Wall Street was completely unaware, but I have a prediction. The M4 Mac mini (Studio) is poised to become a surprising and significant sales success for Apple. It might just be the computer of the year. The initial enthusiasm for this computer appears to be unprecedented, as it seems to be striking a perfect balance between value and performance. The usual jaded tech forums were shockingly enthusiastic.
It might end up being a great computer but it's not out yet (and likely not coming out until Q2 2025).
It's important to understand that >85% of Mac unit sales are notebook models. This has been the case for 15+ years. For the desktop systems, the iMac and Mac mini have more unit sales than the Mac Pro and relatively new Mac Studio.
Mac sales are 8% of Apple's total revenue. iPhones are about 48%. Even if Mac Studio sales jumped (hard to see that happen with its price tag) it's not going to move the needle that much.
For sure Apple enthusiasts can rave about anything but their numbers simply aren't big enough to make a significant impact.
A bigger influencer on Mac sales will be the M4 MacBook Air. Top selling model amongst Apple notebooks. This is a very price sensitive category. A $100 price difference for a MacBook Air is much bigger deal that it would be for a Mac Studio.
I agree with both of you to a large degree. The Mac mini has been considered by many of those in the Mini PC market to be one of the best or the best computer in that product category. The new Mac mini will undoubtedly pile on even more accolades than its predecessor. But unlike the iPhone the Mac mini and other Mac products ultimately hit the Windows PC market share brick wall. Perhaps Microsoft's move to ARM support will improve the situation, but that seems to be moving at a crawl. To really start to crack the brick wall Apple needs to find a way to replace Windows PCs and Windows apps. It may be in Apple's best interest to look at emulation or virtualization solutions that allow Windows PC users to trashcan their PCs and replace them with Macs without losing anything.
Apple may not even care and can continue to do what they do best and play the long game where legacy X86 apps fall into obsolescence and become irrelevant along with more emphasis on mobile platforms. Apple is certainly making a lot of money selling Macs, iPhones, iPads, etc., and seems quite content to let technical evolution run its course and continue to focus on what they do best within their own sphere of influence.
The stock market is always like this. Stocks go up more on future promise than actual results. Likewise goes down on fears of lower revenue. AAPL went up significantly with the AI announcement. No real revenue associated with it except for the vague projections of enhanced future iPhone sales. Now AAPL is going down because projections for China are low.
10K invested in early 2000s is now over 1.5M. If I listened to the analysts I would have never got that.
Hopefully you continued to invest more over the intervening two decades. I didn’t get in until 2008 and some more in Jan 2009 when its split adjusted price got down to $2.89/share. I’m an Apple Millionaire when the prices gets above $232.75. It’ll be nice once that’s a review mirror price and not one we keep bouncing around.
I probably bought in on an average of $1 per share split adjusted. I held on during big dips and when the naysayers were saying the sky is falling. AAPL's P/E was low in those day (~10) so seeing an increase to around 30 per share has helped bring up the value.
The thing with AAPL is that it does go up and down but the general trend is up. You just have to be willing to wait out the slow times that can last up to a year. The way I look at it is that Apple is very healthy, has great products and increasing services. For now I see no major problems.
You have to hand it to Apple, they do know how to make money. Their latest/greatest way… withhold key features of the latest OS from people who own slightly older devices.
What if these so called analysts are making bad predictions in order to drop the price of shares so they can make more money after the announcements when the shares inevitably go up? I know it’s illegal but people who love making money often don’t obey laws.
That is what is going on. Social media has allowed that stuff to be amplified
if i am reading the first chart correcty the iphone 13 was the biggest seller (4Q 2021) (followed by the 15, 4Q 2023) , and the 16 is lower than all the others judging by the height of the blue bar in 4th quarter? or am i reading it wrong? wearables and ipads have been more or less the same since 2020 services is going up, which makes sense, since each year, the pool of iphones (needing icloud, apple music etc) goes up worryingly, macs are going down
if i am reading the first chart correcty the iphone 13 was the biggest seller (4Q 2021) (followed by the 15, 4Q 2023) , and the 16 is lower than all the others judging by the height of the blue bar in 4th quarter? or am i reading it wrong? wearables and ipads have been more or less the same since 2020 services is going up, which makes sense, since each year, the pool of iphones (needing icloud, apple music etc) goes up worryingly, macs are going down
Since Apple's revenue is highly cyclical with the holiday quarter always being the highest, you have to compare year over year quarters. The just reported calendar 3Q24 results looked to have the highest iPhone revenue for a 3Q. The tall blue bar for the iPhone 16 cycle is happening right now, 4Q24, and we won't know its revenue until end of January. It's not on the plot.
You have to be pretty careful interpreting results. The 2020 through 2022 years were COVID years with lots of government money flowing. So, they got an extra bump. You shouldn't conclude anything regarding a specific phone's attractiveness to people without taking account of macroeconomic trends.
Apple’s stock is down because they guided to the low middle single digits for the holiday quarter. I’d bet if they guided to the mid to high single digits the stock would be up. They just don’t get that Apple’s guidance is always conservative. one would think they would understand that after decades, but apparently not.
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Apple may not even care and can continue to do what they do best and play the long game where legacy X86 apps fall into obsolescence and become irrelevant along with more emphasis on mobile platforms. Apple is certainly making a lot of money selling Macs, iPhones, iPads, etc., and seems quite content to let technical evolution run its course and continue to focus on what they do best within their own sphere of influence.
the iphone 13 was the biggest seller (4Q 2021) (followed by the 15, 4Q 2023) , and the 16 is lower than all the others
judging by the height of the blue bar in 4th quarter? or am i reading it wrong?
wearables and ipads have been more or less the same since 2020
services is going up, which makes sense, since each year, the pool of iphones (needing icloud, apple music etc) goes up
worryingly, macs are going down
You have to be pretty careful interpreting results. The 2020 through 2022 years were COVID years with lots of government money flowing. So, they got an extra bump. You shouldn't conclude anything regarding a specific phone's attractiveness to people without taking account of macroeconomic trends.