Just an example here (and I know business sales are not an apple strong suit but we have apple iPhones / laptops - as much apple as we can (which isn't much since few to none support software deployments on it in my industry)). We also have a ton of computers mostly dells but now buying mostly surfaces.
For a small medical clinic in the last 4 years here's the percentages we spent for the big 5 tech companies (we buy domestic big name as much as possible): (Intel is higher then shown since it's in the other computers but that's hard to break out!)
google
microsoft
apple
dell
intel
73%
14%
5%
5%
3%
Yet, surfaces were trounce by the Ipad pro who sold just 6 weeks in Q4. (Apple Q1).
People can spin it any way they want, but this is just not good news. The market currently has absolutely no confidence in Apple's ability to generate value from future growth opportunities. And, we can criticize or chuckle at Google all we want (I often get in on it too), but they have a narrative that the market is buying in droves. As it currently does with Facebook and Microsoft as well.
Kudos to them.
Apple truly can and must do better on conveying some sense of who or what it wants to be 2, 5, 10 years out. This is not rocket science. Every major company does it in some form or the other. That's a huge part of what CEOs are paid to do. It involves much more than talking about "industrial era taxes", "dollar versus yuan", etc.
I realize a lot of people here do not own AAPL and therefore couldn't care less, but for those of us who have been very long-term shareholders of the company, this news hurts. There is simply no need for such underachievement. It's bewildering.
(And, please spare me the vacuous stuff about "Wall Street casino" and such; those are simply sound bites).
Apple doesn't need to do anything at all. It cares ZERO for investors. If all the investors in AAPL up and died (and some of them seem like they should) Apple would cry zero tears for them.
Apple doesn't make money off the stock market so Apple's priority should NOT be towards the stock market. Apple's top priority is the CONSUMER, you know, the ones who buy Apple's products and are the reason that Apple is making record YOY profits. As soon as Apple starts looking after the stock market over the consumer Apple will disintegrate.
Apple knows this but AAPL investors are clearly too stupid to understand this and so want to bite the hand that feeds them.
Apple cares as much for AAPL investors "as a festering ball of dog snot. If you took their combined IQ they might have enough intelligence to tie their shoelaces... if they didn't drool over themselves first" - 10 points whoever gets the reference :-)
Wall Street is irrational? Please! Those who listen to rumors obviously are irrational, but those people who create those rumors to capitalize on are not irrational.
I would say they are the opposite of irrational.
Yep. I wouldn't say irrational. I'd use another "i" word... "illegal". They make up rumours to affect stock value. That is stock manipulation by all accounts and that's illegal.
People can spin it any way they want, but this is just not good news. The market currently has absolutely no confidence in Apple's ability to generate value from future growth opportunities. And, we can criticize or chuckle at Google all we want (I often get in on it too), but they have a narrative that the market is buying in droves. As it currently does with Facebook and Microsoft as well.
Kudos to them.
Apple truly can and must do better on conveying some sense of who or what it wants to be 2, 5, 10 years out. This is not rocket science. Every major company does it in some form or the other. That's a huge part of what CEOs are paid to do. It involves much more than talking about "industrial era taxes", "dollar versus yuan", etc.
I realize a lot of people here do not own AAPL and therefore couldn't care less, but for those of us who have been very long-term shareholders of the company, this news hurts. There is simply no need for such underachievement. It's bewildering.
(And, please spare me the vacuous stuff about "Wall Street casino" and such; those are simply sound bites).
One more time:
Apple, or Tim Cook, can't reveal a single thing about their future products or plans without causing themselves to lose focus or get boxed in by their predictions. The tech press, Wall Street, and the blogosphere are all enemies of rational understanding. Or worse, they are packs of caged dogs waiting for a scent of blood.
The days when Steve could muse about building bicycles for the mind are long gone. Apple is still doing that in ever more refined ways, but they've reduced the formula to "just making great products to improve people's lives." Steve started that cagey reduction, the better not to tip his hand. They dare not, no more than a novelist will tell the ending of their book before it's done.
