iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs(nytimes.com) |
iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs(nytimes.com) |
There is only so much hardware innovation, there are only so many people on the planet with $600 to spend on a mobile phone.
Apple should really move whole heartedly into services (as evidenced by revenue up 20%); build a gmail / dropbox competitor - stop thinking of itself as a consumer hardware maker, that era is over.
I can't be that unusual a customer. I think a lot of people are just done upgrading. For a while there in 2009/11/13 (or was it 10/12/14?) every time you upgraded it really did make a difference... a "quantum leap" in technology. Now, I feel like upgrading just changed the style (and unfortunately accessories) of my phone. Rumor is the 7 is going to do away with standard headsets. That would be a deal breaker for me. I am fatigued of not only replacing the phone, but the $300 in accessories it takes to power/add accessories/run the phone every 2 years.
This whole subject around quarterly earnings at Apple always makes me think about this larger trend here called peak stuff. Material consumption is falling in Western countries. Steve Howard did that great interview on the subject on NPR: http://www.npr.org/2016/01/22/464013718/ikea-executive-on-wh...
Apple's products were the pinnacle of aspirations besides a car or home in much of the world, and now... well... they're less so. Still popular, still great products, but maybe there is starting to be some fatigue. It's probably good. Anyone who things unlimited growth as a model on a planet with finite resources is still living in the 20th century anyways.
Maybe that's contributing.
If the market price is lower than intrinsic value, then the buyback is a good idea.
It's not expensive, their cash stockpile is simply being invested in their own company.
> ..propping up the share price to keep Wall Street happy
Apple isn't worried about Wall St, they've always made that clear in their earnings calls.
Apple makes bets too - they just aren't public.
Yeah. This doesn't seem so bad to me. Search has improved tremendously over the years. Things are easier to find. Google is making more content discoverable.
Advertising is arguably the biggest revenue generator for internet tools. Everyone can use things that are free, and companies want to reach everyone. So long as Google is the most frequently visited site in the world, they remain in control of the biggest revenue stream.
One could argue Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat etc. are making up ground by giving people access to more readers than the likes of Blogger or WordPress. These isolated worlds feel a little like AOL's heydays to me. There ought to be an easy way to publish somewhere, then take your content and network and move to another service if you want. At the moment, it's possible but not easy.
I think anyone who makes such an open social network, with easily exportable contacts and content, would find a lot of success. But it's a really hard problem to solve and I understand why this doesn't exist yet.
Most regular people I know enjoy Facebook, and are accustomed to how it works.
I'm curious about where you see the demand?
This includes VR/AR, less someone else gets to the the brand reputation throne first (like HTC or Microsoft).
I think HTC's got it for at least a year. It may continue longer. They'd need to do something wrong to lose the lead. MS Hololens is too expensive at the moment to get much reach. And I could make many comments about how Oculus/FB messed up a bit recently. However, I think everyone, including HTC, hopes that Oculus finds its stride again. More competition is better for everyone and will advance VR tech and the market reach faster. Gates and Jobs are on record saying Microsoft, Apple, and the world wouldn't have been as good without each other.
Take watches however, there is no one perfect form - different needs demand different forms. Or cars, or fridges or planes.
So yes it may not be computers, phones or tablets, but the number of multi-billion dollar aspirational hardware products that Apple will be good at is not by any means a large number.
Heh, I remember time when a 4-inch screen was declared was the "perfect" size for a phone (with intentionally malformed Photoshopped thumb-reachability evidence to buttress the argument) and "no one would buy 'the hummers' of phones"
Come on Apple, where are the revolutionary products of yesteryear? 3D displays? AR/VR technology? Home automation? iPod headphones? Voice recognition (ala Alexa)? I used to look to Apple for a glimpse of the future; not anymore. :(
Smart money's on the latter. Kinda painful to re-watch the Apple II moment while android ambles off into the sunset with all the users....
It seems to be that squeezing between iPhone owners and everyday
purchases would be very lucrative
Only one restaurant I go to takes it, the one that has little terminals at each table. I'm not sure how the mechanics will play out for restaurant payment. Personally I don't like the table terminal, but maybe someone will come up with a bill carrier that can take payment.
That being said I use it at trader joes and sprouts, and when Starbucks finishes rolling out Apple Pay I'll use it there too.
It's just very convenient and fast. It makes chip and pin cards seem like five steps backwards.
I have an iPhone 5S and don't want a larger one. When the iPhone SE came out, I was excited until I found out it didn't have force touch, which was the main interesting feature to me about the new lineup. Other than Apple Pay it seems I have very little reason to upgrade until this one dies or breaks. I don't see being satisfied with their product as a black mark against them.
I originally upgraded because I wanted NFC and "it was time", but nothing is using the NFC chip in my phone so why bother?
I'm considering buying the SE but my girlfriend is hampering me, she says a 6s is a status symbol. I guess for a lot of people they'll just upgrade anyway.
Check out the Redmi Note 3, on sale in India for about £100:
The Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 is available in two RAM and storage versions - one including 2GB of RAM and 16GB of inbuilt storage, and other 3GB of RAM and 32GB of inbuilt storage. The 2GB variant is priced at Rs. 9,999, while the 3GB variant is priced at Rs. 11,999.
The highlight of the new Redmi Note 3 is it packs a hexa-core Snapdragon 650 processor (four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.4GHz and two Cortex-A72 cores clocked at 1.8GHz). Other specifications of the smartphone are identical with the original, including a 5.5-inch full-HD 1080x1920 pixels IPS display and offers 178-degree viewing angle. It runs MIUI 7 based on Android Lollipop and supports dual 4G SIM cards (Micro + Nano).
The Redmi Note 3 packs a 4050mAh battery with fast charging support that can charge up to 50 percent in 1 hour. On the camera front, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 3 sports a 16-megapixel rear camera with phase detection autofocus (PDAF) and two-tone flash. It also houses a 5-megapixel front camera. It measures 150x76x8.65mm and weighs 164 grams.
For connectivity, the handset supports 4G LTE (compatible with Indian LTE bands), VoLTE, Bluetooth, 3G, GPRS/ EDGE, GPS, Glonass, Wi-Fi, and Micro-USB options.
Source: http://gadgets.ndtv.com/mobiles/news/xiaomi-redmi-note-3-to-...
I changed my mind because of the Google Fi service. I can get a compatible phone for $200, and I project my monthly service plan would be less than half than my Verizon plan, given my usage patterns. I do worry that Google might drop the Fi service, or change the features/cost in the future though.
I reckon the iPhone (and maybe iPad) will transition into just a dumb accessory screens.
My thinking is that this follows the trend: Desktop (power on your desk) -> Laptop (power in your bag) -> Smartphone (power in your pocket) -> Watch? (power on your person)
Now there is moment when smartphone is just a phone. Apple or any other brand - does not make real difference.
Some, say, MicroMax or Huawey Android stuff is about $150, and it gives you everything, except 3D.
It is just a phone.
Basically, the only reason why I would personally want to upgrade is for the bigger screen on the plus model and the battery life that comes with it.
Surely that's the NYT's typo and they mean million with an M, right?
EDIT: Not a typo, see mbrubeck's reply below.
https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/04/27Apple-Expands-Cap...
($175 million would be less than three hundredths of one percent of Apple's market cap.)
Why do certain people say this? The watch is a $6.5 billion business in its first year. That is a huge success. Nothing compares to that.
