rogifan_old

runbuh said:

Yep, those Hyundai commercials were definitely featuring Apple watches.

Um I'm not sure if this was meant to be sarcastic but that's not an Apple Watch,

Something else to think about for all the Apple needs to become a services company crowd...both LinkedIn and Tableau Software got crushed last week. LinkedIn is down 48% so far this year, Tableau down over 60%. Netflix down 27%. Software as a service is looking weak and media companies aren't looking so great either. I don't think it's some panacea that's going to bring Apple stock to $150 or whatever.

SpamSandwich said:

Joe74 said:

Seems like many tech bloggers disregard basic ethics.  Go to CNET's "Top 100".  Every month the number 1 "hottest device" is a Samsung phone.  Lol.  If sales are the metric for what is hot, they are flat out lying.  Also, Nilay Patel at "The Verge" completely takes shots at Apple every time he gets a chance.  I haven't heard him say anything positive in a long time.  It's nice to have someone stand up to the frauds

Nilay Patel is the king of Apple trolls and has seen much of the top Verge writers leave under his leadership. He's a massive jerk.

The Verge is seriously a joke now. Yesterday they ran a story with the headline CBS Sports app suffers outage on Apple TV. Yet the body of the story confirmed the outage didn't just affect Apple TV, it affected Xbox and other streaming media boxes. And then this morning their top story is people are being mean to Tim Cook on Twitter because he posted a blurry photo from the super bowl. (go to the tweet in question and there aren't that many replies and only a couple making fun of the blurry photo). Seriously?

Apple pretty much confirmed the supply chain noise when they forecasted the first quarterly YOY sales decline for iPhone. Some have said this is because sales for the 2014 holiday quarter were pushed to Q1 2015 (either supply chain issues or Apple couldn't make them fast enough). But had that not happened than the 2015 holiday quarter would have shown a YOY decline as it barely beat on sales. Also on the earnings call Cook said that 60% of the install base is still on a 5S or lower. Is that because people like the smaller size? The phone is good enough that they don't feel the need to replace? Didn't find enough compelling reasons to upgrade with 6 series.

I don't know that we've reached peak iPhone and I do think Apple's stock valuation is nuts but I think valuation has a lot to do with sentiment and narrative and because Apple is so secretive about the future it's difficult to paint Wall Street a picture of where future growth will come from. So they see iPad down 25% YOY, Mac flat to slightly down, iPhone flat with guidance to be down the following quarter and wonder where's the growth going to come from?

If Tim and Luca want to change the narrative to Apple being a services company than they should have been building up that narrative for a while not just throwing out one slide on an earnings call where they knew the iPhone story wouldn't be great. And if you look at the slide it's just one number; they didn't break anything out so you could see the trajectory of Music or Pay.  For all we know the bulk of services revenue is still probably IAP from the App Store. If Apple really does want to shift the focus to services than I think they need someone better than Eddy Cue leading it. Walt Mossberg and Jim Dalrymple both wrote articles about issues with Apple software. Most of the issues they have fall under Eddy Cue's leadership. He pretty much owns services at Apple and it's the weakest part of the company. IMO Cook needs to do something about that, even if Cue is popular inside the company. Take most of the software and cloud stuff away from him and have him focus on content deals and building out Pay.

Just hot pink? Not buying it.