Other companies can sketch in their long range plans, but they aren't inventing the very narrative of the future the way Apple is. There has never been a business like Apple's before, in history. They're creating the mind of the future, whether they know that consciously or not. You might notice that true artists resist talking about the meaning of their work. They resist it with contempt, actually. It breaks the concentration to build up expectations among the unknowing. If the unknowing can't fill in the probable arc of progress, it's their failing.
We shouldn't confuse the mission of Apple with that of other companies in the past. We broke with history around 1984 when we externalized the artistic and expressive mind into an electronic machine. It's really our job, not Apple's, to explicate what lies ahead on this new project for humans.
We shouldn't confuse the mission of Apple with that of other companies in the past. We broke with history around 1984 when we externalized the artistic and expressive mind into an electronic machine. It's really our job, not Apple's, to explicate what lies ahead on this new project for humans.
I honestly do not know or understand what this sort of thing means. "We"?!
Guy, unless you have hard fact to prove. Apple this year will add another 50billion to its cash reserves. Think what you want but predicting the future of a company with a quarter alone is as predicting a teendline with only a point. Apple has passed through speed bumps before. That said, maybe is the beginning of the end, but judging from the overall sentiment in the forums, and knowing that broad sentiment in something is most of the time wrong. I feel confident in the company. Even stagnating, something that seing the capex and investment plans I think will not happen, Apple must accumulate until 2020 between 200-250 additional billions to its cash reserves, if you prefer, no less than 400 billion in cash-flow.
Now please, go to Google and tell me how much needs to grow Alphabet to 2020 to match that figure, not beat it, match. And don't tell me that from now on iis downhill for Apple that's as wishfull thinking as two digit grow can be. There are not hard evidence of any of those. The only hard fact we know is that Apple still expands is sales network in China and India. Hardly a symptom of any serious long term slowdown.
so as I ask Tell me how Google can generate with its revenue growth at high teens 400 billion cash flow untill 2020 and I will accept Google is more valuable long term than Appke.
ah, and that fairy tale that Wall Street only value growth, only in your dreams, history says that really succesfull investors (Buffett, Graham, Icahn) are interested in VALUE not in growth. Buffett was the most succesfull investor ever well before buying any red hot growth stock, something that he never have bought. And in VALUE Apple is king.
Cash.... What did huge pile of cash do to Apple business today and what has much smaller done to Google and other companies for that matter?
Let's see how did it work for Apple: - the biggest buyback in history made no impact on company valuation, actually, it was negative - the biggest purchase in Apple's history brought no revolutionary changes in music business, it actually brought a lot of integration issues and Music is generally percieved as not really good app for the purpose - despite rising research expenditures they are falling in percentage and are among the lowest in industry which gives pretty much good idea that there's in no "next big thing" up the sleeve.
This is all very clear to market and that's why they see pile of cash as liability and not as an asset. Value? Buffet? Well, he is advocating invenstments in value, yes. He invested hugely again in IBM when it was valued 200.... nuff said...
OK, guy whatever you want. 3:30 am here. Don't have time to lose arguing on this.
Google in its financial report today uses the same dollar corrected metric.
Who said they didn't?
You should reread what I wrote. I was talking about what their CEOs talk about.
For you is different for me is the same, sorry both use that metrc to show that its revenue would had been more if the dollar has been constant. If any Apple aproach in more honest, because its not included in the balance sheet, something that mislead investors to try to show higher growth that is inexistent. The same about GAAP and non GAAP income, other figure that to me, tries to mislead and distort the real, very good indeed, figures.
I just changed my default search in Safari on my iPhone to something other than Google.
If another billion iOS users did the same, it would not be pretty for Google next earnings.
While we need to see if Alphabet holds all of those gains tomorrow to see if they hold the "crown" for long, I personally think Apple would benefit by being out of the number one spot (e.g. target) for awhile. Let Alpha-Google be the darling child, but then also the eventual target of the media.