A faster CPU, a thinner device (the first gen Apple Watch is huge), and more useful software are clear areas of potential improvement. I think there's a hypothetical wrist-mounted computer which could be really great, but the Watch obviously isn't there yet.
They could buy their way out of this I am pretty sure.
I bought an iPhone 6S, space gray, factory unlocked at around $650 (excluding tax). I sent my iPhone 5 back to Apple for a recycle. They gave me $200 in iTunes gift money. So, all in all, I got a new iPhone 6S for $450 (excluding tax).
There's inevitably a show-off element to it, but I think there's psychological research to show that people appreciate products more when they pay more for them. (But I can't find any evidence from a quick google....)
Sure, this is my opinion on the internet. I've no idea if the HTC and Facebook CEOs feel the same way about competition helping each other as Jobs [1] and Gates [2] said. But I imagine those at the top of massive organizations know a few things about being successful that might not be obvious to the rest of us. What Jobs and Gates said does ring true about their history.
Jobs explicitly pointed out that there was a toxic anti-Microsoft attitude at Apple when he returned, and getting rid of that was critical to their success [1].
> Just as its easy for Gates and Jobs to reminisce after the PC boom after the dust has settled, I doubt they were so romantic during.
That's also discussed in the Jobs/Gates interview. There were good and bad times, and historically speaking, they were not always so against each other. MS invested in Apple several times, and Apple took some risk partnering with them. Jobs pointed out Apple (really, himself) wasn't good at partnering with people, but Gates was, and he admired that [3].
[1] https://youtu.be/wvhW8cp15tk?t=23m42s
If they could get something to improve their cloud services competitiveness vs Google, maybe something like Dropbox, I could see that helping them long-term. Otherwise I don't think anything they could acquire would be anything more than a play at becoming a conglomerate ala GE at this point, there simply aren't many companies with a proven core product out there that can help Apple get out of this mess, except by expanding outward.
Not that there is anything wrong with being a conglomerate, Alphabet/Google is basically on its way to becoming one too, and GE is wildly profitable, I just don't see Apple playing well in that space. They need to concentrate on something.
I think Apple have no where to go than to buy companies. In fact most of their revolutionary products were products or technologies they bought.
It's typical apple strategy, they are just worth so much now that it's hard to see their acquisitions as anything but a drop in the water. Until now I guess.
They could buy Twitter, they could buy Box (or dropbox) or some other cloud solution, they could buy Stripe, they could buy Slack, they could buy so many companies and use their size to leverage those into something truly groundbreaking.
So I don't think it's that far out.
I enjoy Facebook. I just see opportunity for something next-generation. Also, I disagree with the notion that Facebook will be fine forever as the dominant player in social networking. They are better off with more competition. Gates and Jobs are quoted saying that Microsoft and Apple's existence helped each other become better companies [1] [2], and helped get more useful computers into people's homes and businesses faster.
Gmail offers an export feature of its emails and contacts in formats that are importable by other tools.
Facebook could do this for your friends list. They don't because they've never had competition that provides such a feature.
When internet explorer became free for everyone, Netscape was forced to become free for everyone.
> I'm curious about where you see the demand?
Demand doesn't make or break a new product. There wasn't demand for cars or iPods before they came out.
That's the best I can explain it. If you don't agree that's fine.
I liked your examples of cars or iPods. I agree that as specific solutions there was not demand before the existed, however there was clearly demand for personal transportation and portable music players.
What is the equivalent for portability?
I think that makes my point further. There is demand for social networks
I'll concede that portability may or may not be the next big thing for social networks. Let's speak more generally.
People want better social networks. They want to connect with friends more easily. To be honest, my Facebook feed is improving bit by bit, but it's still not as good or interesting as it could be. My perception is that Facebook is 100% focused on improving the feed, but without competition, we'll never have anyone thinking outside the Facebook box. Mark has the final say on certain strategies, and I think his vision is great, but his company would be even greater if there were another Mark.
Jobs and Gates fed off each other. Their efforts to market computers to the world helped each other's businesses grow faster than they would've grown alone. By borrowing each other's ideas, we got better products. And their employees were constantly on their toes. Google and Facebook are amazing companies and provide more services to their employees today than Apple and MS in the 90s.
However, the same energy isn't there to improve their core products. Google could be much better at machine translation across all languages, which is part of search, for example. In the future, I think they will be. Without another real competitor, they're free to work on whatever side projects please their employees. The core products miss out on advancements that may otherwise arrive sooner.
All of this is fine and I think tech will thrive regardless. The reason I write all that is I believe in churning up ideas from the bottom that might not otherwise find support. I don't think I'm the only one with this idea.
But why would they. It's a lot of trouble, and being a bank gives you the right to lend in money from the public.
It's still possible to provide payment services without being a bank.
I think they could more or less buy VISA and pay in cash, and that makes more sense if you want to make money on retail payments.
Perhaps this is just a recent revelation for me, and talking about it helps form my thoughts. And maybe I'm wrong about FB. I don't use Snapchat or Instagram etc. My sense is that FB is far ahead.
I sometimes like to think of it as not so much a benefit of competition as a risk for monopoly holders.
For sure. It is also a risk for state-favored companies that hold monopolies inside authoritarian regimes. Their growth will probably be limited to their own country. Without local competition, it may be difficult to make the leap to global competitiveness. This is very theoretical as I have no experience. But I think you can draw some parallels to the way politicians cut their teeth. They begin at the local level and work their way up.
We hear a few things consistently:
1) Providers have switched from "free upgrades every 2 years" to a plan cost and a monthly phone cost, so people now really know how much their phone costs--and many would rather save the $30 a month than upgrade their phone. This started with T-Mobile a few years ago and now is how most phone plans work. This is having a huge impact on people's desire to buy new phones.
2) iPhone 5/5C/5S users have no desire to upgrade to a larger phone. The SE is going to solve some of this, but it'll more likely be a scenario of "I dropped my 5S in the toilet and it's completely dead, so I'll upgrade to a SE instead of dealing with the hassle of finding a legit used 5S." I don't expect to see a huge push toward the SE from current iPhone 5 users.
3) Repairs are so cheap, so easy and so effective. It's $79 for us to fix an iPhone 5/5C/5S screen right now, and we can fix it in less than 30 minutes typically. No reason to upgrade when your old one works just fine and you can get it fixed cheaply.
Interestingly, the SE screen is 1:1 compatible with the 5S screen, so the SE is coming out of the gate being cheap and easy to repair as well. I'm typically recommending the SE if people really want a new phone.
We also ask customers about 3D Touch (the new feature on the 6S/6S+) and if they're using it if they have a 6S. 99% of people have no idea what it is or how to use it. They bought a 6S/6S+ because it was pink. Yep, most of the 6S phones we see are rose gold, and that seems to be the #1 factor driving sales of that line. If they don't care about the pink and ask me what phone I recommend, I recommend buying a refurbished 6 over any of the 6S line. (We don't sell phones, so I have no horse in that race at all.)
Having said that, 3D touch is far from the only improvement on the 6S. If it didn't have 3D touch I'd still recommend the extra $100 to get MUCH better internals (processor, cameras, touch ID sensor) and a stronger body too.
The only consistent use case though, completely useless beyond.
Photos shows a little icon to indicate that a long press will do something. It is discoverable. No other area where this UI element exists.
EDIT -- I also use the keyboard trackpad thing. Not often though.
