jingo

Apple have really missed the boat with TV, and I cannot see how they will recover from this in the TV space. They have paid too little attention to it and allowed everyone else to overtake them. This is part of why I have just sold all my Apple shares even though I keep on using their products - they are in real danger of being marginalised in an increasingly android-dominated world. It hasn't happened yet, but personally I don't see any serious evidence of them understanding what it takes to be at the leading edge, and if you're not at the leading edge marginalisation in the future is a serious threat. Just going on doing what you have done before like Apple are doing is not an option, and what's more others are doing a better job of forging relationships than Apple nowadays which will give Apple's competitors a big prime mover lead. I wonder whether the bottleneck is Jonny Ive? Maybe he just can't design any more products than they are producing now. Possibly they are so well- ( or over-, take your pick) designed that there is no spare bandwidth for new categories of products?

Totally agree with Oppenheimer, but I would go further. It seems to me that Apple at present is led by a logistics guy and a guy who is focused on perfect (in his view) physical design. They just don't have a real PRODUCT visionary at the top table. Like Steve Jobs used to be.

Otherwise AppleTV wouldn't fall so far short of where it needs to be, and have had so much lack of attention over too many years. And they would be the ones with Amazon Echo and what that means for not just content consumption, but the whole smart home space. Right now Amazon, and to a somewhat lesser degree Google, are seriously eating their lunch in terms of innovation. In the past Apple were a bit late to the party but they always did the job better. Nowadays they are not only ridiculously late to the party, but their competition are delivering excellent products that enable them to take over Apple's space or own it from the start, and when they do come along products like the AppleTV are falling way short of their competitors.

The only area where Apple still have a significant lead is with the Mac, but ironically it is the one area they are largely ignoring and allowing to dwindle away. Add to the lack of new or even revamped products the many dubious specification decisions they take in the name of "aesthetic purity" and they are abusing the loyalty of their computer customers to a quite ridiculous degree.

What exactly are they spending all that vast amount of R&D money on? It doesn't appear to be R&D, or they should have had a vast range of new and exciting products by now for their customer base. Nothing appears while their competitors are really ratcheting up their efforts and delivering great products.

I think their efforts are focused gimlet-like on maximising the profitability (to a sometimes insane degree) of their cash cows with no apparent attempt to broaden their product offering and no interest whatsoever in market share. Admirable focus, and should be good for the share price of a utility or resources company, but very dangerous for a technology company.

Contributors to the share price include profits and cash, but future earnings are also seriously important. Unless they demonstrate a better ability to introduce new revenue streams I am expecting the market to wake up to the lack of future earnings potential and the share price to tank sometime soon - it certainly should do so IMHV.

If they then demonstrate in the future that they can deliver more new products this could come back, but it will take a while for the market to accept that they really are up to that challenge.