Crude oil and distillates, internet services, transportation, health care... all of them are far far ahead a premium smartphone.
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Apple's Record 4Q 2015 Results: $11.1 Billion Profit on $51.5 Billion Revenue
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Crude oil and distillates, internet services, transportation, health care... all of them are far far ahead a premium smartphone.
That's absolute bollocks. If Google disappears, it wouldn't happen overnight, so until they disappear the other services companies would gain userbase, so they'd get better and better and by the time Google disappeared we'd have 3 more Googles in place. It's just how tech works. No company, product, or service is irreplaceable.
Hey, sure, living without oil, cars, health care, even Google, is comparable to living without a premium smartphone.
Cool story bro.
All that companies, biggest companies on earth, have:
-Several different products in their product category
-Monopoly of necessary product in its product category
Apple has none of both. Apple is a design hardware company. Design is by itself a secondary necessity. Can it sell a lot of products just by that? Yes. But the thing which scares investors is it's the biggest company on earth. You can be a 100b dollars company and sell design items. Being the biggest on earth and depending on a design product is scary.
Are you replying to the correct message? You didn't mention any companies in your post which I replied to. You mentioned transportation, health services etc. Those are not companies.
Correction: In my estimation, Apple is struggling to make Apple Pay useful in the U.S.
Apple's problem in the U.S. is not the banks. Large and small banks alike are on board with it. Apple's problem in the U.S. is that retailers have been extremely slow or flat out unwilling to purchase and install new POS equipment that's compatible with NFC.
On top of that, many merchants that have the POS hardware that's necessary to accept NFC payments have the NFC functionality turned off for some reason.
On top of that, assuming the business has the necessary POS equipment and has not disabled the NFC functionality, many employers have been unwilling to educate their employees about NFC payments so if your average Joe walks into a store and asks the clerk if they accept Apple Pay, they're going to get shrugged shoulders, a blank stare, or a "What's that?" in return and the customer is just going to swipe their card instead of using Apple Pay.
This all adds up to Apple Pay having a long way to go before it is anywhere close to mainstream in the U.S.
The thing is, who cares about Apple stock unless they own some? AAPL is not the same thing as Apple the company. The company can do fine and stock can fall and vice versa. Apple stock falling would be a concern only if we are afraid of some other company or person buying a majority share. That's not possible anyway so who cares? Apple will keep making great products whether the stock falls or rises.Apple is doomed
Apple died with Steve Jobs
Apple isn't the same company that it was years ago
They have ran out of ideas
They can't innovate anymore
Only one port?! They are lagging behind everyone else, just look at the surface book.
Yet Apple's profits are higher and higher and higher, something is not right here, RIGHT?!
I just love Apple haters' tears every time they post an article like this to ground them into reality.
I doubt it. They even re-used an old processor design in the Watch. The Watch marketing expenditures might have been bigger.
Vast amounts of Apple's R&D money is likely going into other things (not just cars) such that many new R&D employees can't even post their job titles. Apple may or may not get lucky with their new R&D; but as Edison proved, dogged effort sometimes leads to (getting the credit for) big new inventions.
Whatever: Exxon Mobil, Google... the rest of the biggest companies. They sell a necessary product and have a dominant / monopolistic position and a virtually endless demand.
Is a design smartphone necessary? Yes or no? Are consumer electronics products perennial? Do you think oil and distillates will be "saleable" in 20 years? Do you think the Google search engine be useful in 20 years? Do you think an iPhone will be "saleable" in 20 years? You see the problem?
That wouldn't imply their biggest R&D wasn't the watch nevertheless. Marketing can be higher than R&D in any case.
Do your parents (or grandparents, or their friends or neighbors) have retirement investments? Maybe diversified? If so, they might care about AAPL stock price and dividends, as that's a part of a large number of retirement funds these days.
The beat goes on...
I love the sound of exploding android user heads in the evening. This kind of news must drive them NUTS.
Exxon does produce 3% of the world's oil. I hardly think that counts as a monopoly. Google could be considered a search monopoly but only that. I used Bing for 1.5 years just to see if I could go on without Google, and I survived just fine. Now I'm back to Google, knowing that I don't need it. I just use it because it's the best.
Can't believe that they can make that much money but can't find any love to make ALL their products A1 quality out of the box.
Stand alone 5400rpm has to go.
16GB iPhone has to go.
4GB RAM had to go.
It's not hard Tim. It's called looking after your customer experience...
Stand alone 5400rpm has to go.
16GB iPhone has to go.
4GB RAM had to go.
It's not hard Tim. It's called looking after your customer experience...
I didn't say Exxon is a monopoly, the other option was "has a dominant position" and a necessary product. If you think the difference between Google's search engine, services and Bing's are comparable to the difference between an iPhone and a Galaxy s6 edge, and that they have a similar longevity as products/services, well, then we can stop arguing, we'll never agree.
Google will very probably be useful in 10-20 years. Oil will be for sure necessary in 10-20 years. It's very doubtful that an iPhone will be useful in 10-20 years. And if Apple is the iPhone, because it's that way, then what? What happens next?
Search engines get better when more people use it. Less people use Bing so it's less smart than Google. If a moment comes that more people start using Bing, or Yahoo or whatever, they will become as good as Google in very short time. They all use similar algorithms, Google doesn't own any secrets to do better search. Same with services. If there's a demand away from Google, I wouldn't worry that it'll be met very quickly by some other company.
Except the facts don't back this up. On the conference call Cook said 30% of iPhone sales this quarter were coming from another operating system (i.e. Android). As long as smart phones are necessary there will be a place for iPhones. if google.com didn't exist tomorrow I would just go to Bing. My life really wouldn't change that much.
Didn't Scully, Spindler and Amelio try that tactic? The huge and vastly expanding Mac product line from that era lost quite a bit of money.
It's almost like Apple's idea is to produce the smallest number of total and new SKUs that will keep the overall bottom-line profitable.
They get better, but the base is their search algorithm, capacity and ability to attract business. As fragile as this can look, it's much stronger than the sight of an iPhone upgrade going on for years and feeding the biggest company on earth. Nobody says Apple will go bankrupt, what I say is that soon or later, sooner than later, the iPhone concept will be obsolete and they haven't shown other genuine revenue stream.
I didn't say it won't! What I say is that AAPL situation as the biggest company on earth is unsustainable without a genuine new and different revenue stream in maybe 5 years
There would be tons of companies competing to scale and completely take their place (Bing, Duck, Baidu, et.al.) and before you could blink. What Google did to AltaVista (et.al.) could happen to them.