Wasn't this why Apple was quietly introducting the "iPhone Upgrade Program"?
http://www.apple.com/shop/iphone/iphone-upgrade-program
Seems like Apple realized the future will be a place where everyone just leases their equipment on a monthly basis and switches stuff in-and-out as they need to...including the carrier (gasp!)
This reduction in churn and corresponding reduction in new device sales is great for consumers, which is why all of the large companies (MS, Apple) are trying to push the subscription model, to try and safeguard their revenue streams.
> It's $79 for us to fix an iPhone 5/5C/5S screen right now
Interesting, since I have a 5s with a broken screen glass that I haven't bothered getting fixed yet. :)
It used to be quite a bit more, I think? Have you figured out how to separate the glass (etc) from the actual display, or have replacement display+glass packages just gotten cheaper?
(If you are replacing the display - is there any significant performance difference between the stock display and the replacement display?)
The backlight, LCD, digitizer (touch "web"), and top glass are all one piece. They come bonded from the factory. I never recommend glass-only repairs, and they're nearly impossible to do yourself. Some shops will do them, but realistically, with the 5 series screen cost so low right now, there's no reason to risk digitizer issues with a glass-only repair. (It's very difficult to replace only the glass without breaking the delicate digitizer "web" right below it.)
From what we can tell, there is very little difference between an OEM display and the ones repair shops sell. The 6 model is slightly thicker. On a 5, you probably won't notice it.
It is all about the warranty if you choose to get it replaced from a shop--some percentage of the screens are just going to have issues, and you want a shop that stands behind their work. (No repair shop warranty will cover if you drop or break the screen, though!)
> "I recommend buying a refurbished 6 over any of the 6S line"
I would not, upgrading to "S" was the biggest performance boost I've had, compared to regular 6 - it's blazing fast and on top of that I can't imagine myself without 3D touch app switching, live photos and text navigation, those do help a lot at least to me and most of the people I know.
It really depends on the location of the shop. There are a ton of people who don't live anywhere close to an Apple Store.
Also, considering probably the vast majority of servicing of iPhones happens at an Apple genius bar, I'd say your (very informative) views of the population have some selection bias.
http://www.cultofmac.com/278978/apple-stores-usa/
Repairs are probably orders of magnitude more common outside of Apple stores.
That may not be the case for display replacements. From what I've seen, the Geniuses won't attempt to replace a screen if the phone's chassis is even slightly deformed. But the local fixit shops will.
The question then becomes, "How random is the subset of people who get thrown out of the Genius Bar for screwing up their phone really badly?" The wealthiest of those will just buy a new phone, so that's one potential source of bias, I suppose.
Personally, I think Steve Jobs rolls in his grave every time yet another crappy iOS update gets issued. It's led to a general distrust of anything "forward-moving", and that's led to a distrust in the newer phones too.
Would your customers agree?
I don't have much to say about the software side, though one of the biggest problems we see is that people constantly run out of space on the lower-end 16GB phones, and the way Apple handles that is completely unintuitive.
If Apple is going to continue to sell phones with such limited storage, they really need a better way to manage that storage and allow people to move items to the cloud or delete them more easily than just scrolling through a seemingly-infinite list of photos and videos.
My poor iPad 2 is so slow on iOS9 that its unbearable to use for any length of time. A5's are unbearable, A6's are not far behind.
That's been the only "killer" for phones for me. With a decent case I feel like they otherwise last forever.
My personal upgrade cycle usually involves someone else's (ex: spouse or parent) phone breaking, giving them mine, and buying a new one. Otherwise I'd probably still be on an iPhone 4.
Easiest way to know you need a battery replacement: Your phone gets to 40% or 20% and suddenly just dies on you. That means at least one cell in your battery is dead, and it's time to replace the whole battery.
Also, if your screen is edging up on the left side but isn't cracked or broken, that's a sign of an exploded or "puffy" battery. Usually people have the first issue for a while, don't realize what's happening, and then eventually it goes puffy and explodes. It can even break the screen when it does that.
As with other repairs, if you get a battery replacement at a repair shop, ask about the warranty. Replacement batteries can have real issues, and some runs of them have high defect rates. No big deal if the shop you work with has a good warranty and will just swap it out if it stops working.
If I'm going to spend > $600, I expect my life to improve a little bit. I'll probably upgrade to the 7, mostly because I've gone without a case and have had some dings that do impact functionality, but I hope to go 4 or even 5 years with my next phone.
If there was any way to dramatically increase power efficiency or battery capacity it would be a huge draw for consumers.
Feel free to email me if you want more info--my contact info is in my profile.
Is it possible you mean to compare the iPhones 6S and 6S Plus, which actually differ in size?
I do think Apple needs to focus their money and efforts on improving their services and software integration. There's a lot to like in Apple services, but there's a lot of rough edges and weird gaps, and too often I feel like apps get written and then abandoned. If you bundle an app, it should have a dedicated team that keeps making it better, faster, easier to use all the time.
I also feel like Apple has a real chance to make a mark on the home automation market if they chose to do so. The best stuff out there is still pretty bad, and pretty much all of it spies on you. Based on how they've been adding context-aware features to iPhone in a very privacy-conscious way, Apple is the one company I would still trust to actually try to do home automation in a way that respects my privacy. And they have the money to invest in making it happen. But while I'm sure their hardware would be well-made, can they raise their software polish to the same level?
And I don't think one quarter without growth is enough evidence to conclude "Apple may be reaching the saturation point among potential customers in some countries" or "other smartphone makers using Google’s Android operating system continue to challenge the company with powerful, lower-price devices."
This is a significant earnings report as it's the first to break 13 years of continuous growth. Revenue was down 13%.
• Q2 EPS: $1.90, down 22% YoY, versus expectations of $1.99
• Q2 revenue: $50.6 billion, down 13% YoY, versus expectations of $52 billion
• Gross margin: 39.4% versus 40.8% last year and expectations of 39.47%
• iPhone unit sales: 51.2 million, down 17% YoY, versus expectations of 50.7 million
• iPhone ASP: $644.25, down 2% YoY, versus $651 expected
• iPad unit sales: 10.2 million, down 19% YoY, versus expectations of 9.4 million
• Mac unit sales: 4.03 million, down 11% YoY, versus expectations of 4.6 million
• Q3 revenue guidance: $41 billion and $43 billion, versus expectations of $47.35 billion
It looks like it is just going back to where it was in Feb? (90 or so). I guess if it keeps heading down below that it would be alarming.
I don't think anyone was surprised though, around 2014 we saw the writing on the wall. I mean take the Nexus 5, I have plenty of friends who have one and it's basically like they bought a microwave. It just works, it's fine, and they're expressing 0, and I really mean 0 interest in upgrading their microwave. They'll keep it for as long as the battery lasts and they don't break it. And that's really a last-generation phenomenon, before two years ago I was looking forward to new mobile tech. Now the changes aren't meaningful anymore.
And now people are openly expressing it, too. Like the CEO of sony, who spoke about the end of innovation in smartphones a few months ago. I mean take my dad, he just bought an LG G3 for $8 a month on a 2 year contract. Now this phone is 2 years old, not top of the line... but it's $8 a month and it comes with a nice screen that's almost double the PPI of the latest iphone, 3gb of ram, a nice snapdragon 801 chip, 3000 mAh battery, it just works fine and it's just really cheap. In two years, the latest G5 will be $200 too, and you'll buy G3 like phones for $100. What can we innovate in smartphones that's worth $700 to most people? That used to buy you a magical device that could do things nothing else could, in your pocket just a few years ago.
