78Bandit

avon b7 said:

I seem to be having patchy connections on the train.

Where is the 37% earnings growth coming from? 

I'm seeing an estimated YoY growth of approx 2% in units from the graphs that load.

edit: Paragraphs aren't showing up in the post for some reason. Sorry for the wall of text. The growth is coming primarily from increased prices. The X came in at a cool grand and Apple bumped the price of the 8 by $50 over what the 7 sold for. Average selling price is up while unit sales have been stagnant since 2015. Services is also increasing. Apple Music has grown over the last couple of years and Apple Care is also growing as customers are required to purchase it as part of the Apple financing plan. Time will tell where ASP tops out. Many, including myself, thought $1K was too high. Apparently Apple found enough buyers at that price to do very well even if they only sold around 40 million units of the X as opposed to the expected 80 million. It will be interesting to see the prices for the fall lineup. Will they push prices even higher with the X Plus at $1,200, or will they try to go for market share and price it at $1K with corresponding drop in the 5.8" device's price.

I don't think 4th quarter estimates are going to tell much.  You'll have only a week's worth of sales included if the phone is released on September 21.  Even under the best of circumstances the wait time for orders will slip past the end of the quarter shortly after preorders open up.

Apple will sell all it can make through September, but it won't be until Q1 2019 estimates come out at the first of November that we get a true idea of the long-term demand.

anton zuykov said:

The iPhone is "becoming a stable business, performing more like software than hardware," 

So it is only now is becoming a stable business? Okay.... So, it was unstable before with all those huge and stable profits? I see...

No, it just means the momentous growth seen between 2007 and 2015 is not expected to continue. iPhone sales peaked with the iPhone 6 and growth has stagnated since. The expectations of a "supercycle" year driven by massive pent-up demand for what would ultimately become the iPhone X that was even given as a reason by Tim Cook himself for the sales decline in Q2 2017 never materialized.

Growth in China is huge in percentage points among "affluent customers", yet is still relatively weak in overall numbers. India is proving a tough nut to crack as Apple is having difficulty selling even four-year-old iPhone 6 devices. Maybe eventually economic conditions will improve in those countries to where the average person can afford to choose a $700+ phone, but right now average income is way too low.

The mounting evidence is supporting Apple's iPhone business turning into a mature, commodity market. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean Apple is going to need to find something else to drive revenue growth which is what has driven the stock price in the past. They had a blow-out quarter in December due to ASP increases from the iPhone 8 and iPhone X, but that only goes so far. Apple can't continue to increase unit prices and maintain its customer base.

"The US Department of Justice similarly seemed to ignore that anyone could choose to buy the cheaper Amazon Kindle versions of e-books. Apple CEO Tim Cook described the whole case as 'bizarre.'"

I seem to remember the agency agreements Apple coerced the publishers into simultaneously adopting provided that the price on Amazon was the same as the price on Apple.  I think the contract actually required the publishers to price Apple iBooks at most equal to the lowest price the publishers promoted through any other service like Kindle or Kobo.  There were no cheaper Kindle versions of e-books under the agency agreements and prices rose considerably, hence the holding of collusion to the detriment of consumers between Apple and the publishers.

I'm thinking the 6.4" OLED model will be AT LEAST $1,000.  I don't see Apple offering it for less than $999 and possibly all the way up to $1,149.

At the reported prices I will be in the market for the LCD model as long as it hits the $699 mark.  Now if the 5.8" device can hit $799 I would probably get it instead, but I just don't see that happening.

My prediction is the 5.8" and 6.4" OLED models will have base storage of 128GB and start at $869 and $999 while the 6.1" LCD model will be $699 with 64GB storage.