Price is THE decider on whether this headset will be a success. This author - and others who’ve made the same point that Apple has had supposed failures many times before turn into successes - doesn’t seem to realize this. When has Apple *ever* introduced a completely new product category at an initial price point of $3k? Maybe the original Apple 2 (adjusted for inflation) - but nothing since then. Sure, there are several niche “pro” products in THS range and beyond, but nothing with hoped for mass market appeal. And Apple clearly wants this to eventually become the next iPhone. And I think the AR glasses originally promised for this timeframe had/has this potential - but not some dorky headset costing as much as a used car.
The decider will be the hardware and software integration, and the quality of the programs designed to use the capabilities of the device, if Apple has those things nailed down, then the device will succeed, however no matter what price Apple sets, it will be too much and the complaining will go on and on because many people will want it, but will not be able to afford it.
Even to this day, there are still many financial analysts who think Apple should drop their prices on all products to pick up more marketshare, which, if you know anything about Apple, you know that isn’t their way of doing business.
Yeah, well, remember when all the analysts said that Apple is Doomed™ if they don't release a netbook?
IMO, the lack of a true netbook was a huge miss. As was the original iMac with only USB1. As was, ironically, the delay in getting USB2 onto Macs. As was not buying Netflix. As was not opening up firewire. As was fiasco on 5G/QC...
Let's not forget the whole concept of NetBoot and where that could have gone for business and education.
The question should not be if Apple was doomed because of those 'errors' but how much more they could have achieved by following through with some moves.
How did that work out for netbook makers? Fizzled out before they ever achieved any decent profits.
Even Apple dropped their 11” MBA because it wasn’t popular enough at that size.
Now there's an ARM version of Windows and SoCs are considerably more powerful and power efficient, but you don't see netbooks making a comeback. Perhaps that's because it was never a great idea.
The product category evolved. Just like the iPod.
There was enough business to go around for many companies to sell their products for years before tablets caught on and phones became more versatile. And of course regular laptops are going for very low prices nowadays.
Tablets of course required a physical keyboard to get close to what a netbook could do and were way behind when it came to could be presented through a browser.
But the error here for Apple wasn't simply competing in that space but using the product as a hook to catch users. And then the possibility of following through on the NetBoot promise via OSX Server.
That was a lost opportunity.
And none of those are netbooks. Netbooks failed miserably. End of story.
It's evolution and netbooks were a huge success and had huge demand in there hey day. 2008/9 saw global sales triple, hitting a high of around 35 million. There was a time when all you basically saw were netbooks.
It's obvious why, too.
More hyperbole.
At its peak, netbooks were 20% of the market, but given how short a time span netbooks were "popular", they were a fail. Consumers bought them because they were cheap, but then they realized that they were limited.
Nobody bought a netbook thinking it was remotely more than it was.
Yes, they bought them mainly because they were cheap. That was the whole point.
They had their moment and were a huge success.
No hyperbole. No fail.
They served a purpose and Apple could have used them in various ways to stimulate further growth.
As it was, a $500 iPad came along and people swiftly looked for keyboards for them. And still do for anything more than passive or casual use.
And yet...Apple is the most valuable (publicly-traded) company in the world. It appears they survived this "missed opportunity."
And now back to "As you may expect, the internet already says that Apple's headset is doomed, apparently."
And let's not forget that the market cap has nothing really to do with laptops or iPads.
Nothing? Nothing at all? I agree that a majority of Apple's market cap is attributable to iPhone, but not 100%. Certainly, some of their market cap is attributable to their laptops and iPads.
Zippo. ;-)
The iPad and Laptops are part of the billion dollar Apple, not the trillion dollar Apple.
Okay. Sure. Whatever.
Without the ecosystem, without the decades of makes macOS (nee Mac OS X, nee NeXTSTEP) there would be no iOS. We all know that Apple competed internally to see whether macOS could be made into a mobile OS over the iPod's PIxo OS.
In an alternate reality where the iPod somehow existed but the Mac never did I guess it would be Pixo OS as the basis for the iPhone which likely means a failure of the product, no iPad, and possibly no Apple today as I'm certain the smartphone revolution would've eventually taken off.
But some people want to think the Mac means nothing to Apple's success over the decades. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I bet Steve Balmer winces every time he reads his quote saying the iphone had no chance of gaining significant market share.
I'm sure he's crying all the way to the bank. One of the ones he owns.
Maybe he's not, but I bet Microsoft is. He's the exact reason why Microsoft was completely left out of the smartphone space. He never took its competitors seriously and when you have companies like Apple entering your space you damn well better sit up straight and pay attention.