Anyway, I wonder what's next for Apple. There's no rumours of anything happening except its car. Wearables will expand. But they're all late or super late to market in these product categories. That's not a bad thing, they'll obviously make money, but it's not comparable to creating a real smartphone industry.
The last year quarter was buoyed by previous quarter supply constraints causing a lot more sales in many categories and products.
It's not that this quarter was bad (it was fine) it's that last years quarter was SO GOOD and last quarter had no major supply constraints that we see this.
Basically - Apple has got so good at the supply chain it's hurting their numbers for quarters with no new releases.
But sure, start speculating about [insert your favorite phone] and writing screeds about phone subsidies/performance/innovation/whatever. It won't be right... but you'll feel better I guess.
I think sales are going to slow down but that is a case of less growth to be had in western markets.
Still plenty of growth opportunities in other markets but they'll be slower
In particular, in 2013 40% of respondants would upgrade phones after 2 years... in 2014 that number dropped to 15%.
At the same time, the number of people who said they would upgrade at "obsolesence" went from 15% to 35%.
There's a decent amount of evidence that 2-year contracts trigger a lot of phone upgrading. The end of that whole cycle is going to continue to cause pain to anyone selling cells.
[0]:http://reconanalytics.com/2015/02/2014-us-mobile-phone-sales...
http://recode.net/2015/12/30/att-confirms-it-is-doing-away-w...
Here is data on drop:
iPhone
First quarter of 2015: 61.2 million First quarter of 2016: 51.2 million, down 16%
Went to the Apple Store in my large metro and they were out of almost every model. The associate searched other stores and there wasn't much within 1500 miles. Anecdotal, but it looks like the demand is outpacing the supply of the iPhone SE. It'll be interesting to see the sales numbers.
In many ways, this is a credit to Apple doing a great job. On the other hand, the real challenge with driving iOS upgrades is software. There's no killer app that requires the latest hardware, unless you care about games and maybe a few drawing apps on the iPad.
With TouchID + strong alphanumeric password, I can be secure in my person. My data is far more valuable than just the hunk of metal and glass it resides on.
I think Apple should do an expansion of their 2008 iFund, but writ bigger (and maybe focused on the watch and apple TV).
But ultimately it's about impressing customers, not Wall St. And Apple has been getting less and less good at creating products that do that.
I do find their lack of acquisitions strange given how much capital they are sitting on. There are a lot of markets w/high barriers to entry they'd have no trouble getting their foot in the door(Gaming, On Demand Streaming, etc...).
A) They average like 5-8 per year which is pretty standard among their peers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
B) I said to Steve, “What should he do?” and Steve said to me, “He should focus on his knitting. Not try to do everything. Do one thing well.”
My god, that $50 billion expansion is 7% of the company at the current market cap.
I'm glad to see them returning capital to shareholders. However I worry about the debt they're taking on in order to do so, due to most of their cash being overseas. If things continue to slide for them, for whatever reason (iPhone loses favor, smartphone sales keep contracting globally, something replaces the smartphone, etc), it will pin them into a disastrous situation of extremely high debt and crashing sales (while having committed to very large payouts to shareholders).
Not a great situation to be in but I can't imagine it getting big enough to where Apple could no longer handle it. Maybe I'm underestimating interest rates
Smartphones in general have reached a point where we are barely wowed anymore.
I got myself a cheap xiaomi phone as a stop gap after my high end phone died. A year later, I'm still using it and have no energy to even bother looking at what else is out there.
My son got a iPhone 6 for $25 extra a month. Without that we could not afford it.
Only downsides:
1) no MediaTek CPU any more, only Qualcomm shit => no more easy rooting, firmware reflashing etc.
2) no dual-SIM :'(
They've gotten better about it, but there's only so much you can do when you're producing a high-tech item being purchased tens of millions of times per week globally.
Source - http://www.macrumors.com/2016/04/26/q2-2016-earnings/
So not really a surprise from what they announced at previous quarter.
Apple Pay always gets triggered by accident when I try to unlock using the fingerprint, and once in a while random apps seem to heat up the phone and drain the battery before I realize what is going on.
I think small things like the minor points of perceived quality that I'm describing can have a big impact on sales. When a phone costs $800 people expect a very solid experience with no glitches.
1. Create an appointment, set the geographic destination, start setting alarms and about half the time Calendar crashes.
2. No gesture to make a copy of an appointment in Calendar.
3. No API for Siri.
4. Dial into a conference call with a passcode. Start a second call, and try to dial into another phone number with a passcode from Contacts or Calendar. It dials the number but not the passcode (iOS ignores everything after the phone number for the second call).
5. Come back into cell range from a long absence and receive a barrage of voicemail notifications about voicemails you've previously been notified about.
6. Add a field in Contacts, and the cursor and focus stay in the "add field" area of the record, while the actual field is above that area. You have to scroll up, find the field as the keyboard appears, then key in the field. Older versions of iOS had the behavior correct: adding a field moves the focus to the field in the record.
These and more warts arguably should not exist in a high-end, premium smartphone.
Intel has routinely maintained gross profit margins of 60%+ for decades on its microprocessor sales. Their hardware margins put Apple to shame.
It took PCs 20+ years to get good enough, smartphones managed the same in much less than 10 it seems.
Then we see tablets and all Apple has done is release newer models with higher price points and worse more expensive add ons.
Finally, their cheapest desktop is eleven hundred and cheapest laptop is nine hundred for a low powered system, the first realistic laptops start at thirteen hundred. No I don't really count the Mac Mini because it never seems to register on people's radar and by the time you add on the monitor and such its up close to eight and nine hundred.
I won't even touch that Watch, its price or the silliness of that is the price of just the bands.
Apple's failure is that it won't go low. They don't have to go rock bottom but they damn well need to push "LE" models or the like. Redo the first Air with a few minor upgrades as the Air LE, 299... get an iMac out for the public nearer seven hundred. Get the rest of the iMac line back into realistic pricing especially for SSD upgrades. Please update the Mac Pro, really how long are they going to ignore it?
tl;dr Apple simply priced them out of too many markets, either out of ignorance or arrogance.
Moreover, her iPhone 4 was the first smartphone in our family. Since she got her phone (and stuck with it), I've gone through at least four or five phones -- always because they broke, not because I was interested in upgrading.
So I'm guessing that while there are lots of Apple gotta-have-the-latest people out there, most people just want a phone that works. And if Apple's hardware and software quality are good (or even half-good), then people will just keep using their old phones.
Which means that Apple will continue to sell phones, but the number of people who will buy or upgrade each year will shrink, at least to some degree.
It should also be noted that Apple is still very profitable! It's just less profitable than it was last year.
I have a cheap 2014 Motorola Moto G and I have the same "problem". Yes, there are hundreds of modern phones out there which are several times faster and have way better hardware but the Moto G is fast enough for me.
I usually just browse the web, type a few messages in Whatsapp, take a few pictures, ... and the phone does all of this well enough so that I just don't have any reason to invest 500+ Euro in a new phone.
Another bonus is that if I accidentally drop my phone I can just buy a new one (or two) and it will still be cheaper than an iPhone or other similar phones.
Now I have Nexus 5X, it costs less than half as much as top phones but I think it's actually better, at least for me - clean Android with timely updates, everything is smooth and fast, USB-C, good camera...