Such gloom & doom on this board regarding Apple!! Poor company - it was born with a silver spoon in its mouth and never had to innovate or build anything - never had to overcome adversity - what ever will they do? Only $212 Billion in the bank? Clearly never saved for a rainy day. Taking a look over the last two years, it would seem that their main product line is up about 40% - clearly they have no idea how to grow it. Sure their in-house CPU & GPU design teams may be top notch and achieving gains above all others, but now that the iPhone has hit a speed bump with first quarter of declines ever, there is obviously no way they can use such technology for future products.
I highly recommend that anyone with AAPL on this board sell it & buy Alphabet shares. Apple needs to buy back some more shares, so then do need people to sell.
big pile of cash saved for rainy days is exactly what bothers market and investors.
Let me know when you have sold any Apple shares you have and gone all in with Alpha-Gooogle-bet.
We shouldn't confuse the mission of Apple with that of other companies in the past. We broke with history around 1984 when we externalized the artistic and expressive mind into an electronic machine. It's really our job, not Apple's, to explicate what lies ahead on this new project for humans.
I honestly do not know or understand what this sort of thing means. "We"?!
We humans, with the specific help of Jobs and crew.
We shifted from a 500-year-old print-based world of structured futurism, the kind that built empires and megacorporations like IBM and AT&T.
We shited to an electronic digital-information-based world of instant omnivorous processing of text, image, sound, communication and memory that gives rise to instant business opportunities that essentially can't be planned or structured. No one, Steve Jobs or Marshall McLuhan, could have predicted Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., enough to give "investors" assurances about the future in any meaningful detail. Steve may not have forseen the app ecosystem around the phone and the pad, for example.
What's being built now is the successor to print-based civilization, and it's now being done through little slick pieces of artistic hardware with software to match. Not even the makers know how they will be used in what specific ways, so they just say they want to build great products. If they say for example that the next steps are wearables for the eyes, ears, or hands, and that they're going into aerospace for real-time 4K streaming VR content, or whatever, they will be just subjecting themselves to the kind of corrosive sneering you see on display in this thread of know-nothings. They can give no guidance to people with no imagination.
Impressive. Even I wouldn't have predicted the amount of dumb ass Monday morning quarterbacking in these comments.
Apple obviously isn't innovating. We know this because they aren't sharing their R&D programs or product development details like they used to do under Steve Jobs. In fact, Apple isn't communicating like they used to do under Steve Jobs.
Tim Cook obviously should be fired and replaced by the totally unnamed person who appears not to exist. His focus on revenue growth, profitability, and continuing the practices of Steve Jobs is unacceptable for a CEO. He still has a chance if he would shift his efforts to cater to the desires of a constantly changing amorphous group of short term AAPL investors.
We all know the problem with Apple's reliance on the iPhone, which provides almost 65% of Apple's revenue and profit. This is not nearly as good as Google reliance on advertising and its 95% contribution.
I am happy that the market is "punishing" Apple. Apple got too successful, and didn't have any competition. They need this rap on the knuckles, and probably need a lot more pain before they are forced to change their ways.
- Doing customer unfriendly measures like Soldering RAM into Mac Mini, and intentionally crippling that product are a sign of arrogance. They had a good design that worked well in the previous version - but they couldnt rip off the customer on upgrades - so they decide to solder the RAM in!! - Not launching TouchID on Mac OS even 2 years after it was launched on iPhone, sign of complacence. - Pricing strategies that charge $100 more for additional flash, etc., that too when Apple gets the cheapest prices on the market, are a sign of greed. - Policies where they operate as "Apple knows best, Apple will decide what you can or cannot do", are not the sign of a long term sustainable company. - ridiculous pricing for accessories like cables, coupled with poor quality of iPhone Lightning cables, and insistence on Certified Accessories will only result in people hating the company more! - Things like "you are holding it wrong" don't work forever. Things like compromising battery life for thin-ness and lower weight beyond a point don't work. The damn device has to last through an entire day!
