patrick.net

Apple-a giant ogre with too much cash. Lets see how long they bumble around.

Interesting how Comcast isn't playing ball with Apple here.

They're the ones with the most market position to lose of course, once cable channel packing goes the way of the CD.

How Comcast was able to buy NBC was evidence of how corrupt our system is. No way that should have been allowed.

Thing is, politicians dare not cross the media interests -- "Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel."

Comcast has a market cap of $150B. Apple will take all of it, eventually, if and when they start drinking their milkshake.

Funny how $150B is almost a rounding error on AAPL now. In my mind they're still that scrappy $5B enterprise of late MacOS 9 / early OS X days.

Nothing could be further from the truth! They're WMT + MSFT + INTC now.

Apple best place for its technology is at the cablehead. The demand surge that hits my neighborhood cable loop 8 - 10PM is ugly, ugly. Everybody streaming stuff now.

Once Apple is at the cablehead, it can even do cool things like provide remote UI to cheap terminals in the home -- ChromeBooks pulled the OS off of the device, Apple could pull the motherboard completely, a home PC could just be screen and keyboard.

hey, does apple have any office space in san francisco?

have not been able to find where it is if they do.

anonymous says

For its latest iPhones, Apple raised the base price of its high-end handset, the iPhone 6 Plus, by $100 to $749 without a two-year contract... Revenue in Apple's greater China region, which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan, soared 71%, surpassing Europe for the first time to be Apple's second-largest market.

The smartphone market has huge economies of scale. In the US, most people buy on contract and don't even realize how much they are paying, so in this country (the biggest market for AAPL's biggest product) the sticker price functions mainly as a marketing device to increase the perceived value of the contract. The contract prices are close enough to each other, and the contract terms are so thoroughly obfuscated and confusing, that customers choose the phone they like the best: the iPhone, because it has the best OS. With the biggest product in the biggest market, AAPL has the scale advantage to compete globally.

Personally, I prefer a phone with more open capabilities like LG's G3 D855: FM radio, infrared send&receive, replaceable battery, MicroSD. As a consumer, I'd love to see AAPL introduce a really different phone to complement the iPhone: a fat phone with more capabilities, call it a Wow phone or a Woz phone. A thicker phone could include a multi-focal camera, so you can change the focus after you've taken the picture, and more space for more battery capacity, etc. It doesn't happen currently because it would compete with the iPhone, which has currently a monopoly on the best OS, but it might happen if the Firefox OS comes to America. Firefox phones tend to have features that cash buyers in developing countries demand, e.g. FM radio and dual SIM card slots. AAPL doesn't offer those features, and most Android manufacturers don't either (at least in America), because the American carriers want to lock down the phones and bundle carriers' "unlimited" data plans and streaming services without competition.

Wow, this 2011 prediction by Gartner is so wrong it's funny:

Apple took a significant lead in the smartphone race, capturing 15.7% of the worldwide market last year, compared with just 4.2% for Microsoft. However, both Gartner and IDC predict Microsoft's Windows Phone will beat out Apple's iOS for mobile market share by 2015, with Gartner expecting a 19.5% share for Microsoft and 17.2% for Apple.

from http://www.computerworld.com/article/2507485/vertical-it/apple-vs--microsoft-by-the-numbers.html

Here's what actually happened:

Windows X: one OS to rule them all, one OS to find the apps, one OS to bring them with you and in the darkness bind them.
It usually takes MS three attempts to get it right. Last call. Place your bets.

Speaking as a Mac guy who actively detested Windows 3 and barely tolerated the 9x series, Windows 10 is pretty usable.

The irony is that just like IE on OS 9 and OS X bridged the gap for Apple at its weakest, Chrome makes both Windows and OS X operate the same for me, more or less.

(the lack of a real Unix CLI is Windows' biggest liability. Dunno why they can't get their act together here)

My 2006 Mac Pro gave up the ghost earlier this month so I had to put my 2007-era Conroe box back into frontline use, while I wait for the tech picture to settle out these next two months.

Apple's WWDC is in June, and I'm hopeful -- as always -- that they'll pull the thumb out and ship a decent Xeon box, something that I'd put together on my own.

Failing that, I guess I'll spend about $500 and upgrade the Windows box to a Xeon / Z97 build in the hope that a dual-boot hackintosh won't be too troublesome.

It's beyond comical that Apple's cheapest Xeon box is $3000.

If I ever turn my back on Macs I can date it to when the stupid watch came out. All the company-wide effort on such a bullshit product while the Mac line ossifies in place.