It sounds like a minor complaint and I guess it is, but when I'm fumbling around in the dark and I want my flashlight, or when I'm trying to quickly take a picture, I don't want my phone to be unlocked. I just want my damn flashlight or camera, which are easier to access if the phone is locked.
I'm actually considering going back to the 6 instead of the 6s just because I like that little delay in recognizing my fingerprint.
Pre-iPhone, most contracts were one-year, and typical expensive phones cost $3-400 unlocked. Post-iPhone, phone costs go up, so contracts get longer, but now the carriers are in a position where they're treating expensive iPhones the same as the same as less-expensive base-model Androids. Sure, they can make a killing on the less-expensive phones in that model - since the subsidy amount is greater than the cost of the phone - but it gave T-Mobile incentive to ditch the model and pass on some of the savings to budget-conscious consumers.
And ultimately, that's not such a bad thing for the carriers, but it is a bad thing if almost all the phones you sell are on the "more expensive" side, since you're now competing more directly on price.
Second, the carriers are smart enough to realize that even with relatively old phones data usage is still pretty high. The carriers now make their money on metered data so they want to avoid the capital outlay required to subsidize a phone if they don't need to for customers to stay data hogs. T-Mobile provided a real world experiment that likely found attrition to be low enough even with contracts gone that it was worth removing the subsidy.
Tl;dr The carriers are cheap and don't want to lend you money for a new phone when you still pay them a lot to use your old one.
Apple can and does generate a steady stream of revenue from existing devices. App Store revenue increased 35 percent year-over-year, and iCloud is also continuing to grow. Apple pay is adding 1 million new users per week. and they just announced the Apple Music has 13 million subscribers.
Apple's services unit is now the company's second largest category during the recent quarter, ahead of Mac and iPad sales
Also the touch-id capabilities are significantly improved.
Working at a small shop now, and seeing this same behavior, it's a little frightening. In our case, and from my perspective coming from a couple of startups more recently, and large enterprises prior to that: terrifyingly frustrating for a number of reasons.
I'm in a great spot to make suggestions from my accumulated past, but the team and management seem terrified to make the jump and have nestled themselves nicely in the niche of "let's just do what's easy for now" while still telling themselves they want to grow grow grow, but I don't think management is quite aware of what this growth is going to mean internally for our ability to solve problems with the toolsets we have (both for support and project management).
Not sure I understand. How do you grow revenue unless you're producing something that someone wants, presumably because it solves a problem and makes the world better?
If I were a company I'd pay a lot of money to find other ways to grow!
Not only that, if there is no growth in the next few quarters Apple will be considered to be in "bad shape" which is insane when you consider the size of the company and its revenues.
there isn't anything wrong with Apple's stock selling off violently, as much as there was anything wrong with people bidding the shares up so high under the idea of selling it to someone else at a higher price.
there are plenty of companies that are content with steady or even cyclical growth/earnings. in many other countries were local stock markets are not popular venues for speculation and capital formation, it is quite respected to have steady earnings without a drive to quarterly growth.
that being said, many places that are low growth envy the high growth areas, especially how it has been achieved in the US markets.
Down voters: valuation = income / ( discount rate - growth rate )
What is Apple's next move once it saturates the market?
Or, more generally, what is the next move once you've saturated a market?
My idealized mathematical self thought, naturally, the exponential growth curve, because it expresses what happens when y-dot equals alpha y.
But I asked a passing Caltech astrophysicist, who (not surprisingly) gave a better reply. The curve that flattens out and goes down, he said, because exponential growth is impossible to sustain. Physical limits on some aspect of the system must intervene and impose a new law.
Given that people have already been writing those articles for a couple years, i'm sure a drop in their revenue and missed estimates won't make them stop.
Not to mention that all the other companies (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook) have much worse ups and downs (and are also 1/3 or less the revenue and much much less the profits of Apple, Amazon comically less) but you never see "X is doomed" for them...
AAPL YOY (year over year, not quarter) : iphone down 18% ipad down 19.5% mac down 9% revs down 13.5% eps down 18.5%
Just to put this into perspective:
> quarterly net income of $10.5 billion
I doubt that many people base their purchasing decisions on this though.
This is my first iPhone as at previous occasions I always used Android (nexus) devices and I found the fact I don't need to tweak it, a positive thing. That and the fact that at it is longer supported than some Android flagship devices.
Ten years ago I had the time (and needs) to tweak my phone, nowedays I just want a good (out of the box) smartphone with long support.
Apple's strength isn't in coming up with NEW things, I would say quite the opposite as they're usually very late into any given market. Apple's strength is coming up with products that are better than the ones that came before, in their Apple-y way.
"Innovating" is a business buzz word. Its not meaningless, but I think that its meaning is far from inventing/creating.
The blackberry was the ultimate pager, but didn't have a functional web browser. The Windows device was pretty much awful, and PalmOS was waiting for euthanasia.
Innovating isn't just about inventing new technology wholesale. It's also about packaging that technology in a way that makes it useful and desirable.
But Apple still has a lot of resources and capabilities it can deploy to make something a sucsess, like any other big company, so maybe that's what we should except from the current Apple - altough considering the circumstances - this can be very lucrative.
Apples customers barely complained on slow iPhones, and even less at their pricing level, where many knew apple margin is 40%. "Normal" company cannot withstand such high margins because of competition. Jobs achieved opposite where many people just said "oh screw it - it will cost me plenty, but I really want it!"
As of the lack of growth, I agree with you. It doesn't mean they are in serious troubles, just like a light caught doesn't mean you have a throat cancer. But the truth is that their products lost plenty with Job's departure.
Apple growth barely been done due to progress, but rather because of evolution! First mass-scale touch device, first mass-storage music device (I know, there been Palm and others; but ask 10 people - who ever heard of Palm?). Those were steps of evolution. Before you couldn't type with a finger. Before you couldn't store 160GB of your music in your pocket. Etc etc.
Now Apple is all about growth. There is no more evolution! There is faster CPU, if you really needed it. There is lighter phone, if you really needed it. There is faster GPU, if you really needed it. There is more fancy front-facing camera.... BUT none of those things are evolution; its just a progress. And that won't catapult Apple sales into previous levels. It simply can't.
Would we see the same "disappointing" sales numbers had Jobs still be here? Most likely not. By now we would steer the "i" devices with our eyeballs, and mind control that really works and is friendly to a customer would be just around the corner...
As of today under current management... it's funny, but my i device doesn't even have an FM radio built-in.
The only innovation was the original iphone. There has been zero innovation in the smartphone space since then.
Every single smartphone is just a touchscreen slab. They are, in terms of design, indistinguishable from the original iphone.
Sure - thinner, a curved edge, a different button ... but those are just trivial details.
The original iphone was a different thing than, say, a moto razr or a candybar phone or a treo. That was innovation.
I haven't seen any since...
My battery crapped out rather quickly, but a replacement has extended its life.
On the contrary! iOS relative to Android is more popular in the US than in the EU.
Call quality, screen resolution, responsiveness of the UI, material design, size, lack of crapware...Google really got it right. I've had this phone for 2 years and I have zero interest in upgrading to iOS. Sure, the display is nicer, the battery life is marginally better, but really, I just don't care.
Also, i'm hoping my future glasses have some kind of mechanism built in that will let me text with my mind... even if that means thinking about moving shapes or colors or something to do it.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/02/6-1b-smartphone-users-globa...
http://www.businessinsider.com/smartphone-sales-forecast-201...