In general, I wonder if people have wondered why Apple generates so much hatred in the general population. Even people who buy Apple products feel hatred to a large extent - especially when you feel ripped off about things like $19 Lightning cables, etc. In fact, I have heard many a time, people wishing that Apple has a massive product recall or some such disaster, so that they get into serious losses.
This is a company that *intentionally* operates on a model saying f**k you to its customers. Or to put it differently, if you don't want to hand over huge chunks of money to us, then f**k you. The polar opposite of a company like Amazon, where Customer Satisfaction is the beginning and end of the story. Apple has even higher customer satisfaction ratings than Amazon - but paradoxically generates even more hatred.
And mind you - I am not even referring to the hatred of people who dont buy Apple products. I am referring only to the hatred and ill will that Apple supporters and customers feel to the company.
Unless Apple dramatically alters its ways to be a more customer centric company, it will continue to face this issue. Irrespective of product successes and sales, people will always bet that Apple wont be able to sustain its game, and it is just one failure away from doom. This is the biggest issue with the Steve Jobs' legacy, and the sooner Apple can get over this, the better for it.
Don't kid yourself that this is about Services, or about China. The market is not stupid. The market knows Apple Pay, Apple Music, iTunes, etc, are massive Content and Services plays, with potential to create huge businesses around them in the future. Maybe the Apple Ecosystem was limited 5 years back, and just getting into shape 2 years back. But Apple is definitely on the upswing in terms of Ecosystem now. For all the hiccups in China, Apple is still going strong there, and is such a small part of the market that they can grow. This is about something else altogether.
This is a solid lesson to Apple - that the Market doesn't only care about how much money you are making. It is bothered a lot more about the sustainability of how much money you are making. And Apple, with its own policies, is the prime reason why doubts arise about sustainability. Apple is, with its own policies and behavior responsible for the feeling that the moment there is a decent alternative, people will migrate in droves to that alternative. It is another matter whether those doubts will ever become real, or whether people will ever migrate to the alternatives - as long as Apple doesn't amend its ways to reduce such fears, the market will assume this.
Kind of similar to what happened with Windows - where the alternative wasn't even decent!
Google will never live up to expectations. Period. It can't happen. It's absurd to punish Apple because Wall Street can't belive a tech company can be the most profitable ever and then betting that other one, totally dependent of ad revenue can beat it big, because to give it that valuarion well in advance of beating Apple revenue, not of this year, but for at least three to four years ago, and to beat its cash reserves they can only be betting that those guys will grow forever and earn at least double of what Apple can earn in a sustainable basis. Its impossible to achieve, so be prepared for the next Goigle miss. They got it in the past, they will got in the future. That will be a big crash.
Google is in the business of selling the information. Apple is in the business of selling the product with some services. Apart from music and the apps, they are not very good in anything else and even here it takes them years to move over a single milestone partly due to nature of the business and partly due to nature of Apple . Google on the other hand changes and adapts to trends easily and quickly and is un disputable market leader in advertising by far. I'm sorry to admit that Apple with its honest policy of privacy and other morals stands no chance in competing with Google in service industry.
People can spin it any way they want, but this is just not good news. The market currently has absolutely no confidence in Apple's ability to generate value from future growth opportunities. And, we can criticize or chuckle at Google all we want (I often get in on it too), but they have a narrative that the market is buying in droves. As it currently does with Facebook and Microsoft as well.
Kudos to them.
Apple truly can and must do better on conveying some sense of who or what it wants to be 2, 5, 10 years out. This is not rocket science. Every major company does it in some form or the other. That's a huge part of what CEOs are paid to do. It involves much more than talking about "industrial era taxes", "dollar versus yuan", etc.
I realize a lot of people here do not own AAPL and therefore couldn't care less, but for those of us who have been very long-term shareholders of the company, this news hurts. There is simply no need for such underachievement. It's bewildering.
