rogifan_old

schlack said:

ooh..some common sense finally. watch hardware will be improved...ipad changes are obvious...better internals...better sounds...and pencil support...no need to introduce a phone. should wait till fall and have design (and internals) match that of the iPhone 7

I hope not. I don't think Apple should announce all its products in the fall. The only thing missing from this rumor is new Macs. So is Apple going to wait until WWDC to update? Or is it just going to be a Skylake spec bump and announced via press release?

msantti said:

Aple needs to knock something out of the park this year.

New 4" iPhone, and iPad Air 3, and watch bands ain't it.

Oh really? Says who? Also March isn't the rest of the year. 

I'm always amused with these fantasies about how Apple is going to/should screw it's competition. One minute content blockers and spotlight are going to put a hurt on Google and ooh Apple should do its own search engine cuz that would really screw Google. Or Apple needs to make ARM Macs cuz that would really screw Intel. Now it's bring all their cloud stuff in house so they can screw Amazon. Thankfully I think Apple's decision making is focused on providing the best experience for consumers not how can we screw our competitors.

So we don't even have a rumor here. Just some musings from a Wall Street analyst. But if her thoughts are accurate then Apple needs someone better than Eddy Cue to oversee it.

awilliams87 said:

rogifan_old said:

Bullshit. 90% of Google's revenue is advertising. That hasn't changed. Wall Street got all nervous in 2013 when Samsung was the bogeyman. Now everyone is panicking saying Apple has to pivot to so-called services because Wall Street doesn't like hardware companies and iPhone growth is slowing. More bullshit. And how do we know Apple's not working on diversifying? Just because Cook doesn't tell us what's in the pipeline doesn't mean it's empty.

These people are insane man. Google spends ~$3 billion on R&D, while Apple spends 3x more at $9 billion, yet he says Cook "refuses to invest into the company..." Google will freely say how much they spend at wall-street conference calls. We could only ever know how much Apple spends because of the required SEC filings. Google will freely announce to the world what they're working on. We can only infer what Apple may be working on by their required FCC patent filings. Google's PR stunt has truly fooled this guy.

Google have yet to turn many, if any at all, of their projects into innovations, instead continuously relying on smartphone users viewing ads on the Web, YouTube, or any other ad placement mechanism. But If you remove the iPhone, all of Apple's other products combined still makes more money than the entire Alphabet company. I would say it is Google who is dependent on ads.

I hate the whole "narrative" thing but I think that's what we're seeing here. Cook was getting a lot better on these earnings calls but this last one wasn't great IMO. Too much focus on FX and then sort of this weird pivot to services. There's obviously a story to be told there but it seemed like more of a panic because guidance wasn't going to be great rather than a well thought out new narrative on the company. There was nothing on the Q4 call to suggest we'd get this services meme in 2016.

If the company is going to be focusing more on services they're going to have to get a lot better at them. I don't think Eddy Cue is the right guy but I also don't see him going anywhere. As I've argued before what I'd like to see Cook do is split up Cue's role even more. Let Cue focus on content (iTunes, Music, TV, News) and Pay and bring someone in to run Apple's cloud business, maps, Siri, whatever work they might be doing in machine learning and AI. I think Cue's plate is too full and Apple's services are suffering as a result. And if Cue still has responsibility for Apple's pro apps perhaps move those under Schiller.  I think something like that would go a long way to giving people a bit more confidence in Apple's services.