The thing is a) those are all a few years out, b) they're interconnected. VR will happen first because it's got an obvious path to a large consumer base. That will lay groundwork for AR, which is probably the actual Next Big Thing. Wearables/IoT/3D printing are really an extension of the miniaturization/customization of longstanding technologies, but are all experiencing severe growing pains (wearables : size/batteries, IoT : cost, 3D Printing : materials).
As for the rest: wearables hadn't had a really strong use case - so it's either a niche or a fashion/status object - and maybe that's what will limit growth even when size/batteries gets solved ?
IOT: cost is definitely a huge barrier, but will it be that huge deal ? or just another feature in the stuff we already buy - sold to us through the same big companies, with a few specialized products ?
And 3D printing - don't you think a 1-day Amazon 3 printing with the most optimal processes will win, for most consumers ?
I want to bet on sunglass sized AR, but it seems like we'll need some material science revolutions to shrink down the requisite hardware to have the kind of useful experience is imagine
The only issue is that phone manufacturers have even more of an incentive to bloat the OS more and more (and make it slower and slower on old models) and to deprecate it faster (on older models) so they can sell more hardware if people want to get the latest security fixes / software
Furthermore, my phone supports Qualcomm's Quick Charge tech which means plugging in the phone for a few minutes gives it a lot more charge.
Between these two points; my phone very very rarely runs out of battery. When I was on iOS it'd be almost every day.
another big pain point is battery (and battery consumption). still waiting on hardware (and software in conjunction) to get more efficient. you'll remember how power hungry PCs were in the beginning and how much better they are now (laptops notably).
feels to me like we still have many years to go, and many more "big" technology investments.
Other than that the major change on the horizon that would drive mass upgrades is any advancement in battery tech.
The iPhone was a completely post-Mac product; now Apple needs a post-iPhone product, and they don't seem to know exactly what that could be. They are swinging wildly at fashionable fads from competitors (watches after Samsung, pro tablets after MS, cars after Tesla, etc etc), with little end result. But Apple is at its best when it disrupts mediocre and stalling markets (grey PCs, crappy mp3 players, stupid phones), not running after fashionable fads. They should leave "fire and motion" to the rabble and come up with new panzer designs instead.
Is the iPad Pro a big improvement on that?
An example:
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/10pcs-lot-Mobile-Phone-LCD-Di...
US $215.00/lot 10 pieces/lot, US $21.50/piece
There is a method to go back to iOS6 if you have a jailbroken device, but its complex.
Here in QC/Canada it's basically "90$/month for the 2 year upgrade" or "65$/month for BYOD".
But prepaid is pretty good here. I haven't been on a contract for years now. I just buy my phones.
Obviously it would be a very small amount, but still overall superior to paying cash, definitely better than using credit.
http://wccftech.com/turn-keyboard-trackpad-3d-touch-iphone-6...
However the internals are largely the same as the iPhone SE
Since I was out of warranty anyway I opted to self-replace the battery.
Wait, why cant the OS tell the user that something is wrong with the battery.
For example, if my ISP charges my $10 more a month, they aren't necessarily solving any problems, but it's still growth for them.
Much more of a risk than bumping the iPhone specs.
"which is about a 12% decline in year-over-year quarterly revenue. It’s officially Apple’s first quarterly decline since 2003."
A long way to go, but we'll be there eventually :)
True, but you could easily make it less of a pain point by making the device 1mm thicker ;-)
The point was in most peoples minds the iPhone 4 vs 5 jump was smaller than the 5 vs 6. And the 5 needed a new connector. So, we are stuck with an apples to apples to oranges comparison.
Samsung sales also dropped that's significant and they lack a stark A vs B model year comparison due to massive numbers of phones being regularly released. http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung-phones-9.php
I burned by this, all was looking good till I try to used with my polarized sunglasses, it was probably cheap screen, with wrong polarization, which you see nothing with glasses.
The whole electronics repair business seems rather immature and shady compared to something like car repair. For a car make, you can easily get the software manufacturers give to repair shops which has all sorts of exploded assembly views, instructions and part lists.
The main way screens appear in the repair business is from companies in China that buy back screens with broken glass but functional LCD. They then replace the glass with new glass. Most of the screen is OEM, but not the top glass. They then ship these to repair shops and distributors, who use them to replace screens.
That's why I mentioned in a previous comment that it's all about the warranty with a repair shop. No shop will warranty a cracked or broken screen, but most decent shops will warranty digitizer (touch) issues as long as there's no physical damage to the screen. That type of warranty is a must-have--there are only a small percentage of screens that go bad after a few days or weeks of use, but it really sucks if you get one and the shop refuses to replace it.
> The whole electronics repair business seems rather immature and shady compared to something like car repair.
Well, both are shady (plenty of YouTube exposes on oil change places that upsell services, charge for them, and don't perform them.) Honestly, one of the reasons I came into this industry was I was aware of the huge need for a non-shady repair shop in Austin, TX (where I live.) We're the highest-rated independent repair shop in Austin, and we take that pretty seriously, since there are so many horror stories of bad computer/game console/phone repair shops out there. We do our best to do right by our customers.
That's really interesting. I had assumed these were being manufactured somewhere to fit into apple devices, but instead there're huge operations that are buying tons of broken screens and essentially refurbishing them? Is that for legal reasons or cost reasons or other?
I'm curious: what does the supply chain look like?
A) Person breaks their screen, how much do they get from one of those shops that buy broken phones? Does that firm then break it down and sell the parts? Like a smart phone chop shop?
B) If so, who are they selling to? Surely not the refurb factories themselves, the factories wouldn't want to deal with that many individual people. So are people aggregating these and then selling in bulk to manufacturers? Any idea on the pricing around that? Does there seem to be a dominant player in the market or are there many people doing this?
C) After refurb, how much does the new screen then go for? You mentioned it's like a market--what's the range been in the last few years vs today?
And what about Android?
Calibration is only necessary on a glass-only repair; it realigns the digitizer "touch web" with the top glass that you're actually touching. That's why we don't perform nor recommend glass-only repairs.
When we repair a screen, we test every part of the digitizer before giving it back to the customer. We type on the keyboard, open apps, etc. If we find a dead spot, we replace it on-site. If by chance there's something we missed on our test, that's why our warranty exists.
If a customer finds a dead spot or the digitizer starts glitching, that's covered under our warranty. And that's why I recommend you find a shop with a good warranty. Most of them don't test as thoroughly as we do, but even with testing, a small percentage of digitizers will still have issues a few days to a few weeks after the repair. A warranty will get you a no-hassle replacement as long as you haven't cracked the screen.
So, just like the US in 2008?
Well, quite a lot more effort.
I don't want my data/photos/etc to fell pray to a phone thief -- or a guy that finds the phone after I dropped in a cafe. And Touch ID does that fine.
The "fingerprint on glass" scenario you mention concerns dedicated people targeting my data especially -- which is not something I realistically care about. If such people were after my data, they could also use a crowbar and beat me till I tell them my secrets...
>but a would-be thief is more probably far more concerned with selling the hardware than ransoming your data.
Yes, and I am more concerned about my data than about the hardware -- after all at that point it is already in the thief's hands.
The average person is much more likely to have their password stolen by somebody watching them enter it over and over every time they look at their phone than somebody who is going to go through the trouble to replicate fingerprints.
