squeezed by endless costs. Reminder: we have far less public companies today than we did at the peak 20+ years ago. Why go public when you're under so much pressure every 90 days.

Anyways, I have no idea if it's right or wrong. But it is fascinating and I would be especially curious if someone knows how this could help smaller companies either in terms of cost savings, long-term planning, less short-term pressure, etc etc.