yeah i undeliberately mixed innovation and invention, my bad.
Yes, they made ipad mini, thinner iphone and macbook with retina display. But can this be really considered as an "innovation"? it's more an evolution of a product than an innovation.
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Apple Stock Down 10% in After Hours Trading Amidst Concerns of Flat Growth
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yeah i undeliberately mixed innovation and invention, my bad.
Yes, they made ipad mini, thinner iphone and macbook with retina display. But can this be really considered as an "innovation"? it's more an evolution of a product than an innovation.
I think a major source of cost increases for Apple is Chinese labor rates which have been increasing at over 15% a year relative to the Dollar. Apple has partner factories in that jurisdiction for displays, boards, assembly, and other logistics and materials layers. As I understand it Apple is responsible for employment of almost one million people, at least a big part of their year of work. This trend is continuing and at some point Apple will have incentive to do manufacturing at home again.
Rocketman
Rocketman
He did. Edsel Ford thought the Edsel was a good idea too. Smart people aren't 100% 100% of the time. Jobs made missteps, but he was genius at correcting them. Cook, not so much from what we've seen with his hiring choices, product release strategies, and, of course, prematurely ditching Google Maps for Apple Maps.
That's a silly non-sequitur. First I only have one Gd, and he is not on this earth. Jobs was human. A brilliant one, but still human.
Obviously it's impossible to know what shape Apple would be in if Jobs were still alive. But Jobs did have a stellar record in his 2nd stint at Apple. Cook OTOH has been embroiled in goof up after goof up. So I think it's entirely fair to be critical of Cook based solely on his CEO performance to date.
I agree. They should be using that cash to expand into new products/markets so they are not so reliant on the iPhone. For example they seem to have all but abandoned any serious software development and any acquisitions have been very minor. I don't understand why. Software has always been a high margin business.
Where is the product diversification? Innovative new products like an iWatch or wearable devices. It's like they have simply run out out of ideas so they make a slightly smaller/bigger version of their existing products. As far as I can remember the iPad was the last new invention back in 2010. Even iOS has changed little since it was launched in 2007.
I'd love an Apple Television but that simply isn't going to contribute a whole lot to their bottom line. They would have to sell it at a high price if it's going to be the best TV on the planet which means a limited potential target market.
The iPhone doesn't have the allure it once did. Most of my friends who have one complain endlessly about it's battery life, call quality, etc. The other phone manufacturers are now churning out better phones at lower prices. If the iPhone sales ever start to slide then heaven help Apple stock.
Innovation and increasing market share are not mutually exclusive. There are plenty of companies which are not innovative but do well with big market share and low manufacturing cost. However if Apple does not have any innovative product coming and keep see lower and lower market share, it is a sure fire way to go out of business in a few years. Why shouldn't Apple try to expand IOS market share here until they have another blockbusting product? Get your logic straight.
Retina MBP: Well, it is the use of an existing technology in a new way or form that isn't yet on the market/. I would call this an innovation. Especially since other manufacturers have or are now looking into introducing this technology too.
I wouldn't call thinner myself an innovation, but the technology needed to produce the iphone is (matching of components by camera). There are different types of innovation: process innovation, product innovation and a number of other ones.
For us consumers these can all play an important part. Product innovation changes our user experience, whiole process innovation can make the products cheaper.
It's all innovation. Whether we personally like the innovation part and can use it is another matter. People that don't care about retina don't consider it innovation, whereas designers probably would.
This is what these arguments are about. Opinions and lack of knowledge about what innovation really is.
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Agree, but that will take a long time, because US wages are still too high and the US can't match the manufacturing accuracy necessary.
A more worthwhile strategy for Apple is to move their production into the more rural parts of China like car manufacturers have done or go to Vietnam or Thailand where wages are still low. The problem is that here there is not yet much tech manufacturing and capabilities are on a low level.
Doomsayers
Keep tripping freaks, the sky is not falling.
iPod - changed music forever . iPhone - changed phones forever. iPad - changed tablets forever.
iTV- you can figure out the rest.
When the iTV comes out that stock price is topping 1K. You read it here first. You have my word on it.
Keep tripping freaks, the sky is not falling.
iPod - changed music forever . iPhone - changed phones forever. iPad - changed tablets forever.
iTV- you can figure out the rest.
When the iTV comes out that stock price is topping 1K. You read it here first. You have my word on it.
I hope nobody takes your advice and loses any money in the process. It's comments like this that pushed the price up to $700 and I bet a lot of people have lost a lot of money now that the share price has come back down to $450, except the bankers of course who've probably made a killing as usual.
The iTV is going to an expensive niche product with limited sales to die hard Apple fans like us - just like the MBP Retina.
LG is not selling Nexus 4 at a loss, Google is. I think the way the deal work is Google buy the handset from LG and Google is free to sell the handset at any price they want in Google play store. LG sell the same handset through their regular channel at the price that LG pick. Google only buy a small number of Nexus 4 from LG and hence the shortage. But LG keep selling them at their regular channel and hence we have a situation where Google play store is out of stock but the same handset is available elsewhere at a much higher price.
LG will make money on the handset they sold to Google. But I don't think LG are happy about the situation. Selling 500K hand set is a money losing proposition. The design cost, marketing cost, testing cost with carrier, regulatory cost to get the handset approved for sale in a particular country and corporate overhead etc. will erase any profit from the product .