I think tablets have reached market maturity surprisingly fast. At some point it has to become more about profitability, ecosystem strength and market dominance than growth.
There's plenty of more options available in both the short (<5yrs) and long term (>5yrs). They've previously had consumer product lines that included cameras, game consoles, laser printers, TVs, etc.. They could revisit those markets again, or push into business markets.
Really they could do anything.
Hmm, now i'm kind of out of options. As after Samsung Galaxy note experience, I said I'd never buy Samsung again.
The oleophobic glass coating is a joke, at least on my 5s. I can easily make out a clear fingerprint from touching the screen with a solid press.
Every morning we have a company wide meeting where capturing more market share is a recurring theme. And immediately after that meeting yesterday in a developers only meeting, an inordinately large amount of time was spent on discussing how we can introduce new features yet still accommodate those of our customers who don't have internet access.
Because, as you know, if you want to capture more market share with software in 2016, you want to focus on people who don't have internet.
We finally put Internet access in all of the warehouses and told the truckers they had to end their night at the warehouse and log their hours there. Several drivers quit because it was too much of a burden to drive that far every day. But then we finally got to upgrade the software to support showing customers where the trucks were at and how long it would take to get to their locations.
It would be awesome if technological progress was more evenly distributed across the population.
I understand that any good company wants to provide quality service to all of their existing customers, but dedicating resources and devising workarounds for that small percentage of disconnected customers (to the detriment of the thousands of others) while our mission statement is to "capture market share" seems counter intuitive to me.
This is not complicated. You buy with the expectations of future profits X. If the stocks fails to meet those expectations, you reallocate your capital by selling to someone else who is happy with <X.
There is nothing nefarious about it. Nobody is a failure. The system isn't broken. This is the free market.
How is the long-term R&D of Apple affected by a bunch of shareholders exchanging ownership with new shareholders?
US had a crappy system. TMobile innovated. Even if that innovation was to copy a system from another country, to our market it was an innovation.
I could update my statement to say
"Most innovation in the AMERICAN cell phone market has been through T-Mobile"
Also there are ways to disable some of the newer features and reclaim some responsiveness, such as General->Accessibility->Reduce Motion.
Besides, at least China has actual manufacturing jobs and exports instead of tons of service jobs...
Anyways, America has actual IP jobs and a relatively transparent financial system to compensate. We just have wild guesses about what is going down on the ground here.
The stock price doesn't just reflect the amount of money the company has. The stock price reflects the "fully loaded" expected value of that stock. That means it prices in ALL expectations.
If the company you buy performs exactly as expected, then you don't actually make any money because you paid the price that reflected those expectations, so whatever dividends the company issues will only compensate you for the premium you paid. So the stock has to outperform expectations before it's worth buying.
The "expected value" of the company actually discounts dividends and the like, because the value of money in the future is less than the value of money today.
There's an amusing side point to this, which is that a perpetual annuity actually has a finite value [1].
The stock will cost a fair market-clearing price for its expected return, risk-adjusted. But often a stock, or a perpetuity, is a good purchase for one or other market participant - no different from a loaf of bread bought at a fair market-clearing price.
One can say that this "risk premium" actually reflects the expectation that things don't go as well as expected. But the fact is that in the aggregate and in the long term equity investors are still doing "better than expected" and there is no agreement on why it is so (this has been called the "equity premium puzzle").
I believe you would agree with me that a company could exceed expectations while at the same time not growing (by giving out a bigger dividend, or buying up its own shares with its profits).
As for 3D printing, the biggest problem in my opinion is modeling, not printing itself. The cost of stereolithography printers is finally dropping, and extrusion printers are getting easier to use, but actually printing things is useless unless you have a model you can print. Most people just don't want to spend the time or effort to create a model, especially when you can walk into a store and get a higher quality item that's professionally designed and manufactured for dirt cheap.
$2b is spare change for Apple -- I don't see Echo going places anyway, it will end more or less like the Kindle is now.
In fact, Amazon's whole profit was around $100 million last year -- and it's the first year it ever had any profit IIRC. I don't see those $100 million profit per year threatening the $18 BILLION profit per QUARTER anytime soon.
Amazon prices its products for thin margins and aggressively moves into new product spaces (sometimes with spectacular failures). Apple prices its products for thick margins and returns a lot of money to investors with stock buybacks. Using profits as a metric to compare these two companies holistically is specious.
I thought capitalism was a for-profit endeavour. Unless Amazon runs as a non-profit, it's just people investing in perpetuity based on pure belief/speculation of imagined future profit (and of course, on actual stock-based profits). Not that different from any pyramid scheme, which is why historically the stock market has periodical bubbles and crashes.
Those kind of rewards for the kind of actual prospects the company has are more or less a speculative bubble, with little basis on objective reality. $600 billion in "cash" on the other hand, that's something to keep you going and to talk about.
Apple could even get to be privately owned company with their buybacks -- Amazon wouldn't even stand a year as one at their churn rate.
>Amazon prices its products for thin margins and aggressively moves into new product spaces
Walmart does thin margins too -- but with huge revenues and profits compared to Amazon.
But all that said, Echo is a neat device but not unique. It can be easily outpaced by either company if they choose. Amazon's "Skill Store" for Alexa is piss-poor and the ability to add skills is horrendous. Getting a skill approved is a nightmare, and they basically have to be "free" skills to have any potential.
If Amazon can figure out how to monetize skills, they may be able to pull ahead. But as it stands, right now, Echo is a novelty device that appeals (mostly) to kids.
Offtopicish: I think the first to offer the battery life my phone has in an iPhone like package will sell a lot: even my mother got an iPhone because the battery life on her Samsung was too miserable and in her head this equals 'Android' so no more Android... work to do this reunion'
Also thats not true. Most important parts of Android are open source, for whatever thats worth. Its the parts that communicate with Googles cloud that are closed as well as Google's branded suite of apps.
Besides, where have you seen OSS services? It doesn't even make sense.
Also the argument that Android isn't actually OSS argument is dumb. If it was closed source how have other companies forked it and successfully released their own variants? It doesn't make sense.
But that's not really what you're doing when you invest in an S&P index fund, right?
In real terms, that means the cost of a PC has been reduced quite a bit (because of inflation: http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=10... )
One of many high end buyer guides one could reference. http://www.anandtech.com/show/538/17
I'd say that computers have come down in price.
You couldn't get $2,300 for a 33MHz machine now, just like you can't sell a Galaxy S1 for a $700.
High-end PCs at that time were Compaq computers. Not cheap knockoffs that were made by no-name brands. The Compaq 386 had a launch price of $6500 to $10,000+
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/10/business/the-executive-com...
The "Jade" PC you see in that image is probably more comparable to "Gateway" brand now-a-days.
Computers are a hell-of-a-lot cheaper today than in the past.
EDIT: I looked it up, and I can't believe I forgot about this. Back then, every mom-and-pop store was able to build their own brand of PCs. The clone wars were unstoppable I tell you! Jade Computers was apparently a small business with just a few retail locations running out of California.
$1500 in 1995 is about $2300 today. A $1500 computer today is ~35% cheaper than the "same price" computer from before.
Having been a gaming rig builder since around that time, high-end performance desktops have gotten way cheaper, with more realistic performance tiers to boot.
Or...they are unwilling to allow the company to eat losses to pretend to invest in the long term, but are in reality on their way to failure (for example). Let's not act like companies, in general, have this figured out and know what's best. Lots of them fail.
