I appreciate that Apple are a business and they're there to sell and profit.
I've been an Apple customer since the 80's and supported the company by continuing to buy its products during the difficult years.
That said, their prices continue to increase, to a point that in my opinion, is excessive today. I had been purchasing a new iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad Pro and MacBook Pro as well as services every year without fail for a decade plus.
The past year was the first time I decided to pull the plug on that - not because the money isn't there - rather in response to the ever increasing prices and eye gouging (in my opinion). I feel that my loyalty is being taken advantage of. Pulled the plug on Apple Music and happily using Spotify as well.
I'll happily continue to use Apple products, because frankly they're the best. However they won't be extracting anywhere near the money they have been over the vears.
Apple isn’t Google, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, or LG they can’t afford to charge their prices for the things that they do, Apple has a lot more going on.
And Here come the psychoses fueled stock analyses.
Probably, but the numbers are well within what any reasonable person should have expected.
I considered a new iPhone for Christmas but prices across the board were too high to justify a purchase. I'm sure many, many people were in a similar situation.
Mac revenue was down but, post pandemic, that is understandable too.
If we are going to call this 'a miss' it's because that's what it is, but not to the point of management even needing to prepare the markets beforehand. Everyone in the industry is suffering from the same underlying issues.
The 'good' news is that given the prolonged nature of the forecast downturn, Apple might drop prices or get aggressive on promotions.
Dream on about price drops, let Spotify lose money or Netflix, promotions? can Apple or Microsoft, or Google, be promoted at any higher level? The answer is no.
Can’t sell what you haven’t made maybe this might get Apple to release their full range of computers using the M2 or the M3 families of SOC‘s within the same calendar year, there are many people waiting for the rest of the range to be released before upgrading, i.e., a bigger, screen iMac, or a Mac Pro, everyone who wants a laptop or an iPad got theirs, but there are many other people who want something that they haven’t released i.e., the bigger screen iMac, or the Mac Pro, can’t sell what you haven’t made.
Price drops already happened. They just weren't worldwide. China took most of the discounts because China is a huge market and all handset players are suffering except one and that is Honor, not Apple.
The Christmas period creates artificial demand and now that is over it will be a long wait to September. If demand for iPhone (Apple’s biggest revenue generator by a huge margin) slacks I can guarantee you those discounts and/or promotions will be released worldwide.
That is exactly what happened when Apple issued its last profit warning which, by coincidence, occurred during the Christmas period.
Discounts were plunked on its front page before Christmas Day. That was unheard of and wasn't that long ago.
All EU indicators point to disposable income being in short supply due to rising inflation, stimulated by high energy prices (both direct and indirect). We're still in winter. China is showing no signs of recovery.
If you have followed Apple over the years, you would have figured out that Apple does not drop the price. They usually will make something and put more features into it and keep it at the same price.
The bitching about Apple’s prices is incessant. Financial analyst’s have always expressed the thought that Apple should drop their prices and pick up marketshare, and that’s something that they will probably never do they’re not interested in marketshare.
Apple is only interested in profit share and building the best products they can, expecting some massive price drop to be in line with the Clone makers or the Android market just isn’t going to happen and this quarter’s results again have shown that they don’t have too the problem this quarter isn’t the price the problem is the availability of supply.
If you live in Europe, or any place else where the dollar isn’t your currency you will pay for any fluctuation in price or taxes levied and it will be added to the bill. Going forward Apple’s market share in Europe will be probably less than 23%, only the upper crust will be buying Apple products, Europe will be like everywhere else it will be Android country like most of the Third World.
Apple regularly drops pricing but only in select markets. It tries to avoid it and zealously oversees resellers' attempts to do their own thing to shift units. It's on the hook in the EU precisely for that practice.
Most discounting is done in China but my wife's XR (current model at the time), purchased at a Spanish Apple Store, was discounted by 100€ on top of a special trade-in offer that wasn't available via the online store. In fact, I called the online store to find out the new trade-in value but they said I would have to visit the retail store to get the special prices. This was an Apple thing and not the usual outsourced company that handled trade-ins.
Do they ever talk about cash flows during these calls? Virtually the first thing you learn in Finance 101 is that “cash is king”. Net Income is a construct of accounting rules which you need to do to calculate tax liabilities but once those taxes are known a security analyst is going to back out all those accounting operations to determine the actual cash flows to determine asset valuation. It’s the difference between finance vs. accounting.
It’s in the press release - $34 billion in operating cash flow.
Comments
Apple isn’t Google, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, or LG they can’t afford to charge their prices for the things that they do, Apple has a lot more going on.
Most discounting is done in China but my wife's XR (current model at the time), purchased at a Spanish Apple Store, was discounted by 100€ on top of a special trade-in offer that wasn't available via the online store. In fact, I called the online store to find out the new trade-in value but they said I would have to visit the retail store to get the special prices. This was an Apple thing and not the usual outsourced company that handled trade-ins.