That keynote slide of Cook’s is an absolute classic piece of misdirection. We need to keep a copy for his retirement speech, you know, for a laugh.
First, a product is turned into a category ‘ipads’*, while a seperate category “notebooks” (which appeared in the slide’s title) is broken into brands to misdirect. Also, I feel like there was a notebook brand missing. I can’t quite put my finger on it.....
*it does show that Apple is selling a lot of iPads, but if all those columns to the right of them were stacked it wouldn’t fit the narrative Cook was attempting to shape. He doesn’t own an RDF.
1) What would be funny about his eventual retirement speech seeing as he's pushed Apple to where it is today? Or are you suggesting that he's not fit to be CEO?
2) How is that a misdirect when it clearly states what the graph represents? It's also pretty grandiose since Apple could've just pegged Apple v all other tablet and notebook makers and come out even further ahead, but instead they decide to limit it to just their one branding option that is just a tablet while pegging it against all the others that make notebooks, "convertibles," and tablets that are really designed to be used more like notebooks, as in the case of the MS Surface.
3) How is it more far to you that one product category from one brand be stacked against at least 3 product categories from all other brands?
Apple has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to provide transparency. Like it or not, unit sales is a key metric of a company that sells hardware. Apple’s services business can be seen as a shift away from this but they can and should share this unit sales information going forward. If I owned Apple’s stock or was the manager of a fund that owns it, I would press for unit sales to continue to be openly shared.
I can see Apple’s strategy here as they choose to be less transparent as unit sales decline and price increases make up for the difference. After all, winning on market share can still be a very unprofitable venture that is not sustainable.
By still showing unit sales figures and adding this visibility such things as Apple Watch sales, Apple shows an honest reality to shareholders. It helps them understand how Apple is going up market and the success of various business lines. It also allows them to hold the board and management team accountable. By choosing to not be opaque, Apple has an opportunity to lead here - doing so by example. I hope they they reconsider their stance. Shareholders can and should bring this as a requirement. As consumers of their product, we should also expect nothing less.
I understand what you are saying but (as a shareholder) I don't think the unit sales are all they are cracked up to be. Platform growth, however, is very important. The issue with releasing the unit sales numbers is it breads the "cult of marketshare" hive mind and the "cult of marketshare" is meaningless. That the iPhone grew its installed base by 20%, even if Apple did not derive direct revenue from much of that growth, is far more important. The simple fact iPhones, iPads and Macs seem to live substantially longer is critically important and this is not represented in the mindless "cult of marketshare" hive mind.
I guess this could be spun as Apple wanting to emphasise the growing importance of services as a revenue stream, making hardware less important as revenue. The thing is though, much, much more than any other company providing services, ultimately Apple will have to rely on sales of that hardware to grow services revenue.
As a general rule, all Apple services require an Apple device. If you don’t own an Apple device you are unlikely to use Apple services. Apple Music on android is about the only one I can think of off hand, and I bet that isn’t that popular.
Moving hardware prices up into the Burberry market, and the limits that places on hardware growth, ultimately threatens services revenue growth. You can only extract additional revenue from existing hardware owners to a point. Ultimately in Apple’s business model, hardware purchases have to expand to also grow services revenue.
"...more than any other company providing services, ultimately Apple will have to rely on sales of that hardware to grow services revenue."
It's true, but with an important caveat. In his article "Lasts Longer" http://www.asymco.com/2018/09/13/lasts-longer/ , Horace Diedu points out the error of thinking about Apple in terms of "market share" rather than "installed base". Robert Paul Leitao put it this way recently on ped30.com:
"The violent sell-off in Apple illustrates a clear and pervasive misunderstanding of Apple’s emerging revenue model and a knee-jerk unwillingness to forego conventional approaches to the valuation of the company. Apple has entered a “post-iPhone era” in which revenue and profit growth will be driven less by reported device unit sales and more by an expanding global base of device owners leveraging the most advanced eco-system of devices and services on the planet. The robust global market for pre-owned iPhones through both formal and informal channels is not reflected in Apple’s quarterly unit sales. It is, however, reflected in the fast growth of Services revenue. Nothing about Apple’s fundamentals has changed. The company reported record September quarter revenue, net income and earnings per share. Despite very heavy forex pressures, management is guiding to the highest quarterly revenue in the company history in the December quarter which will deliver record quarterly revenue, net income and earnings per share (again)."
