For one of Apple’s earnings cycles, I decided to write about the company’s financial performance here and here. I will no longer do that. It’s not because my forecast/guess about first quarter iPhone sales growth was low and therefore wrong (it was)… it’s because this is not something I can do well.
My motivation for these posts was to provide a counterpoint to stories about Apple which I felt were becoming pure hype in the financial media. There are so many people weighing in on the state of Apple and trying to get attention with hyperbolic statements like, “Apple May See First iPhone Sales Decline,” or, “iPhone Growth Hits a Wall,” or, “Apple is Doomed!” It’s not that these reports are always invalid, but it seemed to me they were missing the larger point, which is that Apple is now among the world’s largest companies in terms of sales, and that focusing on a lack of growth ignores the reality of “large numbers.” Simply put, Apple can’t keep growing at double-digits forever.
So I thought I could bring some sanity and a different perspective to this topic, and I thought I could cover it adequately. All I really accomplished, though, was some thin speculation. People like Jason Snell at Six Colors does this kind of thing very well, complete with charts of all kinds of metrics released within minutes of an earnings call. That is where you should go to read about this stuff.
Meanwhile, I plan to get back to writing about various things that I feel are important and to which I believe I can bring a unique perspective. Thanks for reading.
There has been a lot of link-bait headlines predicting the upcoming “iPhone 7,” or whatever it will be called, is going to be a flop. These kinds of predictions are routine.
From Daring Fireball, the eulogies for apps (Dropbox-acquired apps, in this case) that are no longer with us, including Mailbox and Carousel. And of course, we can’t forget some of the many other apps that have been acquired and retired, or the ones that have faded away and died.
This is not to say that you should not buy apps, but investing in something that is software or a web-based service should cause you to think a little. I previously wrote about paying for software and impermanence, and I think this is all related. You need a fallback plan.
“Social scientists have documented that the public follows ‘elite cues’ when forming opinions on topics, especially those for which they don’t have a lot of information,” Dr. Riley Dunlap, an environmental sociologist at Oklahoma State University, told The Huffington Post in an email. “So when Republican politicians and pundits, whose voices are amplified by conservative media figures, deny climate change, this readily filters down to party activists and eventually many lay Republicans.”
These media messages have a major impact. In a forthcoming study, researchers tested the influence of climate change denial messages on American adults’ views of climate change, and found that they have an especially strong effect on conservatives.
The only reason people can successfully propagate invalid ideas and get others to believe them is because those “believers” don’t try to discover the facts themselves. Many people want to be told what to think. It’s easy. The process of learning and discovery is not easy. It can also have the inconvenient consequence of finding out that you’re wrong sometimes.
Goldman Sachs believes the company is drastically undervalued, awarding its shares a $163 12-month price target and adding the security to the bank’s “conviction buy” list. Trading at close to $117 at the time of this writing, shares are currently at about a 39% discount to this price target. Could Apple stock really be this undervalued?
Wow, things have totally changed in two weeks? It’s hard for me to completely buy the reasoning in the rest of the article, but this is certainly true:
Apple’s conservative P/E ratio is definitely a bit baffling in light of the company’s customer loyalty and annuity potential.
Apple still plans to open source Swift by the end of 2015. This should help it take off even more, as it is likely to be ported to other platforms quickly.
But bombing it was the kind of dumb idea that characterized the US occupation. In the end it’s not just hearts and minds but stomachs that are won and lost. Anyone who attacked Haji Hussein was not going to win in Iraq any more than a terrorist group that attacks a night club in Paris is going to intimidate the French. If anything, it does the opposite.
The premise of this article – that simply bombing ISIS is going to do lasting damage to their movement, and that without a serious effort of local groups rather than far-flung foreign powers ISIS cannot be defeated – is echoed in more and more pieces I’ve been reading by foreign policy and military experts. It is completely counter to our gut response to the terrorist attacks in Paris, and is the opposite of what all the right-wing megaphones have been blaring in the media these past few days.
Because once you feel it your gut, you’re tempted to do what the French did when they attacked Raqqa almost immediately with large-scale bombing raids. But how many new recruits did ISIS get from this gut response? We’ll never know, but no doubt far more than the few they lost in Paris.
We need a strategy that will work to stop ISIS. Air strikes may be necessary in the short term to contain them or slow them down. But again, without local groups and other powers in the region stepping up, there is little hope of defeating ISIS.
A common theme that is emerging is how capable the iPad Pro is and how many are considering its suitability as a laptop replacement. For me, it’s a slightly different twist: with Apple blurring the line between iPads and MacBooks, the buying decision is no longer simple.
I’m starting to get the feeling that Apple has too many models within their iPad and MacBook product lines. They now offer five different iPads and six different laptops. Choosing one of these devices requires a little too much deliberation not only within either product line but across both product lines, given how the capabilities of the iPad overlap with the MacBook. The matrix for making decisions has expanded.
Anyone tying themselves in knots looking for a specific target audience for the iPad Pro is going about it the wrong way. There is no single target audience. Is the iPad Pro meant for office workers in the enterprise? Professional artists creating content? Casual users playing games, watching movies, and reading? The answer is simply “Yes”.
Consider a person who is looking for a target audience as a potential buyer, and you get my situation.
I am in the market to replace my first generation iPad Mini. This is mostly due to not being able to run content blockers — many websites now simply crash when I’m browsing as they load all the cruft and additional content to capture my attention and track me. Plus, I sorely miss having a Retina screen given that I work on a MacBook Pro and iPhone 6s every day. But I am also considering the unique capabilities of the iPad Pro. So, do I get a new iPad Mini? Or maybe the iPad Air is now light and thin enough for me to consider that? Or would the iPad Pro be useful if in fact I am going to take advantage of its new capabilities?
And then, having a super lightweight laptop to write on – something with a decent keyboard – is another desire. Can the iPad Pro with the keyboard accommodate me? Or would the new MacBook be a smarter choice than any of the iPads? And in that case, wouldn’t a MacBook Air be better in a lot of ways — in every way except some weight and that it doesn’t have a Retina display? But I do travel with my MacBook Pro (used for writing as well as coding), and the little iPad Mini is a great companion…
Part of the answer — as I’m sure Apple loves — is that I am driven to consider and possibly purchase more than one device. So I keep mulling all this stuff. Apple has now made the simple buying decision complex. The bad thing for them is that, as someone like me is finding, this weighing of options is delaying my purchase.
