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This was inevitable and predicted long long ago. It just took longer to happen than most anticipated. That's why investors are bailing. The next question will be: how many years from now will Apple start closing stores (and eventually move out of the space ship?)
 
The internet echo chamber is alive and well here. In a year’s time it is just as likely people will be kicking themselves for not investing in Apple right now.
 
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I'm not a fan of Tim, but looking at their upper management team, who's better? I can't see anyone; the last thing Apple needs is someone worse in charge.

The person they need is Steve Jobs, who they will not find in upper management. They probably currently employee a thousand Steve Jobses, who are all busy doing the job they were hired to do, with no way of utilizing greater vision.
 
It’s honestly not the perfect time to buy. theirs no justification right now to buy. The trade war with China is still on going. I think the stock is going to continue to fall. No new products except for an iPad mini in the first half of the year... I would wait it out the next 4-5 months. And buy in around WWDC..
 
Buyback time. Apple didn’t buy back many shares in calendar Q4. Get all the bad news out and start buying back stock hard.
And here lies what's wrong with our current financial, banking, fiscal and monetary policies. Companies today are no longer allowed to report lower than expected numbers. In today's financial world, companies must grow exponentially or they pay the price. Companies are now subjected to "infinite growth on a finite planet". You can't grow forever.

What makes matters worse is the reason major corporations are buying back their stocks i.e. to make the stock price go higher is because of Federal Reserve policy of zero interest rate lending i.e. "QE". So instead of giving the markets a caffeine jolt, they have since 2008 made the markets heroin addicts. Remove the heroin and the markets crash which is what we are now seeing with trade wars and Fed interest rate hikes. Eventually the whole house of cards will come crashing down globally 10-20x worse than it did in 2008.

Besides that any company on the planet would love to have Apple's numbers but that no longer is allowed so Apple HAS to continue to grow exponentially or face the consequences.
 
Everytime the stock drops people call for Tim Cook to be fired. This is nonsense. Don't forget that it was under his leadership that the stock hit its all time high. It is his leadership that has brought apple to where it is. Steve Jobs has been gone a long time now.

Wall Street has always misread Apple. Anyone who didn't think the battery replacement combined with the elimination of subsidies wouldn't result in decreased sales is fooling themselves. I think the error was in the estimation of the impact of those factors combined with the trade war with China.

I also think that people at large have unreasonable expectations of Apple. No other tech company has changed the way we use technology more than Apple. There will be bumps along the way but Apple has strong leadership.

I'd like to see Apple address a few issues:

1) Mac Mini entry price is too high. $799 for an i3 with a 127Gb SSD is way overpriced. Shouls be $500.
2) Return to form following function. Seriously, trying to get to the USB ports on an iMac is a nghtmare. The new laptop keyboards suck.
3) multiple accounts in iOS
4) Complete replacement for iTunes. Such a bloated disaster.
 
I thought it was funny when Tim said "Would have I liked some of products to be ready a few months earlier, of course." around 8 minutes in on the CNBC video.

Taking 2 years to make a Mac Pro is a bit silly. Apple needed a dose of reality, and needs to be a bit more competitive both on price and features. I actually thought the new lineup of phones was pretty compelling, but I think they missed it by about 10% on pricing. Products like new AirPods and the powermat thingy really should be out.
 
I'm not a fan of Tim, but looking at their upper management team, who's better? I can't see anyone; the last thing Apple needs is someone worse in charge.

It's hard to know if the problem is management or engineering. I suspect that working for Jobs was frustrating day to day, but really rewarding when his products came to light.

I don't see anyone being rewarded by working on the products Apple is delivering today and nobody in their right mind would feel good about Cook's empty vision about the direction of technology. So I would say it won't matter if it gets worse.
 
When people throw out the word services what exactly do they mean? Tom Warren at The Verge says Apple’s services are terrible compared to Google. What services is he referring to? Apple Music? iCloud? GMail? Do people really think of iCloud or their mail app as a “service”? I think the term services is incredibly broad and seems to mean a ton of different things. And even if most Apple “services” are locked to iOS so what? Apple has over a billion active iOS users. That’s a lot of people they can sell services too. Plus it’s not like nobody is buying iOS devices anymore. So the install base will keep growing.
 
I’d be buying shares here.

Apple didn’t buy back many shares in calendar Q4. Get all the bad news out and start buying back stock hard. They have $71B left in their buyback authorization from May 2018.

The numbers didn’t look that bad in other areas:

19% non iPhone business growth.
25% services growth.
50% wearables growth.
Double digit iPad growth.
Record iPhone revenues in US, Canada, Germany.

This is an iPhone in China story. They will have to fix that, but the world isn’t ending at Apple.

Still the most profitable. Still the industry leader, it's pathetic how an entire industry relies on Apple to do its R&D.
The sooner Apple can buy back all its shares, the better its customers will be. Cook won't be chasing the short term Wall St vote, and we might get compelling products again.
 
It’s honestly not the perfect time to buy. theirs no justification right now to buy. The trade war with China is still on going. I think the stock is going to continue to fall. No new products except for an iPad mini in the first half of the year... I would wait it out the next 4-5 months. And buy in around WWDC..

I tend to agree here. Apple would be a perfect buy except for the ongoing trade war. If they have to move their supply chains around it could cost some money. I am also a little leery of what they say later this month and how the market will react. It may not be a bad buy but there are a lot of safer stocks out there that are more exciting and have greater upsides right now.
 
Apple has over a billion active iOS users.
That's not true is it though? They hit 1.3 active iOS devices in February:

https://www.macrumors.com/2018/02/01/apple-now-has-1-3-billion-active-devices-worldwide/

and two billion iOS devices sold (not all active though) in September:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/1...s-sold-and-when-it-will-hit-2-billion-iphones

Neither of these stats equate to "over a billion active iOS users" as people who own Apple products are likely to own more than one device.

It's still a lot though....
 
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Still the most profitable. Still the industry leader, it's pathetic how an entire industry relies on Apple to do its R&D.
The sooner Apple can buy back all its shares, the better its customers will be. Cook won't be chasing the short term Wall St vote, and we might get compelling products again.
And this is why people are getting sick and tired of the price gouging. Look at what other companies are offering for far less. Cheap smartphones are now good, and good smartphones are cheaper.
 
August: Apple becomes first trillion-dollar company. December: $AAPL market cap overtaken by both Amazon and Microsoft. Today: Apple is now worth less than Alphabet, as it heads for its biggest one-day stock drop in five years.

Hopefully a much needed wake up call for Apple. They need to innovate again and stop just increasing prices.
 
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