So it's NOT true that "Moving hardware prices up into the Burberry market, and the limits that places on hardware growth, ultimately threatens services revenue growth." At least not for Apple.
In the short term there is clearly heaps of room to grow in services revenue. That is what is happening.
But ultimately, ultimately, Apple will need to sell more hardware, whether that is new product categories or more iPhones, macs, iPads or Apple TVs, to keep on growing services revenue. Apple will need more players playing.
That keynote slide of Cook’s is an absolute classic piece of misdirection. We need to keep a copy for his retirement speech, you know, for a laugh.
First, a product is turned into a category ‘ipads’*, while a seperate category “notebooks” (which appeared in the slide’s title) is broken into brands to misdirect. Also, I feel like there was a notebook brand missing. I can’t quite put my finger on it.....
*it does show that Apple is selling a lot of iPads, but if all those columns to the right of them were stacked it wouldn’t fit the narrative Cook was attempting to shape. He doesn’t own an RDF.
1) What would be funny about his eventual retirement speech seeing as he's pushed Apple to where it is today? Or are you suggesting that he's not fit to be CEO?
2) How is that a misdirect when it clearly states what the graph represents? It's also pretty grandiose since Apple could've just pegged Apple v all other tablet and notebook makers and come out even further ahead, but instead they decide to limit it to just their one branding option that is just a tablet while pegging it against all the others that make notebooks, "convertibles," and tablets that are really designed to be used more like notebooks, as in the case of the MS Surface.
3) How is it more far to you that one product category from one brand be stacked against at least 3 product categories from all other brands?
I dont know about culture in your country, but in mine, retirement party speeches are usually include the funny, stupidish and embarrassing moments over ones’ career to lighten up the fact we will be losing a valuable employee. If all it was was boosting ones’ ego they would be very dull affairs indeed. At least there are drinks, right?
Its a misdirect because it is implying there it is about iPads against individual notebook brands. That didn’t tell you anything much. Its a misdiect because it excludes important things (eg Apple notebooks aren’t there), and it creates a false impression of the actual, real life market. If it was Ipads and other tablets stacked in one column against another column of notebook sales in total it would be more relevant to the case he was making, but it would also reverse his narrative. That iPads have become a replacement for notebooks.
The actual purpose of the slide was to distract from the problem of declining iPad sales. A problem probably more to do with the long, longevity of each iPad, what must be clear decisions within Apple to limit the productivity uses of the device for the time being ( eg file management, peripherals), and escalating price. iPad pros are now more expensive than quite capable laptops. That won’t help sales.
I guess this could be spun as Apple wanting to emphasise the growing importance of services as a revenue stream, making hardware less important as revenue. The thing is though, much, much more than any other company providing services, ultimately Apple will have to rely on sales of that hardware to grow services revenue.
As a general rule, all Apple services require an Apple device. If you don’t own an Apple device you are unlikely to use Apple services. Apple Music on android is about the only one I can think of off hand, and I bet that isn’t that popular.
Moving hardware prices up into the Burberry market, and the limits that places on hardware growth, ultimately threatens services revenue growth. You can only extract additional revenue from existing hardware owners to a point. Ultimately in Apple’s business model, hardware purchases have to expand to also grow services revenue.
"...more than any other company providing services, ultimately Apple will have to rely on sales of that hardware to grow services revenue."