(And, please spare me the vacuous stuff about "Wall Street casino" and such; those are simply sound bites).
Winner, winner, chicken dinner.
Market multiples are often broadly and on company-specific basis just a reflection of sentiment from the collective crowd. The sentiment from the market today on Apple is that nobody has any confidence in their ability to navigate this road bump and continue to grow. I don't get this hardware vs software crap..... apple has been sitting on tens of billions of cash for years, they could have diversified their revenue stream but chose not to. Why should management get a pass now for doing nothing when many people have for years said they law of large numbers and saturation would catch up to them. Guess what Tim Cook, it did, you just had your head buried in the sand.
I have no idea what Apple wants to be in 5 years nor does anyone on this board nor does the market. Their primary product growth is negative/shrinking (according to mgmt), why should the market give them a market multiple when mgmt can't articulate a vision for what they will be in 3 years let alone 5, something every other company on earth does???
I could not agree more. Unfortunately many people on this forum simply refuse to look at Apple with a critical eye like this. Lets see what happens in the next five years with Apple. Because Cook has been sitting on billions and refuses to invest into the company so that it may diversify and ass significant alternate revenue streams. Relying on one basic source of revenue stream is not being smart. Everything Apple does is dependent on iPhone and iPad.
People can spin it any way they want, but this is just not good news. The market currently has absolutely no confidence in Apple's ability to generate value from future growth opportunities. And, we can criticize or chuckle at Google all we want (I often get in on it too), but they have a narrative that the market is buying in droves. As it currently does with Facebook and Microsoft as well.
Kudos to them.
Apple truly can and must do better on conveying some sense of who or what it wants to be 2, 5, 10 years out. This is not rocket science. Every major company does it in some form or the other. That's a huge part of what CEOs are paid to do. It involves much more than talking about "industrial era taxes", "dollar versus yuan", etc.
I realize a lot of people here do not own AAPL and therefore couldn't care less, but for those of us who have been very long-term shareholders of the company, this news hurts. There is simply no need for such underachievement. It's bewildering.
(And, please spare me the vacuous stuff about "Wall Street casino" and such; those are simply sound bites).
Google in its financial report today uses the same dollar corrected metric.
Except Googles value increased. And Apples decreased. Wonder why that is
Have you perhaps at any point considered that there's nothing else to talk about apart from "dollar vs. yuan" and stuff? Numbers talk and services are still niche part of Apple's business without any clarity for the future growth. Cook can't really use Eddy Cue's stunts in this department to 'change the narrative' and let's be honest, Apple was lucky to hit the market with 3 new product categories within the same decade. It won't happen again in our lifetime. Now it is treated as any other hardware company with services, because market has matured and saturated in new categories where Apple pumped all its growth from.. On the other hand market believes Google is capable of rising the revenues despite this facts even in the future. This time I agree with them and I'm pretty much sure there won't be any Apple car or any other similar nonsense in the future. For any new product category you simply need another company, different mindset. This is as far as this one goes. I'm sorry about that, too.
I predict that spaceship they are building will become their last straw, their Waterloo....if SJ was still here he could make it work for Apple, but now it just looks like a big white elephant. Oh and I have been an Apple user since 1998, but since Apple went backwards on the Mac Mini upgrade, created a MacPro only the seriously rich can afford, busted up the Aperture party, went all stupid and thin on everything....I've lost my patience with Apple.
Good for you make a stand. Not all that Apple does is great. On the contrary there making a lot of sh**y choices as of late. No ram upgrades with a new mac mini? Really Mr. Cook? You just couldn't stand people buying ram from a 3rd party and installing it themselves because it was cheaper. No no. Tim Cook put a stop to that. "If you buy our mac mini we will make you buy our ram." Sorry Mr. Cook but for the poor mans mac, preventing the upgrade of ram is just counter intuitive for a mac designed to let people who can't afford the high end stuff buy something less expensive. Good Job.