Suppose you'd invested $1,000 in Microsoft on June 29, 2007, when the iPhone was introduced. What do you suppose it would be worth today?
At Friday's market close, that would now be $20,703.70.
Of course, by calculating the same metric, $1,000 in Apple on that day is now worth (are you sitting down?): $1,206,333.33
I doubt Microsoft is crying. But I bet Apple is popping the corks on Dom Perignon Vintage 2007! (BTW, it's because, adjusted for splits, Apple stock was worth 15¢/share on the day the iPhone was introduced. Microsoft was worth $16.20, over 100 times as much as Apple). Each currently have a market cap. approaching $3 trillion. Put away the kleenex!
Your numbers are way off!
You seem to be applying the splits to numbers that had already been accounted for the splits.
In June of 2007, AAPL was about $140 and MFST was about $24. (split adjusted that would be $4.95 for AAPL)
$1000 invested in each in 2007 would get you 7 shares of AAPL at $140 and 20 shares of MSFT at $41 ( NOT using $4.95 for AAPL)
Accounting for splits, today you would have 196 shares of AAPL (7 x 7 x 4) and 20 shares of MSFT
At today shares prices, that would be about $35,500 of AAPL (196 x $181) and about $6,700 of MSFT (20 x $336)
Adjusted for splits on Jun 2007 ..... AAPL would be about $5.00 and MSFT would be about $24 (share price alone can not be use to determine "worth" between the two.)
In 2007, Apple had a market cap of about $150B and Microsoft had a market cap of about $330B. So in 2007 Microsoft was "worth" only about twice that of Apple. But it took only 3 more years (in 2010) for Apple over take Microsoft in market cap. Apple went up from $150B to $222B while Microsoft went down from $330B to $220B.
The comparing of current market caps between Apple and Microsoft is little misleading because in the past 10 years, Apple have bought back 10's of billions of dollars more of their AAPL shares than Microsoft have bought back their own MSFT shares. The number of outstanding shares is used to calculate the market cap. Apple been decreasing their outstanding shares at a much greater rate than Microsoft over the last 10 years.
BTW- I knew your numbers were off when you said that AAPL (after accounting for splits) would be at $.15 in 2007 when the iPhone came out. I knew that couldn't be right because the shares of AAPL that I bought when Jobs returned in 1998, cost me about $.17, split adjusted. And that included a 2 for 1 split in 2000 and another 2 for 1 in 2005, that would not have been included in 2007. It's $1000 invested in 1998 when AAPL was at about $20, that would be worth $1,000,000 today. Just 1 share of AAPL in 1998, would be 112 shares today. (if you didn't sell any on the way.)
Now i'm screwing up. Not invested in MSFT, so hadn't really followed the stocks over the years. Except when articles compares it to AAPL.
in the above ... It should be .....
MSFT in June 2007 was at about $29 a share and $1000 invested in 2007 would get you 34 shares of MSFT. With no splits since then, that would be about $11,500 today, at about $336 a share.
I bet Steve Balmer winces every time he reads his quote saying the iphone had no chance of gaining significant market share.
I'm sure he's crying all the way to the bank. One of the ones he owns.
Maybe he's not, but I bet Microsoft is. He's the exact reason why Microsoft was completely left out of the smartphone space. He never took its competitors seriously and when you have companies like Apple entering your space you damn well better sit up straight and pay attention.
Suppose you'd invested $1,000 in Microsoft on June 29, 2007, when the iPhone was introduced. What do you suppose it would be worth today?
At Friday's market close, that would now be $20,703.70.
Of course, by calculating the same metric, $1,000 in Apple on that day is now worth (are you sitting down?): $1,206,333.33
I doubt Microsoft is crying. But I bet Apple is popping the corks on Dom Perignon Vintage 2007! (BTW, it's because, adjusted for splits, Apple stock was worth 15¢/share on the day the iPhone was introduced. Microsoft was worth $16.20, over 100 times as much as Apple). Each currently have a market cap. approaching $3 trillion. Put away the kleenex!
It seems like you looked up AAPL's share price in June of 2007 and then divided by 28. That would be the right thing to do, since there have been two stock splits since then, one of them 4-1 and the other 7-1.
So you looked it up and found that it was about 4 dollars and change. Then you divided by 28 to get your value of 15 cents.
The problem is whatever you used to look it up had already accounted for the splits. The 4 dollars and change was already split-equivalent. (The price of the pre-split shares on that day was in the mid-120's.)