It's true, but with an important caveat. In his article "Lasts Longer" http://www.asymco.com/2018/09/13/lasts-longer/ , Horace Diedu points out the error of thinking about Apple in terms of "market share" rather than "installed base". Robert Paul Leitao put it this way recently on ped30.com:
"The violent sell-off in Apple illustrates a clear and pervasive misunderstanding of Apple’s emerging revenue model and a knee-jerk unwillingness to forego conventional approaches to the valuation of the company. Apple has entered a “post-iPhone era” in which revenue and profit growth will be driven less by reported device unit sales and more by an expanding global base of device owners leveraging the most advanced eco-system of devices and services on the planet. The robust global market for pre-owned iPhones through both formal and informal channels is not reflected in Apple’s quarterly unit sales. It is, however, reflected in the fast growth of Services revenue. Nothing about Apple’s fundamentals has changed. The company reported record September quarter revenue, net income and earnings per share. Despite very heavy forex pressures, management is guiding to the highest quarterly revenue in the company history in the December quarter which will deliver record quarterly revenue, net income and earnings per share (again)."
So it's NOT true that "Moving hardware prices up into the Burberry market, and the limits that places on hardware growth, ultimately threatens services revenue growth." At least not for Apple.
In the short term there is clearly heaps of room to grow in services revenue. That is what is happening.
But ultimately, ultimately, Apple will need to sell more hardware, whether that is new product categories or more iPhones, macs, iPads or Apple TVs, to keep on growing services revenue. Apple will need more players playing.
"Apple will need more players playing"
The best way to do that is to grow its user base which Apple has been doing with the iPhone via a healthy grey market and has been doing with the Mac since 51% of Mac buyers are new to the Mac.
Surface devices might not be great sellers but they are well designed and good quality. I think it's just because there's so much more competition for devices you can run Windows on that they haven't taken off.
Wouldn’t this be an argument for Apple to keep reporting quarterly unit sales? I’m glad they’re not but analysts will turn just go off bogus estimates from firms like IDC.
Apple has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to provide transparency. Like it or not, unit sales is a key metric of a company that sells hardware. Apple’s services business can be seen as a shift away from this but they can and should share this unit sales information going forward. If I owned Apple’s stock or was the manager of a fund that owns it, I would press for unit sales to continue to be openly shared.
I can see Apple’s strategy here as they choose to be less transparent as unit sales decline and price increases make up for the difference. After all, winning on market share can still be a very unprofitable venture that is not sustainable.
By still showing unit sales figures and adding this visibility such things as Apple Watch sales, Apple shows an honest reality to shareholders. It helps them understand how Apple is going up market and the success of various business lines. It also allows them to hold the board and management team accountable. By choosing to not be opaque, Apple has an opportunity to lead here - doing so by example. I hope they they reconsider their stance. Shareholders can and should bring this as a requirement. As consumers of their product, we should also expect nothing less.
What nonsense. Name all the tech firms that are Apple competitors that report unit sales. With links, if you please.
Wouldn’t this be an argument for Apple to keep reporting quarterly unit sales? I’m glad they’re not but analysts will turn just go off bogus estimates from firms like IDC.
Yes. These companies will now control the narrative of Apple product sales. The Apple board know this of course, but find it preferable to having to account for themselves directly to their shareholders. The corporate establishment hates being questioned. Once one company got away with not reporting actual activity, inevitably they all will stop doing it. Apple is just one of the last to stop doing it.
Wouldn’t this be an argument for Apple to keep reporting quarterly unit sales? I’m glad they’re not but analysts will turn just go off bogus estimates from firms like IDC.
Yes. These companies will now control the narrative of Apple product sales. The Apple board know this of course, but find it preferable to having to account for themselves directly to their shareholders. The corporate establishment hates being questioned. Once one company got away with not reporting actual activity, inevitably they all will stop doing it. Apple is just one of the last to stop doing it.
Think different indeed.
You assume that Apple cares because AI (and their like) cares. That's a pretty silly assumption. Moreover, why should this be an issue for Apple any more than it is for any of Apple's competitors who've never bothered with unit sales numbers?
