VisualSeed

foad said:

VisualSeed said:

If indeed suicide, I'd wager it was a culmination of personal issues and some petty workplace issue that triggered a manic episode. If firearm related it could have been a premeditated attempt at a murder / suicide / workplace rampage at the office and he just changed his mind at the last moment. I just can't imagine an engineer bringing a gun to the office every day unless he kept it in his car. In any event, I don't suspect it was job pressure (unless he was terminated) even when Jobs reigned over the engineers like a mad dictator, nobody killed themselves and Apple has become a lot softer since then. 

It's impossible to know and dangerous to say things like this. Very often, suicidal people tend to hide their true emotions and by definition, have issues that aren't easy to diagnose. Additionally, I doubt he was terminated as he wouldn't be allowed into an on campus conference room. You can't even get past reception if you are not badged or escorted.

He could have shown up for work anticipating being terminated and gone to the conference room just after getting the news instead of to his desk or office to gather his things. People do seem to have a sense when things like this are going to happen. My point was it seems unlikely that an engineer would have a gun on them in the office on a daily basis and that its presence indicates a culmination of some ongoing issue and not a snap reaction. 

red oak said:

VisualSeed said:

The management team has put 13 years of extraordinary profits on the books and has obliterated almost every metric used to measure a company. If Wall Street can't figure out how to value the stock, that's not the fault of the management team. The $100 billion was not lost by Apple. It was lost by shareholders who invested in a massive company expecting unrealistic sustained growth when they should have been putting the focus on value. The company told everyone 3 months ago almost to the decimal place what yesterday's numbers would be. If you can't accept the company's guidance (which has yet to be adversely wrong) and randomly price the stock based on whatever some guy at BS Fund Company says then you deserve all the losses you suffer.

Apple's PE of 10 is a direct result of the management's inability to tell its story and inspire confidence.   It is ridiculous that it has taken a slow down in iPhone units for it to start touting it's Services business.  They should have started this three years ago 

Awful 

It's a direct result of investors ignoring the story and making up whatever BS they wanted to second guess the facts they were presented with. Apple has always promoted their services business, but until recently they didn't have the multifaceted appeal to consumers to generate much revenue. Also Apple Music was only launched last year so it's not like there was a plethora of profitable services to focus on instead of hardware and three years ago iTunes music sales were still doing well. If you had paid attention to the "story" Apple tells over and over, they don't release things before their time. The don't leave money on the table with a service or device that is still making money. You can moan and cry "awful" all you'd like but it has no basis in reality unless you are referring to what the market did to your position in the company. 

red oak said:

jonl said:

LOL. Are you so dimwitted so as not to be able to mentally adjust for the split, and don't you know what the stock price range was in 2012 off the top of your head, because I sure do. Pitiful, just pitiful, even for this board.

The stock peaked at 705 back in 2012, the equivalent of $100.71 today.   The value of the company (aka market cap), taking into account the buybacks, is $100 billion less today than it was in 2012  

The senior mgmt team has done an awful job managing the narrative of this company.  Awful  

The management team has put 13 years of extraordinary profits on the books and has obliterated almost every metric used to measure a company. If Wall Street can't figure out how to value the stock, that's not the fault of the management team. The $100 billion was not lost by Apple. It was lost by shareholders who invested in a massive company expecting unrealistic sustained growth when they should have been putting the focus on value. The company told everyone 3 months ago almost to the decimal place what yesterday's numbers would be. If you can't accept the company's guidance (which has yet to be adversely wrong) and randomly price the stock based on whatever some guy at BS Fund Company says then you deserve all the losses you suffer.

ac1234 said:

More money WASTED by Cook - the buybacks have done nothing for shareholders or Apple - use that money to give us far larger dividends - not the pathetic 2% a year as it is now.

If Apple was on the ropes and spending their last dimes on these buybacks you might have point, but they aren't. The buybacks are not even coming out of existing cash holdings and instead are being financed at a much more advantageous rate. You can argue all you would like about what Apple should be spending their money on, but this is not preventing them from doing anything, nor is it hurting. If you want the stock price to improve, the best thing you can do is stop complaining about it and buy more.

sog35 said:

okay. Watch sales have been good.  

But I'll admit it is not a must have product. I own an AppleWatch. I wear it every day. I like it.  Just like I like my shoes. But I don't love it. It does not appeal like how the iPod, iPhone, iPad did when it first came out.

I think its time to fire Tim Cook. We need a new CEO at Apple to make some tough decisions. If not Apple will just slowly rot away.

Very hard to take you seriously when you spend half your rant telling Apple what to do to improve their hardware offering then say they need to transition to services. Nothing wrong with selling services but Apple is a vertical company that is firmly built on their hardware offering. No software/service focused company is going to put the kind of points on the board each quarter that Apple is now. Microsoft can't do it, nor can Google do it and those companies are supposedly better at services than Apple. Services are great to smooth out uneven market trends in hardware sales but for Apple they have to be driven by hardware sales even if hardware profits are falling. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for expanding and improving their services, I just don't think then need to be the company's number 1 priority.

Your whole rant sounds like a Micheal Dell "Sell the company and give the money back to the shareholders" speech because you don't have the vision to see how the company moves forward because you don't understand what the company does, what it can do or what it is working on. Nobody in the know is advocating firing Tim Cook. He has sold more products and put more money in Apple's coffers in the last 5 years than Jobs did in both of his terms at the company.