So the stock has essentially grown by a factor of: $180(ish) divided by $4.50(ish) = 40(ish)
So if you had invested $1000 on that a day, you would now have somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000, not $1.2 M.
Apple's AR headset hasn't been announced yet and there are already those who insist it is a flop that is dead on arrival -- just like they said with the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and even the Mac.
My tech memory goes as far back as the 1984 Mac and I don't recall potential users saying that. Their complaints were generally that the technology was great but the cost too high. I know I wanted an IPhone as soon as it was announced, but I had to wait for the 3gs before one bought used fit my budget.
The failure predictions didn't come from potential buyers. They came from competitors who had nothing similar to offer. I tried Sony's music player. It was far interior to the iPod. And all Microsoft executives could do when the iPhone was released was whine that it lacked a tiny physical keyboard.
The problem with this AR headset isn't just its price, likely to be about what I paid for my new Mac Studio. It's that it is seen as a niche product, useful only for specialized applications. All the products you claimed were sneered at actually addressed a very felt need by the public. This headset does not.
The Apple Watch took quite a while to catch on. Regardless of reason, the general public did not understand its purpose when it was launched. Only a small fraction jumped on it for the health tracking aspect, but it took a while for those features to be properly enhanced and/or marketed. There was a need, but it wasn't "a very felt need by the public', as you put it. Now it sells 40 M units per year and is a definitive success.
It's entirely possible that the headset will go down the same road, i.e. address a need that is there but not entirely obvious to everyone at this particular moment.
Comments
In an alternate reality where the iPod somehow existed but the Mac never did I guess it would be Pixo OS as the basis for the iPhone which likely means a failure of the product, no iPad, and possibly no Apple today as I'm certain the smartphone revolution would've eventually taken off.
But some people want to think the Mac means nothing to Apple's success over the decades. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You seem to be applying the splits to numbers that had already been accounted for the splits.
In June of 2007, AAPL was about $140 and MFST was about $24. (split adjusted that would be $4.95 for AAPL)
$1000 invested in each in 2007 would get you 7 shares of AAPL at $140 and 20 shares of MSFT at $41 ( NOT using $4.95 for AAPL)
Accounting for splits, today you would have 196 shares of AAPL (7 x 7 x 4) and 20 shares of MSFT
At today shares prices, that would be about $35,500 of AAPL (196 x $181) and about $6,700 of MSFT (20 x $336)
Adjusted for splits on Jun 2007 ..... AAPL would be about $5.00 and MSFT would be about $24 (share price alone can not be use to determine "worth" between the two.)
In 2007, Apple had a market cap of about $150B and Microsoft had a market cap of about $330B. So in 2007 Microsoft was "worth" only about twice that of Apple. But it took only 3 more years (in 2010) for Apple over take Microsoft in market cap. Apple went up from $150B to $222B while Microsoft went down from $330B to $220B.
The comparing of current market caps between Apple and Microsoft is little misleading because in the past 10 years, Apple have bought back 10's of billions of dollars more of their AAPL shares than Microsoft have bought back their own MSFT shares. The number of outstanding shares is used to calculate the market cap. Apple been decreasing their outstanding shares at a much greater rate than Microsoft over the last 10 years.
BTW- I knew your numbers were off when you said that AAPL (after accounting for splits) would be at $.15 in 2007 when the iPhone came out. I knew that couldn't be right because the shares of AAPL that I bought when Jobs returned in 1998, cost me about $.17, split adjusted. And that included a 2 for 1 split in 2000 and another 2 for 1 in 2005, that would not have been included in 2007. It's $1000 invested in 1998 when AAPL was at about $20, that would be worth $1,000,000 today. Just 1 share of AAPL in 1998, would be 112 shares today. (if you didn't sell any on the way.)
in the above ... It should be .....
MSFT in June 2007 was at about $29 a share and $1000 invested in 2007 would get you 34 shares of MSFT. With no splits since then, that would be about $11,500 today, at about $336 a share.
So you looked it up and found that it was about 4 dollars and change. Then you divided by 28 to get your value of 15 cents.
The problem is whatever you used to look it up had already accounted for the splits. The 4 dollars and change was already split-equivalent. (The price of the pre-split shares on that day was in the mid-120's.)
So the stock has essentially grown by a factor of: $180(ish) divided by $4.50(ish) = 40(ish)
So if you had invested $1000 on that a day, you would now have somewhere in the neighborhood of $40,000, not $1.2 M.
You accounted for the 28-1 split twice.
It's entirely possible that the headset will go down the same road, i.e. address a need that is there but not entirely obvious to everyone at this particular moment.