"Think different" =/= "Be stupid and provide all the numbers that Wall Street wants". So that's a vacuous statement.
Wouldn’t this be an argument for Apple to keep reporting quarterly unit sales? I’m glad they’re not but analysts will turn just go off bogus estimates from firms like IDC.
The best bit of the slide was how irrelevant surface sales are, a little blip waaaay out on the end. Although I find 0.3m hard to believe, you see them around a fair bit.
anyway, back on topic, what What NHT and Soli said.
Here in the UK I see people with Surface tablets more often than iPads, but both are much less common than laptops. How about comparing iPads to the rest of the tablet market, Timmy? Once upon a time Apple was miles out ahead in terms of tablet sales. I do think they have missed the boat a bit with the iPad: iPad is still essentially a giant iPhone, whereas the Surface tablet is a full blown Windows PC. I find I still can't do a lot of things I need to on an iPad, so I still need a "proper" computer to do the rest. I expected the iPad's OS to slowly evolve toward more of desktop metaphor, but it seems Apple pretty much abandoned it software wise between about 2012 and 2016, and even now it's still really a giant iPhone. The UI still feels simplified and lacking power. For some of course this is great, it allows you to focus on one task and carry it out really well, but as soon as you try and do something that's not in Apple's very structured workflow, it's a real hassle.
Apple has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to provide transparency. Like it or not, unit sales is a key metric of a company that sells hardware. Apple’s services business can be seen as a shift away from this but they can and should share this unit sales information going forward. If I owned Apple’s stock or was the manager of a fund that owns it, I would press for unit sales to continue to be openly shared.
I can see Apple’s strategy here as they choose to be less transparent as unit sales decline and price increases make up for the difference. After all, winning on market share can still be a very unprofitable venture that is not sustainable.
By still showing unit sales figures and adding this visibility such things as Apple Watch sales, Apple shows an honest reality to shareholders. It helps them understand how Apple is going up market and the success of various business lines. It also allows them to hold the board and management team accountable. By choosing to not be opaque, Apple has an opportunity to lead here - doing so by example. I hope they they reconsider their stance. Shareholders can and should bring this as a requirement. As consumers of their product, we should also expect nothing less.
You don’t really invest, do you? No other major hardware company is reporting per product unit sales, so your claim is bunk.
Your second claim is also ludicrous, as customers of the units have no bearing in this conversation between corporation and investor. I suspect you are only a consumer and this comment is the tip-off.
Actually, I do invest. I used to work at a publicly traded company and we included unit sales data in our quarterly conference call, broken out by market segment. If you read the transcript of Dell’s recent earnings call you will note that they specifically call out their market share in several different segments they participate in, telling investors more than just the revenues by various segments. (This is just one example; don’t get hung up on Apple vs Dell)
I agree with you that the 10k (for example) is important, especially items such as gross margin, operating income, inventory levels and the balance sheet.
I also agree that privately held companies have an advantage over publicly held ones in keeping certain financial items outside of public scrutiny.
Yet leading indicators in terms of share of market are important too. Tim likes to brag that Apple sells more watches than anyone. That figure becomes harder to believe if he doesn’t release the number that they sell.
The best bit of the slide was how irrelevant surface sales are, a little blip waaaay out on the end. Although I find 0.3m hard to believe, you see them around a fair bit.
anyway, back on topic, what What NHT and Soli said.
Here in the UK I see people with Surface tablets more often than iPads, but both are much less common than laptops. How about comparing iPads to the rest of the tablet market, Timmy? Once upon a time Apple was miles out ahead in terms of tablet sales. I do think they have missed the boat a bit with the iPad: iPad is still essentially a giant iPhone, whereas the Surface tablet is a full blown Windows PC. I find I still can't do everything you need to on an iPad, so you still need a "proper" computer to fill that last 10%. I expected the iPad's OS to evolve toward more of desktop metaphor, but it seems Apple pretty much abandoned it software wise between about 2012 and 2016, and even now it's still really a giant iPhone. For some of course this is great, it allows you to focus on one task and carry it out really well, but as soon as you try and do something that's not in Apple's very structured workflow, it's a real hassle.
