zoetmb

It's been this way for a while, but I think Apple has lost its mind in regard to pricing.   I think the fact that their executives and managers make so much money (even if offset by absurd housing costs) has distorted their perception of what the masses, even the higher-end of those masses, can afford to buy.

One can buy an internal Samsung 4TB SSD drive for $1051 and a 2TB for $500.    Of course you can't use that in a MBP because Apple hardwired the storage and made it almost impossible to replace/upgrade.   Apple wants $1200 to go from 512K to 1TB and $3200 to get to 4TB of storage.    Ridiculous.  Apple charges $400 to get from 16GB to 32GB of memory and a 32GB DDR4 kit from a company like Crucial is as little as $350.   And those are (obviously) in quantity one. 

2.6G / 16GB / 2TB is $4000.    2.9G/ 32GB / 4TB is $6699.   Personally, I think that's absurd.   The only saving grace is that on models released in the last few years, prices came down pretty quickly and there were and continues to be lots of sales.

nunzy said:

 Drake owes everything to Apple.  Without iTunes, he would be nothing.

Apple came in and changed the entire music industry forever. Drake is reaping the rewards.

That may have been the case when downloading dominated.  But downloading is now (as of calendar 2017) only 15.7% of industry sales (in dollars) and it will probably be even lower this year.   Downloads comprised 64% of industry dollars as recently as 2013.  Streaming in 2017 was 66.7%. of industry dollars, but total industry dollars, adjusted for inflation are only 40% of their former peak.

nunzy said:

Monster better stop it's lawsuit, or it will get Appled. Just ask Samsung.

Reading the AI article about the lawsuit, it seems to me that there must have been outright incompetence in writing the contract that Monster had with Beats.   If there was a clear contract, there's no way that Dre et al could have walked away with the company.   And I don't see what Apple has to do with it in any case.   It's funny because what Dre is accused of doing is very similar to what Jack Warner did to get his brothers out of Warner Bros.    

We'll never know because Apple doesn't break out numbers, but I don't see how this could have been a good acquisition for Apple in terms of return on investment.   Apple would have done far better, if they were going to acquire a headphone company at all instead of developing a line themselves, of going after Grado, which they probably could have gotten for pocket change, or even Sennheiser.    Personally, I think the Beats headphones have awful audio quality, but obviously a lot of people like them.    Unfortunately, if Apple decided to sell Beats, it's unlikely they'd get anything even close to what they paid.  

eightzero said:

Is this good or bad for Apple? 

Since most publishing royalties are statutory, it won't make any difference.   For those that aren't, Sony will be in a position to negotiate a better deal.

Having said that, the U.S. Copyright Office has made recommendations to Congress that the whole system be changed to a "willing buyer - willing seller" free-market system (although Congress has shown no interest in acting on this), which means that instead of statutory rates, everything would be negotiated.   In that case, I would say Sony would have the upper hand because Apple could not take down all Sony Publishing owned tracks and still survive as a viable streaming/downloading service.   

Other countries vary depending upon their copyright laws.  

Note that "publishing" has nothing to do with the actual recording and payments to performers .  It only has to do with royalties to composers (and their publishers).  

steveh said:

Microsoft's "saving" Apple was hardly done out of altruism, nor did it cost Microsoft anything in the long term.

In 1997, Microsoft bought 150,000 shares of Apple preferred stock, convertable to common shares of Apple stock at a price of $8.25, redeemable after a three year period, for $150 million. Apple was worth ~ $3B at the time.

By 2001, they'd converted all of the shares into common stock, netting the company approximately 18.1 million shares. 

By 2003, they'd sold all of it.

It was mostly optics.

One of the reasons Microsoft invested in Apple was to make sure Apple survived.  They needed Apple because there were threats of restraint-of-trade suits against Microsoft because of the dominance of Windows and (at the time), Explorer as the default browser.    There were fears the Government was going to get involved. 

Apple really was in trouble at the time.   There were calls for Apple to either shut down and give the money back to shareholders or sell itself to a company like Sony, which demonstrates how analysts and industry insiders were just as dumb (if not dumber) back then as they are now.

I've posted this before, but here's some brilliant quotes by these geniuses over the years:

John C. Dvorak, 1984. “The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a "mouse". There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I don’t want one of these new fangled devices."

former Apple VP Gaston Bastiaens, January 1996.  “Within the next two months, Sony will acquire Apple. … Sony will be the white knight who will step into the picture."

Michael Dell, October 1997.  "I'd shut [Apple] down and give the money back to the shareholders."

Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe, 1998.  "The iMac will only sell to some of the true believers. The iMac doesn’t include a floppy disk drive for doing file backups or sharing of data. ... The iMac will fail. 

10/5/2000   Michael S. Malone.  Apple R.I.P.   … “Nevertheless, the bloom is off the rose. The incredible run-up Apple stock has enjoyed since Steve's return is over, and the sheen of success that had enveloped the company has been tarnished.    A temporary setback? Don't be too sure. Unlike, say, Hewlett-Packard, Apple has always been a company that deals poorly with failure. When things go bad at Apple, they go very bad. “

5/21/2001  Cliff Edwards    Commentary: Sorry, Steve: Here's Why Apple Stores Won't Work. “New retail outlets aren't going to fix Apple's sales “

 12/23/2006 Bill Ray (Mobile)

“Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly”.  It's the Pippin all over again”

 1/14/2007 Matthew Lynn.   Apple iPhone Will Fail in a Late, Defensive Move

“…Don't let that fool you into thinking that it matters. The big competitors in the mobile-phone industry such as Nokia Oyj and Motorola Inc. won't be whispering nervously into their clamshells over a new threat to their business…

The iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks. In terms of its impact on the industry, the iPhone is less relevant”

 

3/28/2007 John Dvorak.  Apple should pull the plug in the iPhone.   Commentary:  Company risks its reputation in competitive business

“… Now compare that effort and overlay the mobile handset business. This is not an emerging business. In fact it's gone so far that it's in the process of consolidation with probably two players dominating everything, Nokia Corp… and Motorola Inc.” 

Apple just had two record breaking sales and net-income quarters at a time when the analysts and press claimed the iPhone X wasn't selling.  Apple Services alone, if spun off, would make the Fortune 100 list and it's rarely even mentioned.    Apple's net income in fiscal 2017 was LARGER than their net sales in 2009 and before.  One quarter of Apple's Services revenue is LARGER than annual sales of the entire company before fiscal 2004.    And yet the analysts keep trying to imply that Apple is somehow failing.   Either they're completely stupid or this is clearly stock manipulation.     

I don't care what the article says - Buffet didn't buy more Apple stock because he saw that customers liked Apple and bought into the eco-system - there's no doubt in my mind that he looked at the numbers, which are extraordinary.  There's a good chance Apple will beat the fiscal 2015 net sales record of $233.715 billion as they're already at $149.44 billion after two quarters.   But having said all that, there is a question of what Apple is going to be ten years from now.   I've predicted for some time that 15 years from now, Apple will be an A.I. and robotics company, but with Siri still being so lame, I'm not so sure anymore.