And by preventing people from upgrading from 3rd party ram and forcing them to buy it from Apple, Cook just made Apple how many more dollars that it probably didn't need. As a company that makes so much money you would think Apple would entice its poor man customers not crap on them. But hey what do I know.
Well sure, with GOOG's inflated P/E rating of 31.70 compared to Apple's undervalued 10.26.
Wall Street hates Apple's secretive business model and always has.
Comments
Apple doesn't make money off the stock market so Apple's priority should NOT be towards the stock market. Apple's top priority is the CONSUMER, you know, the ones who buy Apple's products and are the reason that Apple is making record YOY profits. As soon as Apple starts looking after the stock market over the consumer Apple will disintegrate.
Apple knows this but AAPL investors are clearly too stupid to understand this and so want to bite the hand that feeds them.
Apple cares as much for AAPL investors "as a festering ball of dog snot. If you took their combined IQ they might have enough intelligence to tie their shoelaces... if they didn't drool over themselves first" - 10 points whoever gets the reference :-)
Apple, or Tim Cook, can't reveal a single thing about their future products or plans without causing themselves to lose focus or get boxed in by their predictions. The tech press, Wall Street, and the blogosphere are all enemies of rational understanding. Or worse, they are packs of caged dogs waiting for a scent of blood.
The days when Steve could muse about building bicycles for the mind are long gone. Apple is still doing that in ever more refined ways, but they've reduced the formula to "just making great products to improve people's lives." Steve started that cagey reduction, the better not to tip his hand. They dare not, no more than a novelist will tell the ending of their book before it's done.
Other companies can sketch in their long range plans, but they aren't inventing the very narrative of the future the way Apple is. There has never been a business like Apple's before, in history. They're creating the mind of the future, whether they know that consciously or not. You might notice that true artists resist talking about the meaning of their work. They resist it with contempt, actually. It breaks the concentration to build up expectations among the unknowing. If the unknowing can't fill in the probable arc of progress, it's their failing.
We shouldn't confuse the mission of Apple with that of other companies in the past. We broke with history around 1984 when we externalized the artistic and expressive mind into an electronic machine. It's really our job, not Apple's, to explicate what lies ahead on this new project for humans.
For you is different for me is the same, sorry both use that metrc to show that its revenue would had been more if the dollar has been constant. If any Apple aproach in more honest, because its not included in the balance sheet, something that mislead investors to try to show higher growth that is inexistent. The same about GAAP and non GAAP income, other figure that to me, tries to mislead and distort the real, very good indeed, figures.
We shifted from a 500-year-old print-based world of structured futurism, the kind that built empires and megacorporations like IBM and AT&T.
We shited to an electronic digital-information-based world of instant omnivorous processing of text, image, sound, communication and memory that gives rise to instant business opportunities that essentially can't be planned or structured. No one, Steve Jobs or Marshall McLuhan, could have predicted Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., enough to give "investors" assurances about the future in any meaningful detail. Steve may not have forseen the app ecosystem around the phone and the pad, for example.
What's being built now is the successor to print-based civilization, and it's now being done through little slick pieces of artistic hardware with software to match. Not even the makers know how they will be used in what specific ways, so they just say they want to build great products. If they say for example that the next steps are wearables for the eyes, ears, or hands, and that they're going into aerospace for real-time 4K streaming VR content, or whatever, they will be just subjecting themselves to the kind of corrosive sneering you see on display in this thread of know-nothings. They can give no guidance to people with no imagination.
Apple obviously isn't innovating. We know this because they aren't sharing their R&D programs or product development details like they used to do under Steve Jobs. In fact, Apple isn't communicating like they used to do under Steve Jobs.
Tim Cook obviously should be fired and replaced by the totally unnamed person who appears not to exist. His focus on revenue growth, profitability, and continuing the practices of Steve Jobs is unacceptable for a CEO. He still has a chance if he would shift his efforts to cater to the desires of a constantly changing amorphous group of short term AAPL investors.
