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Hilarious blaming battery replacement program. So expecting their products to be more disposable than retained? Seems like their quality or standards is heading towards disposable electronics. Premium pricing and short life cycle. Now we’re talking Tim’s vision.
 
A company has no right expecting higher earnings when delivering the same-old, same-old, and simply charging more for less value. What Wall Street considers a successful product is solely based on sales dollars. You can sell more of something cheaper and make more money, or sell less of something more expensive. Apple is learning towards the latter with their lack of innovation.
We all can't be wrong all of the time...
Actually, Wall Street primarily cares about earnings, not sales (revenue) dollars. That is how corporate valuation is conducted.

And that was the point of my post. Apple’s prices are proportional to teardown costs, and those numbers have remained stable for about a decade now.
 
Sigh...the usual chorus of “prices are too high” is out in full force, I see. But (as usual for comments on here) that conclusion doesn’t necessarily follow from the revised guidance. In fact, it could be flat out wrong.

The correct question is whether lower prices would yield higher earnings overall. I’ve yet to see any public substantiation of that theory. I’d love to get my hands on a conjoint analysis that has been done by someone out there. That’s pretty much the only way to know.

The secondary question is whether this is a temporary aberration, or if that’s just Apple corporate spin. We know there is softening demand in an over saturated market. How much is attributable to A versus B?

Those questions remain highly speculative.

A final note: let’s remember what corporate guidance is and is not. It’s a public projection for investors. No more and no less.

Strong dollar was mentioned by Tim himself. That means that there certainly was an issue with price overseas.
 
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Actually, Wall Street primarily cares about earnings, not sales (revenue) dollars. That is how corporate valuation is conducted.

And that was the point of my post. Apple’s prices are proportional to teardown costs, and those numbers have remained stable for about a decade now.

Margin was estimated to be higher on the iPhone X. About 5% higher than the iPhone 8 based on Tech Insights teardown
 
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LoL blaming the 29 dollar battery replacement program... seriously? So your business plan is to build cheap components that fail in a couple years to force people into upgrading? Yeah, how about sell phones at a compeditive price (sure might cut into your huge 34% margin) and don't make them fail after a couple years to gain back trust from customers... then you will sell more.
 
Hilarious blaming battery replacement program. So expecting their products to be more disposable than retained? Seems like their quality or standards is heading towards disposable electronics. Premium pricing and short life cycle. Now we’re talking Tim’s vision.

Maybe better quality control of batteries would have prevented this problem in the first place. The batteries of my Apple Watch 4 and iPad Pro failed after 2 and 10 months. I've been using Apple products for a long time but something like that has never happened before.
 
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I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple’s China numbers are down by a quarter by end of this year. Due to the trade tensions the business elite are leaving the Apple ecosystem in droves and that is having a knock on affect on other consumers.
 
Margin was estimated to be higher on the iPhone X. About 5% higher than the iPhone 8 based on Tech Insights teardown

I've seen various teardown estimates with a rather broad range. But anyway, when I ran various numbers a while back, I found the MSRP markup numbers to be really similar across the 8, 8 Plus, X, XS and XS Max. It was about 2.8x across the board.

Given that the standard deviation on gross margins has been about 2% for the last decade, a ±5% margin on a product seems reasonable. After all, regardless of the component costs, it's a safe bet you'll have a US price for a standard model that ends in "99," and a certainty that if not that then it'll end in "49."
 
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LoL blaming the 29 dollar battery replacement program... seriously? So your business plan is to build cheap components that fail in a couple years to force people into upgrading? Yeah, how about sell phones at a compeditive price (sure might cut into your huge 34% margin) and don't make them fail after a couple years to gain back trust from customers... then you will sell more.

Dont listen to the spin on here, it was much higher than that on the iPhone X
 
And that's fine for Amazon, which is a very different company.

You may wonder why Samsung's GPM is 47% and Microsoft's is 66%.

Both astonishingly greedy, right?

And Oracle...Holy Smokes, 80%!
GPM for software is hugely different. Apple and Amazon (even though I disagree about Amazon) are considered tech companies that sell products....
 
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I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple’s China numbers are down by a quarter by end of this year. Due to the trade tensions the business elite are leaving the Apple ecosystem in droves and that is having a knock on affect on other consumers.

^^^This! A large factor.
 
Glad Apple is having a hard time.
Their price structure is out of touch on the entire line up.
HomePods are $150 more than they should cost.
MacMini with 8gbRam/126gb at $799 it’s a joke.
IMac Pro at $5k base model.
iPhones costing as much as MacBooks.
Etc.
I can keep going on and on.
Time to drop prices and come back to reality.
 
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How in the name of Zeus was that CNBC thing I just watched in "interview"? It looked more like a PR stunt. No hard-hitting questions, no clarifications, not a *single* question that forced an answer above and beyond what Cook/Apple have already disclosed. This "journalist" should be ashamed.
Did you really expect that? Most "news" is really scripted as if you make them sweat you never get another interview. Hence, "fake news".
 
GPM for software is hugely different. Apple and Amazon (even though I disagree about Amazon) are considered tech companies that sell products....

