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Rayz2016 said:

corrections said:

2nickelstripper said:

These kind of articles miss the forest for the trees. The business cycle is a repeatable pattern that happens thousands of times over to thousands of companies, including Apple:

Stage #1)  A company invents a revolutionary product or service, like the iPhone, or Facebook, or Amazon, etc.  The invention is enough by itself to move massive sales, account signups, brand loyalty, whatever your metric is.  The company becomes a leader in the stock market and otherwise.

Stage #2) Over time the novelty of the product wears off, competitors catch up and market saturation slowly creeps in.  The net result is slowed sales.

Stage #3) Faced with slowing sales, heightened shareholder expectations and increased operating costs (due to having more staff, etc.), companies compensate by increasing prices and increasing the number and range of available products to try and keep growth from slowing too much.  Sound familiar??

4) The increased prices compensate for reduced sales over a short period due to customers being locked in, brand loyalty, etc., but over time the higher prices reduce demand even further and the company starts to trend downward on multiple fronts.  What happens from here depends on many factors.  Sometimes the company can find a new product or service to start the cycle again, sometimes they can't and just continue to service a reduced user base.  Sometimes another company invents a new product that effectively outdoes the original company (kind of like what Apple did to Palm and the other smartphone providers originally).

Apple is in stage 3.  Everything they are doing is textbook business cycle economics.  This idea about people vs. units and such, you see a lot of this kind of news/opinions for companies around stage 3.  The reason being people, websites (like this one) etc., are invested in and dependant on the original companies success, and try to do whatever they can to help stem the tide.  I will work for a time...

Sounds familiar because we've been hearing it for 10 years now about iOS. Except that Apple has outlived every pre-iOS platform, outlived American Android, and is outperforming Samsung/LG and all the companies in China in every metric apart from sales of <$300 phones that are a terrible business to be in. Apple is now selling +200M iPhones a year at ~$800, which is the best it has in all its years of trying. Are you saying that isn't sustainable, because people are suddenly going to run out and get a $400 OnePlus? If so, why haven't they done that for the last 5 years, and why did the $1,000 iPhone X turn into Apple's last hit?  

Rather than iPhone going away as promised, Apple introduced iPad and again outlived every pre-iOS tablet, outlived American Android tablets, and is now outperforming Samsung/LG and all the companies in China in every metric apart from sales of <$300 tablets that are a terrible business to be in.

And then it introduced Apple WAtch and outlived every pre-Watch wearable, outlived American Android Wear, and is outperforming Samsung/LG and all the companies in China in every metric apart from sales of <$100 wearables that are a terrible business to be in.

Sound Familiar?

 

In ten years time, the usual suspects (the ones that are still alive) will be complaining how Apple is all about the Apple Watch and VR and AI and self-driving cars and services, and has completely forgotten about the iPhone and the Apple faithful that supported it.

Yes, 2nickelstripper is right; that is the standard life-cycle for a company, but he has forgotten that Apple is the master of reinvention.
Computers
Then music players
Then phones
Then tablets
Then Watches
Then Health
Then Energy Production
Next VR
Next transport.

And with each reinvention, it increases the installed base for the entire ecosystem.

rogifan_new said:

Why Apple is focusing on users not units? Because units aren’t growing like they used to. I will say though seeing Apple become a company focused on extracting more money out of existing users is kind of depressing. Not nearly as exciting as the great product reveal on stage.