Wow. You really must see a lot of the UK all at once, a lot of the time. And what is true of the UK must, of course, be true of the world. Silly Timmy -- what does he know.
If you read the transcript of Dell’s recent earnings call you will note that they specifically call out their market share in several different segments they participate in, telling investors more than just the revenues by various segments. (This is just one example; don’t get hung up on Apple vs Dell)
Funny. I was just looking at Dell's 2018 10K. I was unable to see where they report their unit sales.
Could you please point me to where I might have missed it?
Apple has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to provide transparency. Like it or not, unit sales is a key metric of a company that sells hardware. Apple’s services business can be seen as a shift away from this but they can and should share this unit sales information going forward. If I owned Apple’s stock or was the manager of a fund that owns it, I would press for unit sales to continue to be openly shared.
I can see Apple’s strategy here as they choose to be less transparent as unit sales decline and price increases make up for the difference. After all, winning on market share can still be a very unprofitable venture that is not sustainable.
By still showing unit sales figures and adding this visibility such things as Apple Watch sales, Apple shows an honest reality to shareholders. It helps them understand how Apple is going up market and the success of various business lines. It also allows them to hold the board and management team accountable. By choosing to not be opaque, Apple has an opportunity to lead here - doing so by example. I hope they they reconsider their stance. Shareholders can and should bring this as a requirement. As consumers of their product, we should also expect nothing less.
You don’t really invest, do you? No other major hardware company is reporting per product unit sales, so your claim is bunk.
Your second claim is also ludicrous, as customers of the units have no bearing in this conversation between corporation and investor. I suspect you are only a consumer and this comment is the tip-off.
Actually, I do invest. I used to work at a publicly traded company and we included unit sales data in our quarterly conference call, broken out by market segment. If you read the transcript of Dell’s recent earnings call you will note that they specifically call out their market share in several different segments they participate in, telling investors more than just the revenues by various segments. (This is just one example; don’t get hung up on Apple vs Dell)
I agree with you that the 10k (for example) is important, especially items such as gross margin, operating income, inventory levels and the balance sheet.
I also agree that privately held companies have an advantage over publicly held ones in keeping certain financial items outside of public scrutiny.
Yet leading indicators in terms of share of market are important too. Tim likes to brag that Apple sells more watches than anyone. That figure becomes harder to believe if he doesn’t release the number that they sell.
As a shareholder, it doesn't bother me if Apple refuses to break out ANY specific unit sales figures. Their competitive advantage is also my advantage.
I actually don't see the big deal in reporting iPhone device numbers - that was relevant when Apple sold just one kind of iPhone in two capacities. Now Apple sell 7 different devices named iPhone, each in a range of price points, colours and capacities. All of which filling out the top end of the market.
Every year we see analysts get their estimated numbers wrong, then admonish apple for selling too many or too few - when neither figure is relevant, it's just to save their own egos.
Meanwhile competitors will only report on revenue for the total category which includes a staggering range of devices from the most basic to flagship models, not even giving a hint to where their sales are generated.
Wouldn’t this be an argument for Apple to keep reporting quarterly unit sales? I’m glad they’re not but analysts will turn just go off bogus estimates from firms like IDC.
Yes. These companies will now control the narrative of Apple product sales. The Apple board know this of course, but find it preferable to having to account for themselves directly to their shareholders. The corporate establishment hates being questioned. Once one company got away with not reporting actual activity, inevitably they all will stop doing it. Apple is just one of the last to stop doing it.
Think different indeed.