Why do people keep saying Apple need to innovate? Are you saying that Apple don't? What does innovation mean? Shiny new product? Have people stopped for a while and think what's inside the iPhone 5 and how one could cram all of those components in there and yet create a lighter and more powerful phone than the previous one? Have anybody stopped and look at the retina screens? The retina Macbook Pros? Apple is innovating left and right and pushing other companies like intel, mobile chipsets, and display manufactures to innovate too, yet all people are clamoring for is an iWatch? 
Jefferies & Co cut its rating on Apple's stock to "hold" from "buy" and slashed its share price target by $300 to $500. "We think Apple is losing the screen-size wars"
Deutsche Bank trimmed its price target to $575 from $800, and said Apple should start making a lower-priced iPhone to arrest the market share loss.
"We believe a lower ability to beat earnings per share expectations, and some concerns on demand, may weigh on the stock near-term," said Credit Suisse, which cut its target price by $150 to $600.
Apple is the lowest ranked stock among the marquee technology firms in the United States based on the change in analyst sentiment, or Analysts Revision Model (ARM), according to StarMine.
Apple's global ARM score of 10 is well below Google Inc's 34 and Microsoft Corp's 19 out of a possible 100. Nokia and Samsung have scores of 82 and 89, respectively.
We have seen PE ratio compression since Obama was elected since his policy is increased taxes, debt, and spending. The environment a stock is priced within matters. A sort of typical PE ratio for running companies over time is around 15. Apple is around 7-10 right now. If there is a change (reduction) in the tax environment and the velocity of money (increase) in the private sector, it will increase company PE's generally independent of internal performances of those firms.
Interestingly AAPL as a stock yields more (2.1%) than a 10 year government bond (1.85%) right now. That's amazing. The bond is at the top of its principal price range and the stock is near the bottom of its price range. Inverted risk.
During the short time the market felt Romney might have been elected, PE ratio expansion started to happen in anticipation.
Two news events happened when AAPL topped in mid-late September 2012. The iPhone 5 was released and the polls started to be pretty clearly favoring Obama.
I hope I have not triggered anything by saying these facts.
Rocketman
Interestingly AAPL as a stock yields more (2.1%) than a 10 year government bond (1.85%) right now. That's amazing. The bond is at the top of its principal price range and the stock is near the bottom of its price range. Inverted risk.
During the short time the market felt Romney might have been elected, PE ratio expansion started to happen in anticipation.
Two news events happened when AAPL topped in mid-late September 2012. The iPhone 5 was released and the polls started to be pretty clearly favoring Obama.
I hope I have not triggered anything by saying these facts.
Rocketman
Why do people keep saying Apple need to innovate? Are you saying that Apple don't? What does innovation mean? Shiny new product? Have people stopped for a while and think what's inside the iPhone 5 and how one could cram all of those components in there and yet create a lighter and more powerful phone than the previous one? Have anybody stopped and look at the retina screens? The retina Macbook Pros? Apple is innovating left and right and pushing other companies like intel, mobile chipsets, and display manufactures to innovate too, yet all people are clamoring for is an iWatch?
iWatch. Lulz. A solution in search of a problem. Have we become so ****ing lazy that we need a device on our wrist to check the status of the device in our pocket? Until I have me some iGlasses to let me know if it's even worth the effort to look at my iWatch before I expend the calories to dig my phone out of my pocket.
And for those screaming for innovation and new products, do you really think any company can crank out new products every few years? For christ's sake, the iPad isn't even 3 years old yet.
He may be, but he hasn't officially been named COO and he isn't on the executive committee.
Anyway, what we may be seeing is design getting a little out of control. For all the silly talk on the Street that Jony Ive would be a better CEO than Tim Cook, it could be Jony Ive who is causing some of the supply issues by pushing the design envelope. Steve Jobs had a way of bullying engineering to pull off the seemingly impossible, but what people forget is that volumes were significantly lower than they are now. Would a Steve Jobs-led Apple have been capable of shipping 47.8 million iPhones last quarter, or would Jobs have made a last minute change that held production down even more?
People complain that the iPhone 5 and iMac aren't "different enough" from their predecessors, and that their predecessors were "thin enough." Nevertheless, these design changes did create engineering and manufacturing issues (Foxconn has said the current lineup is the most difficult they have ever manufactured for anyone).
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By that token, is the Galaxy Note an "innovation," or just an evolution? Dell had the Streak a year earlier, but few people bought it.
Factor in that T-Bonds are exempt from state and local income taxes and the T-Bond comes out on top of Apple's paltry 2.1% yield.
I know I'm a broken record with that comment but that's because I constantly see comments about how Steve would/wouldn't have done X, or how Y would/wouldn't be happening if Steve were around. Some of the same people that hate Cook lionize Steve.
For me the jury is still out on Tim. I think we need 2013 to see how the re-org plays out. Was Forstall holding iOS back? What kind of stuff is Mansfield's new team working on? What will Ive's impact be on software UI. We might not see all of this in 2013 but I think we'll get a feel for the direction the company is heading.
Mountain Lion improved many aspects of Lion, and also made it more stable. Personally I think the iCloud integration, Notification Center and Gatekeeper (I don't use it, but it's wonderful my mom's new mac) ARE innovative things. And they're aggressively updating Mac OS X now.
Exactly.
By that token, is the Galaxy Note an "innovation," or just an evolution? Dell had the Streak a year earlier, but few people bought it.