If you want long term growth, you're free to invest that way. But don't impose your preferences on others, or assume their method is wrong. The only way speculators, or anyone, can buy shares is by someone else deciding to sell, uncoerced.
Google restrict OEMs from forking, is certainly shitty. But its also a smart business tactic and I hope Google gets more restrictive around letting OEMs use their flavor of Android. Since it leads to a more cohesive experience surrounding Android.
Suppose you buy a perpetuity, granting $X every year. After 100 years, you'll have 100 times $X more dollars, but you will be worth exactly the same as you were worth before the perpetuity. (This assumes that the market correctly prices the perpetuity so that the expected value of purchasing it is $0).
EDIT:
I'm not talking about "profit" because it's not really a super useful concept here. Having a larger quantity of dollar bills after a period of time does not mean that I've got more value. Trivially, if I have $100 in 1950, and $101 in 2016, I have made a "profit" of $1 but lost a substantial amount in real terms.
I should cite sources and use correct terminology.
Wikipedia provides the following [0]
> The dividend discount model (DDM) is a method of valuing a company's stock price based on the theory that its stock is worth the sum of all of its future dividend payments, discounted back to their present value.[1] In other words, it is used to value stocks based on the net present value of the future dividends.
It's a nice Econ lecture but markets do not actually behave by a manner of collective estimate of dfcf. I would say it's more accurately described as a random walk with an upward inflationary bias.
Compaq's pricing was clever. If you bought one, everyone knew you bought it because it was better, not because it was cheaper than the IBM model. (And it was better because Compaq was shipping 386 machines when the IBM PC AT still had a crappy 286.)
Just because Apple didn't become the first trillion dollar public company by marketcap (lets assume that chinese bank ipo for a brief second didn't count), doesn't mean that it would have broken a physical limit on the system.
There was a time not long ago when 100 billion companies didn't exist
and there was a time when private venture capital didn't value new businesses at 1 billion dollars
although I don't see the fundamentals to support such large companies, apple, or another company, isn't breaking anything if it does achieve the ability to grow larger
The higher valuations of private companies IMO has little to do with quantitative easing. Despite any bubble talk, very little funding actually goes into these private companies. The S&P 500 returns nearly 1 trillion a year to shareholders via dividends, VCs put like 50 billion into these high growth startups.
Low interest rates from quantitative easing might contribute greatly, but I wouldn't say the inflation targets have much to do with it.
Higher valuations come partly from businesses having more cash because they are not spending money expanding, and because the low interest rates encourage companies to borrow money to buy back stock, which increases EPS and dividends, which increases share prices. Of course, there has been some legitimate growth over the past years, too.
[1] http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-infla...
(for reference, the S&P 500 calculation was around 170 in 1985, compared to 2,098 today in 2016)
Time-delayed negative feedback produces a peak and a crash.
It's not readily accessible, and there seems to be no street-view coverage there. The photos listed nearby on google maps have a location that is far enough off to be useless.
But instead I end up triggering a 3D Touch when I want to delete an app.
If the OSK can distinguish a finger resting from a finger pressing, then you get closer to that of a physical keyboard.
Especially if the resting part can be tied in with the vibration engine to give a slight nudge to indicate edges of keys, or some such.
Wow, that is poor discoverability. Also, thanks so much -- I've been wanting that for ages. I never knew about it.
Are you saying this as someone who actually uses the feature? Because in my experience a long press and 3D are very distinct. In fact 3D touch makes it quite difficult to long press on home screen icons to delete them.
BTW, thanks for the tip on the iMessage timestamps, their "seeming" absence was an obnoxious nitpick when I switched to an iPhone.
Now how to turn it off...
It additionally devalues the dollar, which leads to assets to be worth bigger numbers. QE has been mainly flowing to investors and the financial sector, and ts been staying there, hence not translating to consumer price inflation.
So yes QE is responsible and QE caused inflation and inflation is also responsible. This inflation is confined to investment assets.
What's the point in getting a really nice theme and then ruining it with AccuWeather's horrible widget and a calendar that looks like an HTML iframe?
the keyboard is of a known layout, and by marking by feel when you move from one key to the next you know where you are.
This allows the keyboard to be operated without looking, much like how most people use a ordinary keyboard today once they are past the hunt-and-peck stage.
A big reason for touch screens being a problem in many situations is that you have to actually look at it to operate it. Physical buttons, switches and knobs can be operated by touch alone.
Frankly way too much of modern computing relies on sight and sight alone.
Also, allowing someone to rest on the keyboard is why long typing sessions are not such a strain on the hands. Without it, the writs has to carry the weight of the fingers continually.
Also this "vibration" thing you're talking about--it's obvious you haven't thought deeply about this because if you took at least a couple of hours thinking more about how this would work you would realize vibration itself has nothing to do with this". I have had a phone that gave you nice tactile feedback using vibration (Prada phone), and while it does feel nice, it doesn't do anything in terms of letting me know my input was correct.
Anyway this all doesn't mean anything if you don't really believe me. So let me ask you a rhetorical question: Do you think you will be able to type into a blackberry absolutely without looking at the keyboard? Also, when exactly would you be typing while NOT looking at a mobile screen? Even on a blackberry people have to look at the screen to make sure they didn't mistype something (Even with all that tactile feedback). On a desktop computer typing without looking makes sense because that's the mode in which people use the device (whereas on a mobile phone the screen and the keyboard are attached so looking at the screen means also looking at the keyboard)
Anyway if you really believe in these ideas, you should at least try an MVP or any simple experiment (or maybe even some thought experiment) before being so sure about it.
Combine with pressure detection and you can make Swype / SwiftKey provide a sense of where you're dragging your finger when swipe typing, plus that you can put emphasis on the right letters easily when swiping across groups of letters that would make for different words, making for better precision in the word suggestions.
It would also be much easier to implement gesture support by having areas much easier to target that you start gestures from or end them in. You'd also instantly get tactile feedback telling you if you made the gesture right or not, like for switching character sets or for moving the cursor.
Lots of gestures could be supported, where you'd essentially be "asked" with tactile feedback to push harder after making the gesture to activate the particular action. Suddenly you solved both accessibility, discoverability and precision, while reducing the error rate.
The touch screen keyboards are more practical in many ways but they can never truly replicate a physical keyboard.
(I long ago traded the fidelity of the actual keyboard for the convenience of a touch keyboard.)
'Most people'? I must have had really bad luck in a number of financial/tech companies, as a disturbing majority don't touch type.
Note, my experience is with people aged 30-50. It's possible that this doesn't apply to millennials, but they certainly aren't the majority still.
As I mentioned above, I explored into building a mobile device that you can type into without looking, and my first hypothesis was "tactile feedback is key". And turns out there are many many other factors at play. Even if Apple built something like you say, that won't make more people buy iPhones, it's just an incremental innovation that doesn't significantly change any user behavior for the better.
I'll have to think a bit longer to come up with good examples.
Edit: non-scrolling swipe gestures are where this is the most valuable.
Improved Google Photos app image selection: a hard press would start selection, and as you continously to drag to select it would provide tactile feedback for where the image borders are, making accidental selection less likely and quicker to detect. Selection would stop on release (to make scrolling easy). Hard press and swipe again to continue the selection.
A surface that can "project" arbitary tactile shapes with different strengths of feedback can let you orientate without looking. In fact it can even do Braille for the blind if the resolution was high enough!