That's the point I'm making. What works for Amazon (especially with Bezos owning 43% of the company) wouldn't work for Apple . And for other companies.

How about Samsung? Super greedy at 47%?

Companies live/die by Wall Street analyst reports, which are hugely a function of GPM. The *hardware company* I last worked for had GPMs around 60+%. I couldn't launch a new product unless I could show 80% GPM.
 
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I've seen various teardown estimates with a rather broad range. But anyway, when I ran various numbers a while back, I found the MSRP markup numbers to be really similar across the 8, 8 Plus, X, XS and XS Max. It was about 2.8x across the board.

Given that the standard deviation on gross margins has been about 2% for the last decade, a ±5% margin on a product seems reasonable. After all, regardless of the component costs, it's a safe bet you'll have a US price for a standard model that ends in "99," and a certainty that if not that then it'll end in "49."

Margin was much higher on the flagship phones that the numbers being bandied about in this thread though.
 
Good. Time for Tim to stop the grift. Price products appropriately. Customers first, not shareholders. A return to the days of a 30% 'Apple Tax' (as opposed to whatever eye-watering number it is at now) is long overdue.

Amazing how many people comment without reading the entire article and knowing the facts.
 
All-in costs? This is a computer we are talking about, not the Fountain of Youth... As much as I love Apple computers, or did, the all-in costs are not remotely in-line with tech from most other companies. Period. Not even close.

And again, YOU are talking about something omitting a constraint I explicitly and deliberately included. That’s dishonest tepresentation of both what I said and your argumentative reply. And if you bother to address my entire statement and the all-in costs I wrote of, you’ll see your bad math. But you won’t.
 
Margin was much higher on the flagship phones that the numbers being bandied about in this thread though.

Here's the link to the back-of-the-envelope ones I posted in another thread here about a month ago—pretty darn consistent I think:
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...expected-demand.2155834/page-25#post-26850005

Margin was estimated to be higher on the iPhone X. About 5% higher than the iPhone 8 based on Tech Insights teardown

Also one thing to keep in mind is that—and I'm replying what you posted, and I don't recall having read this article, so this may not be relevant—5% more from MSRP-to-components would yield a tiny difference rather than 5 percentage points on gross margins, which would be huge.
 
Maybe this improves the chance of an iPhone SE 2. This also raises the stakes in the recent trade war with China, as well as the dispute with Huawei over the Iran sanctions. The US government nearly bankrupted ZTE but saved it in a last minute deal. Will we do the same to Huawei?

Apple discontinued the SE because of poor sales, so the odds of that are zero. I never even seen an SE in the wild.
 
Combined revenues for September and December quarters:
2017: 45.5 + 88.3 = 133.8
2018: 62.9 + 84(+) = 146.9

So in total, revenues for these two quarters (impacted by new iP release) are UP by 10%, not so bad when you look at it this way.

This is clearly due to the delivering millions or even tens of millions of iP Xs in the final 10 days of September.

Issues are clearly China related, and I think there are two components in this. First one, general slowdown in China, hopefully will be resolved soon if the trade war ends in the following months.

Second problem is Huawei. Chinese people are increasingly proud of it, and they are buying more of their phones. Not because they are better than iP (they are not), but simply because they are their own brand. That is understandable, but at the same time we should act the same and stick to Apple products instead of trying to find a flaw in everything they do. If they were so bad as some here are claiming, for sure 80% of phone manufacturers would not be desperately trying to copy their design and functionality.
 
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What will you do if your SE breaks and you can’t find another one? What will you do if there’s nothing smaller 5 years from now and the SE is too slow?

Maybe he will go find something in Android-land? That's just constantly boiling with scrappy OEM's trying every possible gimmick and game under the sun.
 
Let's see:

2007 - iPhone is $399 (after initial flub)
2019 - that would be $487 with inflation - where is my $499 flagship phone? (which honestly should still be $399 as tech gets cheaper, certainly storage is)

Pick up a 2007 iPhone and compare it alongside any new iPhone, and the reason for the price increase will be obvious.
 
Stop. You're making sense and people don't like that.

I especially like the part where Apple's gross profit margins have dropped to 38%, but people are still whining about the price hikes as being greedy. Think about it...

Issue is - everyone is missing the whole point.

This tweet sums it up.

https://twitter.com/reneritchie/status/1080605678706790410

The high-end smartphone market is getting saturated. In this context, Apple’s current strategy (higher prices, more accessories, services) is absolutely the right thing to do in terms of growing revenue from a business standpoint.

And all signs point to that working. People are still buying iPhones, and that serves as a springboard to sell more smart watches, airpods, iPads, plus music streaming subscriptions.

And all signs point towards the Apple Watch eventually replacing the iPhone as the next growth driver.

That they all don’t like this is besides the point. Yes, Apple probably lost a few sales by raising their prices, but I am willing to bet that any lost sales is still more than offset by the higher prices.

But yeah, the next few days is going to be a bloodletting for all the critics here who have no doubt been frothing at the mouth for precisely this sort of event.
 
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