new lineup of phones with nothing new in them. boring. commoditized. boring. the watch thing is a fad. mkt share decline will continue unless they come out with an iPhone SuperMini and actually gain some share. this would change the Apple story and they could count me as a supporter if they did so. the reason the market share losses are important is because although they have other businesses besides selling phones, like BB, if they lose the phone business, they lose everything (or everything becomes much less profitable at least).
I guess all the millions of people who are going to be lining up to buy these products along with Beats agree with you too.
they buy because they are trapped in the ecosystem and their old phone is dying, not because it is an exciting product that is better than all other products. it is not the phone itself that sells the phone but the ecosystem (which is decent), the ecosystem entrapment and the “hipness” of the phone/company due to its association with music among other things.
In either case they buy, whether you like their reasons for it is irrelevant, and not exactly a bear case for Apple. In fact, that’s a very bullish assessment, thanks for coming around to my view.
I doubt it. The build quality is probably a little better than the Moto 360 (because of the sapphire crystal display), but my guess is that the Moto 360 is selling near cost since it’s probably a Google-lead project.
The watch seems like a defensive move on Apple’s part to further engrain customers into the ecosystem and provide an incentive to upgrade to a newer phone, rather than move to Android. I’m sure we’ll see lots of hipsters wearing them, though.
The watch looks fun. But for $350, I’d hope the watch wouldn’t be obsolete in a year or two. Of course, we used to say that about phones in the paleophonic [corded phone] age, too…
…yet another year in which Apple’s press conference could be titled “the Meh heard around the world”. Looking at how fast Apple’s R&D expenditures have been rising in the past and how little groundbreaking innovation it has translated into should make any level-headed person wonder. Sure people will flock to buy the iP6 and the iW on release day, but then what? With market shares eroding all over the globe and switching costs sinking for private customers where will Apple be 5 years from now? What if cloud computing gains ground on mobile devices and in the future customer value in that segment will depend the performance of network backend-structure, the domain of Google?
When Apple teamed up with IBM to fill the void Blackberry’s implosion has left in the corporate sector I was optimistic, but Apple now seems reluctant to take further steps into this direction. Sometimes I wonder whether Captain Cook is aware of Apple’s unhealthy obsession with the North-American tech savvy private consumer. I think he is a smart enough steersman to know the direction to safety, but his and Apple’s public insistence on mourning Steve Jobs’ legacy until the end of days either means that he’s just an impotent muppet or that Apple’s corporate culture hinders meaningful change.
That watch looks terrible, if they had taken a leaf out of Motorolas book and made it round, I would have considered it over the 360. There are not many square watches that tickle my fancy, even real watches.
I have a 4s at the moment so will probably look to upgrade to the 6, but there was nothing particularly innovative in what I saw in Apple’s announcement. The iWatch looks clunky and not at all elegant. If Steve Jobs was still alive, he would have insisted they keep working on it until they made it better looking. Apple never released ugly products under Jobs. Even the packaging was a thing of beauty.
Yesterday’s release would worry me if I was a shareholder. I just don’t think they can innovate without Jobs. Still, with $100 billion or whatever of cash to spend and a massive established user base, they are starting at a much stronger position than Nokia or Blackberry ever had.
Think about that for a while, will you…
I think ApplePay was the most interesting thing yesterday.
The payments market is huge and Apple is lining up to collect 15-25bps of “huge” – in my mind it is a big step for them to start leveraging their (in some ways) captive audience within the ecosystem outside of just selling them a new device.
I know the Finns have been doing this for a while, but the phone that can work as a credit card is a genuine innovation here in the US.
An innovation supported by Android and Google Wallet since 2012.
Apple Pay faces the same problem as Google Wallet: Not enough retailers support NFC-based payments. 220,000 seems like a big number until you realize that there are over 160,000 fast food restaurants in the US. Apple is just playing catch-up, here.
The payment infrastructure will be revamped over the next two years (with a rollout starting next month). But that technology isn’t going to cater to Apple’s small market share. it will use open technology accessible through a variety of means.
Phone + Touch ID + Apple has your credit card no. is pretty good. This would also be a good move on preventing Google and Amazon from encroaching on the most profitable smartphone users.
how are you valuing AAPL and how many iPhones do you think they will release before people say, ahh, boring? iPhone 20? b/c that’s what their valuation is telling you. this thread could have been for BB in 2007/2008. BB was all there was at that time and everyone absolutely LOVED their BB. then the iPhone came and BB wasn’t all that special. i’m not saying that AAPL will fall as far as BB did, but giving any company in this business a $600B valuation ($500B ex-cash) when its only making $40B a year, and this figure is stalling, is crazy. when GOOG owns the majority of the mobile ecosystem, as well as the mobile auto market ecosystem, AAPL will be hardpressed to be relevant.
also, i don’t see how Apple Pay will be all that big of a moneymaker considering it relies very much so on other parties (banks, CC companies) which are known for being cheap and unless everyone on the planet is paying with an AAPL device (which will not happen), they will not provide that much by way of concessions.
i’ve owned several AAPL devices since 2004 and own an iPad right now, and i’m just bored as heck with their product line. what they offer now is basically what they offered 10 years ago. and what they offer now is definitely not special, just par for the course. i don’t think it will be long before many others feel the same way.
give looking into the future a try.
also, being from a tech town that isn’t Apple’s stomping ground, no computer science guy with half a brain owns an iPhone.
let’s be clear about valuation. investors are obviously willing to give insane valuations based on userbases. AAPL at $600B is nowhere as crazy as FB at $200B. i think we’d need to see FB at $100B before AAPL hits $400B.
Or payment processors like First Data could continue with their plan to generically support secure NFC payments and support everyone’s iPhone 6 and every medium-to-high end Android phone made since 2012.
I guess I’m in the minority. I kinda like the watch. I’m not going to buy one, but that’s more because I try to stay away from first gen anything. But, I could see myself getting the V3.0 one day.
Now I need to decide if I’m getting the iPhone 6 with the bigger screen or not. If it’s too big it might distract people’s attention away from my buldge.
To be clear, I am not recommending a long position in this stock, I bought in the low 400s, and am just enjoying the ride. That being said, I don’t think this firm is overvalued. A company making 44B on a 500B EV is an FCF yield of about 9%, which is very high to start with. Then you need to add in the fact that there is significant growth potential based on expansion of their iPad line, the Watch, which is really the beginning of a multi-year product cycle, if successful. There are also a number of embedded options within this valution.
Unlike the BB, competitors have had years to bring down the iPhone, however, it’s marketshare has been stable, it’s continued to have both a wide following and keep its brand pre-eminence, and most importantly, Apple has continued to sell ridiculous numbers of phones, furthermore, they’ve even been doing well in the Mac line while the rest of the PC market stagnates. Ultilmately if the smartphone market does well, Apple will capture a disproportionate amount of profit, and if the market struggles, Apple will struggle less than other makers.
I don’t know how much money Apple Pay will make.
As for Apple offering the same things it did 10 years ago, I think you need to refresh your memory. In 2004, even the iPod Shuffle didn’t exist, Mac was still on PowerPC processors, iOS wasn’t even a drawing on paper yet…I could go on and on.