2nickelstripper

Everyday it becomes clearer that the folks writing these articles are taking a bath holding Apple stock.  They are doing anything they can to convince themselves and others it’s all fine and dandy. 

I would not advise touching Apple stock other than to quick flip a short to cash out on people trying to bottom fish the rips.  If this thing goes below $150 look out for some real old fashioned panic selling goodness. 

Even as along time Apple user, I can say they are going down. The premiums are no longer worth it vs. windows. 

These kind of articles miss the forest for the trees. The business cycle is a repeatable pattern that happens thousands of times over to thousands of companies, including Apple:

Stage #1)  A company invents a revolutionary product or service, like the iPhone, or Facebook, or Amazon, etc.  The invention is enough by itself to move massive sales, account signups, brand loyalty, whatever your metric is.  The company becomes a leader in the stock market and otherwise.

Stage #2) Over time the novelty of the product wears off, competitors catch up and market saturation slowly creeps in.  The net result is slowed sales.

Stage #3) Faced with slowing sales, heightened shareholder expectations and increased operating costs (due to having more staff, etc.), companies compensate by increasing prices and increasing the number and range of available products to try and keep growth from slowing too much.  Sound familiar??

4) The increased prices compensate for reduced sales over a short period due to customers being locked in, brand loyalty, etc., but over time the higher prices reduce demand even further and the company starts to trend downward on multiple fronts.  What happens from here depends on many factors.  Sometimes the company can find a new product or service to start the cycle again, sometimes they can't and just continue to service a reduced user base.  Sometimes another company invents a new product that effectively outdoes the original company (kind of like what Apple did to Palm and the other smartphone providers originally).

Apple is in stage 3.  Everything they are doing is textbook business cycle economics.  This idea about people vs. units and such, you see a lot of this kind of news/opinions for companies around stage 3.  The reason being people, websites (like this one) etc., are invested in and dependant on the original companies success, and try to do whatever they can to help stem the tide.  I will work for a time...