kevin kee

The bigger story I think is how Huawei gained 43.9% while Samsung and iPhone are both in declined (negative)? - and in some extent, Oppo and Xiaomi also see an increase in shipments while market is in average -4.9% compare to last year.

When Apple removed the headphone jack, it was apocalyptic. Imagine if non iPhone remove every single ports, it's going to be.. oh wait... nothing? Yeah, 'cos it's not iPhone.

rogifan_new said:

Cook needs to stop talking or if he does talk stop being so defensive. Oh and if the ecosystem is under appreciated by the market whose fault is that? Cook’s.

People like you and this comment are the reason why Tim Cook should keep say things this. It's not being defensive, it's called transpired, like an exasperated parents whose kids never learnt.

No bent on my 12.9". Are we being paranoid again? Not sure why when it comes to Apple, a 1% occurance is always treated as 100%.

davgreg said:

Fanboy drivel.

Google is an advertising company.  Pixel phones and Chromebooks are a dot on the balance sheet.
Microsoft is a cloud services company. Windows on PCs is no longer the big driver of MS profitability and Office is now a subscription service agnostic to platform.
Apple has been a hardware company that is trying to transition to a services company as there is a limit to how high you can drive the average selling price without hitting the point of demand destruction.

Going forward Apple is counting on a growth in services and some advertising to offset the plateau in hardware sales. The question regarding Apple is can they make serious inroads selling services- an area where their record is less than stellar. What Apple makes on music rentals probably could not pay the company’s light bill. Where is Apple’s platform agnostic equal of Office? Where is their equivalent of and MS Azure? Or AWS?

After how many years and how much money, Apple has not been able to translate almost a billion iTunes accounts to 1/10th of that for Apple Music. Is iCloud ever going to move beyond the small potatoes it currently serves? Even Apple uses Amazon to host iCloud.

The Apple I invested in years ago was a very different company from the elephant Tim Cook has created that has a lot of tail and not much tooth. The rent is paid by things inherited from Steve Jobs tenure and innovation has been largely replaced by iteration and imitation that makes the company look increasingly like Microsoft under Steve Ballmer.

So who is Apple’s Satya Nadella?

Writing in bold does not make your story believable. Trust me, I tried.