I understand that this is mostly about who controls the narrative but I see the problem very differently and born of frustration. I think Tim Cook is sick to death of analysts trying to reverse engineer Apple’s supply chain and manipulate the stock price. Tim is very limited in what he can say and do in mid cycle when the manipulation is taking place. All he can do is throw out broad generalizations about not reading too much if anything from supplier data, but he cannot point out where, why, and how analysts' whacko creations are off the rails. Tim's inability to shoot down the false narratives empowers the owners of these narratives to carry on just as they always have. BS has a short half life because it is in such great abundance and nobody peddling it is ever held accountable anymore. Even if Tim were able to stamp out one BS narrative it would be quickly replaced by a new one, son of BS, grandson of BS, etc.
Apple refraining from reporting unit sales is going to create a lot of hissy fits from a wide cast of characters. I think it is kind of sad because in an environment of logic and understanding I believe Tim would prefer to “educate” the market about how Apple has an aggregate value derived from a wide range of its business endeavors. Again, Tim is frustrated by the fixation that analysts have on very narrow (but massively deep) contributors to Apple’s bottom line. He wants to tally the big gains in new businesses and growing value in the form of increased average selling price (ASP) Apple is extracting by pulling more revenue out of fewer sales. Therein lies the problem in today’s society. Too many people have decided that they are “above” learning because they already know everything they will ever need to know. So even if Tim could provide insight and learning opportunities, very few to no analysts are listening. They don’t care because they already know it all.
I'm not convinced that Apple will stand its ground on this decision.
As the CTO for a large government laboratory for many years, I’ve read many Gartner reports over the years and also took part in a Gartner data gathering exercise when they were surveying our industry segment. I couldn’t believe what I read when the survey was published. They screwed up nearly every datapoint we worked hard to give them. I have no idea why people believe anything they publish or how they remain in business.
That keynote slide of Cook’s is an absolute classic piece of misdirection. We need to keep a copy for his retirement speech, you know, for a laugh.
First, a product is turned into a category ‘ipads’*, while a seperate category “notebooks” (which appeared in the slide’s title) is broken into brands to misdirect. Also, I feel like there was a notebook brand missing. I can’t quite put my finger on it.....
*it does show that Apple is selling a lot of iPads, but if all those columns to the right of them were stacked it wouldn’t fit the narrative Cook was attempting to shape. He doesn’t own an RDF.
1) What would be funny about his eventual retirement speech seeing as he's pushed Apple to where it is today? Or are you suggesting that he's not fit to be CEO?
2) How is that a misdirect when it clearly states what the graph represents? It's also pretty grandiose since Apple could've just pegged Apple v all other tablet and notebook makers and come out even further ahead, but instead they decide to limit it to just their one branding option that is just a tablet while pegging it against all the others that make notebooks, "convertibles," and tablets that are really designed to be used more like notebooks, as in the case of the MS Surface.
3) How is it more far to you that one product category from one brand be stacked against at least 3 product categories from all other brands?
I dont know about culture in your country, but in mine, retirement party speeches are usually include the funny, stupidish and embarrassing moments over ones’ career to lighten up the fact we will be losing a valuable employee. If all it was was boosting ones’ ego they would be very dull affairs indeed. At least there are drinks, right?
Its a misdirect because it is implying there it is about iPads against individual notebook brands. That didn’t tell you anything much. Its a misdiect because it excludes important things (eg Apple notebooks aren’t there), and it creates a false impression of the actual, real life market. If it was Ipads and other tablets stacked in one column against another column of notebook sales in total it would be more relevant to the case he was making, but it would also reverse his narrative. That iPads have become a replacement for notebooks.
The actual purpose of the slide was to distract from the problem of declining iPad sales. A problem probably more to do with the long, longevity of each iPad, what must be clear decisions within Apple to limit the productivity uses of the device for the time being ( eg file management, peripherals), and escalating price. iPad pros are now more expensive than quite capable laptops. That won’t help sales.
Nope. There are no other tablet sales to speak of, it’s an ipad market. So to show the context of where ipad sales are compared to the notebook sales of competitors is entirely relevant. iPads are computers. That they’re doing better than notebook computers of competitors is relevant.
