brisance

MplsP said:

Well, both. Like any company, Apple needs to turn a profit, and profits also fund R&D for new devices, but beyond that, as a user, I really don't care how much Apple's profits are and to a certain extent I'd prefer them be lower since my purchases are what's funding their profits. If you are looking at two different cars, do you buy the one from the company with higher profits?

Agree with you and this is why Google and Facebook are doomed. Between the two of them they are taking in more than 90% of the global ad revenue, which means market saturation. And they can’t price ads any higher because there is a lack of differentiation (hence the need to invest in tracking technologies and alternative delivery like AR, VR etc.) Additionally there’s ad fatigue which leads to fast growing use of ad blockers as well S government oversight, and I would be underweight those stocks. 

cropr said:

The disposable income  in France, Spain and Italy is indeed very low.  Similar to your insight in the world economics (we are indeed not all equal on that point as well).  

And similar to the smartphone offerings in non English languages.   Apple is very slow to offer it services in non English regions in the world.  I live in the Dutch speaking part of Belgium, another of those "low income" countries, and I don't have Apple Pay, Apple News, no Apple Maps Transit, no contextual predicting or multilingual support for the keyboard, very crappy Siri (it is embarrassingly bad), no Siri on Apple TV, ...  In all those areas Google is providing a good to very good service.

Very good points. Outside of US, UK, Canada, Australia, Apple’s second tier are Japan, China and New Zealand. Then comes the rest of the world. iTunes Store only took more than 10 years to be established in Singapore, mind you. You would think Apple could spare a billion or two to hire more people to work on these problems.

An observation about those countries where Android is dominant: they typically don’t have strong IP law enforcement. My wild ass guess is that it’s popular in those places due to pirated content. Germany may be an outlier because of Android’s ability to sideload apps. iOS can do this as well but I wish more people would stop peddling the myth that it can’t. 

saltyzip said:

brisance said:

The analysts that misguided investors should be sued. They had only one job and they blew it. 

They were expecting a supercycle of sales and that hasn't happened, which is why sales forecasts have been cut in supply chains.

No, it’s poor journalism, if it can even be called journalism. It’s outright lies and none of the liars have been called to account. The narrative was that because Samsung’s display unit is the sole supplier for the iPhone X’s OLED screen, the former’s poor performance would mean commensurately tepid sales of the iPhone X. So either the comapnies’ people are lying in their respective earnings conference calls or the analysts are lying by creating a false link between two seemingly unconnected events.

The analysts that misguided investors should be sued. They had only one job and they blew it.