We all know the problem with Apple's reliance on the iPhone, which provides almost 65% of Apple's revenue and profit. This is not nearly as good as Google reliance on advertising and its 95% contribution.
- Doing customer unfriendly measures like Soldering RAM into Mac Mini, and intentionally crippling that product are a sign of arrogance. They had a good design that worked well in the previous version - but they couldnt rip off the customer on upgrades - so they decide to solder the RAM in!!
- Not launching TouchID on Mac OS even 2 years after it was launched on iPhone, sign of complacence.
- Pricing strategies that charge $100 more for additional flash, etc., that too when Apple gets the cheapest prices on the market, are a sign of greed.
- Policies where they operate as "Apple knows best, Apple will decide what you can or cannot do", are not the sign of a long term sustainable company.
- ridiculous pricing for accessories like cables, coupled with poor quality of iPhone Lightning cables, and insistence on Certified Accessories will only result in people hating the company more!
- Things like "you are holding it wrong" don't work forever. Things like compromising battery life for thin-ness and lower weight beyond a point don't work. The damn device has to last through an entire day!
In general, I wonder if people have wondered why Apple generates so much hatred in the general population. Even people who buy Apple products feel hatred to a large extent - especially when you feel ripped off about things like $19 Lightning cables, etc. In fact, I have heard many a time, people wishing that Apple has a massive product recall or some such disaster, so that they get into serious losses.
This is a company that *intentionally* operates on a model saying f**k you to its customers. Or to put it differently, if you don't want to hand over huge chunks of money to us, then f**k you. The polar opposite of a company like Amazon, where Customer Satisfaction is the beginning and end of the story. Apple has even higher customer satisfaction ratings than Amazon - but paradoxically generates even more hatred.
And mind you - I am not even referring to the hatred of people who dont buy Apple products. I am referring only to the hatred and ill will that Apple supporters and customers feel to the company.
Unless Apple dramatically alters its ways to be a more customer centric company, it will continue to face this issue. Irrespective of product successes and sales, people will always bet that Apple wont be able to sustain its game, and it is just one failure away from doom. This is the biggest issue with the Steve Jobs' legacy, and the sooner Apple can get over this, the better for it.
Don't kid yourself that this is about Services, or about China. The market is not stupid. The market knows Apple Pay, Apple Music, iTunes, etc, are massive Content and Services plays, with potential to create huge businesses around them in the future. Maybe the Apple Ecosystem was limited 5 years back, and just getting into shape 2 years back. But Apple is definitely on the upswing in terms of Ecosystem now. For all the hiccups in China, Apple is still going strong there, and is such a small part of the market that they can grow. This is about something else altogether.
This is about the DNA of the company.
Kind of similar to what happened with Windows - where the alternative wasn't even decent!
I could not agree more. Unfortunately many people on this forum simply refuse to look at Apple with a critical eye like this. Lets see what happens in the next five years with Apple. Because Cook has been sitting on billions and refuses to invest into the company so that it may diversify and ass significant alternate revenue streams. Relying on one basic source of revenue stream is not being smart. Everything Apple does is dependent on iPhone and iPad.
I've argued this before
Except Googles value increased. And Apples decreased. Wonder why that is
Good for you make a stand. Not all that Apple does is great. On the contrary there making a lot of sh**y choices as of late. No ram upgrades with a new mac mini? Really Mr. Cook? You just couldn't stand people buying ram from a 3rd party and installing it themselves because it was cheaper. No no. Tim Cook put a stop to that. "If you buy our mac mini we will make you buy our ram." Sorry Mr. Cook but for the poor mans mac, preventing the upgrade of ram is just counter intuitive for a mac designed to let people who can't afford the high end stuff buy something less expensive. Good Job.
And by preventing people from upgrading from 3rd party ram and forcing them to buy it from Apple, Cook just made Apple how many more dollars that it probably didn't need. As a company that makes so much money you would think Apple would entice its poor man customers not crap on them. But hey what do I know.