The price bothers people on this forum more than it does real customers. You aren’t forced to buy the high end tier, $329 at entry level is more than affordable. Nobody is entitled to the top tier features at the entry level prices except on forums.
Comments
2) How is that a misdirect when it clearly states what the graph represents? It's also pretty grandiose since Apple could've just pegged Apple v all other tablet and notebook makers and come out even further ahead, but instead they decide to limit it to just their one branding option that is just a tablet while pegging it against all the others that make notebooks, "convertibles," and tablets that are really designed to be used more like notebooks, as in the case of the MS Surface.
3) How is it more far to you that one product category from one brand be stacked against at least 3 product categories from all other brands?
But ultimately, ultimately, Apple will need to sell more hardware, whether that is new product categories or more iPhones, macs, iPads or Apple TVs, to keep on growing services revenue. Apple will need more players playing.
Its a misdirect because it is implying there it is about iPads against individual notebook brands. That didn’t tell you anything much. Its a misdiect because it excludes important things (eg Apple notebooks aren’t there), and it creates a false impression of the actual, real life market. If it was Ipads and other tablets stacked in one column against another column of notebook sales in total it would be more relevant to the case he was making, but it would also reverse his narrative. That iPads have become a replacement for notebooks.
The actual purpose of the slide was to distract from the problem of declining iPad sales. A problem probably more to do with the long, longevity of each iPad, what must be clear decisions within Apple to limit the productivity uses of the device for the time being ( eg file management, peripherals), and escalating price. iPad pros are now more expensive than quite capable laptops. That won’t help sales.
The best way to do that is to grow its user base which Apple has been doing with the iPhone via a healthy grey market and has been doing with the Mac since 51% of Mac buyers are new to the Mac.
The Apple board know this of course, but find it preferable to having to account for themselves directly to their shareholders. The corporate establishment hates being questioned. Once one company got away with not reporting actual activity, inevitably they all will stop doing it. Apple is just one of the last to stop doing it.
Think different indeed.
"Think different" =/= "Be stupid and provide all the numbers that Wall Street wants". So that's a vacuous statement.
No, it wouldn't.
See above.
I agree with you that the 10k (for example) is important, especially items such as gross margin, operating income, inventory levels and the balance sheet.
I also agree that privately held companies have an advantage over publicly held ones in keeping certain financial items outside of public scrutiny.
Yet leading indicators in terms of share of market are important too. Tim likes to brag that Apple sells more watches than anyone. That figure becomes harder to believe if he doesn’t release the number that they sell.
Could you please point me to where I might have missed it?
Every year we see analysts get their estimated numbers wrong, then admonish apple for selling too many or too few - when neither figure is relevant, it's just to save their own egos.
Meanwhile competitors will only report on revenue for the total category which includes a staggering range of devices from the most basic to flagship models, not even giving a hint to where their sales are generated.
Apple refraining from reporting unit sales is going to create a lot of hissy fits from a wide cast of characters. I think it is kind of sad because in an environment of logic and understanding I believe Tim would prefer to “educate” the market about how Apple has an aggregate value derived from a wide range of its business endeavors. Again, Tim is frustrated by the fixation that analysts have on very narrow (but massively deep) contributors to Apple’s bottom line. He wants to tally the big gains in new businesses and growing value in the form of increased average selling price (ASP) Apple is extracting by pulling more revenue out of fewer sales. Therein lies the problem in today’s society. Too many people have decided that they are “above” learning because they already know everything they will ever need to know. So even if Tim could provide insight and learning opportunities, very few to no analysts are listening. They don’t care because they already know it all.
I'm not convinced that Apple will stand its ground on this decision.
The price bothers people on this forum more than it does real customers. You aren’t forced to buy the high end tier, $329 at entry level is more than affordable. Nobody is entitled to the top tier features at the entry level prices except on forums.