Don't get me wrong, Apple is doing OK keeping up with technology, e.g. shipping NVMe boot support in 10.10.3, but overall their product choices suck now, other than the laptops. Can't beat those.

I am a longtime apple fan and developer. My first was a Mac 512 with 2 800k floppy drives. I've owned countless machines since, and currently have two powerful ones I'm using for audio engineering and special effects production work.

However, I'm am seeing a few disturbing trends which I believe are going to derail their position as professional tools.

Their policy of producing an operating system that 'just works' is a portent for future security disasters. Handoff plus Keychain plus AirDrop plus iCloud integration and even fingerprint recognition all in the name of ease-of-use is a hacker's dream come true. It is so difficult to maintain secure and private data on the current systems that I CANNOT continue using their products for my business without taking personal responsibility in my financial contracts for the inevitable breaches.

To me, the "it just works" mantra has become a euphemism for "it just leaks". They are making so much more money from iOS products and mobile UI/UX experience, that they have become blind to the potential disasters ahead in privacy and security failures.

Add to that a less than stellar performance of the apple watch, and you have a recipe for a long slow slide into mediocrity.

anonymous says

they have more cash

~$200B if you're interested. Bigger market caps:

Exxon Mobil Corp. XOM 404.86
Microsoft Corporation MSFT 397.47
Google Inc GOOG 364.30
Berkshire Hathaway Inc. BRK.A 349.70
Johnson & Johnson JNJ 304.43
Wells Fargo & Co. WFC 276.81
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. WMT 273.88
General Electric Co GE 270.34
Procter & Gamble Co. PG 239.76
JPMorgan Chase & Co JPM 226.53
Chevron Corporation CVX 220.18
Verizon Communications Inc VZ 209.52
Facebook, Inc. FB 204.40

When I wrote the One OS riff above, I wasn't expecting this to happen: Microsoft Demonstrates Android and iOS Applications Running On Windows 10.

^ Utter desperation.

3.5% marketshare is what Apple fell to in their darkest days with the Mac PPC product line, 2002-2005.

At least back then Apple was the only alternative to the Windows XP juggernaut, giving them some daylight from the brave few holdouts (aka "The Switchers") who just didn't like Windows and all its crap.

Truly shocking how Microsoft threw away its crown jewels under Ballmer. WinCE was crap but the overall intent was sound. Microsoft incrementalism and god knows what other problems (trying to herd cats with Chinese manufacturers?) just resulted in stasis by 2005, allowing Apple to swoop in and drink their milkshake in the mobile space.

I actually bought a top-of-the-line WinMo smartphone in 2006 (it was meh) and my day job was mobile-related so I saw this evolution directly (even if as late as 2008 I had no idea how BIG the future iOS platform was to become).

What Microsoft needed to do in 2006 was get the goodness of the xbox 360 and smash it into a mobile phone form factor.

This was the secret of Apple's success, the PowerVR guts from day 1.

Google has been beating Redmond like a rented stepchild for a decade now.

A botched device launch does not inspire confidence for many reasons.

"hey, does apple have any office space in san francisco?

have not been able to find where it is if they do."

They just leased a 76K square foot place in SOMA. Probably for the digital music entity.

I'm sort of tempted to buy more of their stock, but not sure if I can handle technology stocks well. They've been a solid company, at least ever since they made iPod.

FortWayne says

I'm sort of tempted to buy more of their stock

i owned some apple 10 years ago and selling it was a big mistake in retrospect. but now i'm afraid to buy it because it's just so freaking huge. it's the biggest stock by market cap:

http://www.iweblists.com/us/commerce/MarketCapitalization.html

The bad news for Apple is that the huge buying cycle that happened with the Apple 6 will start petering out soon. People wanted a larger screen, now they got it (or will soon). After that, people will not upgrade for a small camera improvement or a remotely faster processor - at least for a while.
Also competitors in China are ramping-up. A smart phone is a commodity, and for many, there is very little to justify the extra cost of the fat Apple margins.
There's really nothing Apple can do to compensate with other businesses. It's not music or TV or watches that are going to plug the hole.

Based on this I would expect a crash of some sort for Apple stock similar to what we saw in 2013.

Call it Crazy says

“If AAPL doesn’t find its footing soon, it may risk a deeper drop,” writes Andrew Nyquist, over at See It Market.

I love these kinds of information-free wall street prognostications. NOT! Andrew Nyquist is saying: If it does not stop falling, it will continue falling.

Well, gee, that is quite an insight you've got there Andrew.

i owned some apple 10 years ago and selling it was a big mistake in retrospect. but now i'm afraid to buy it because it's just so freaking huge. it's the biggest stock by market cap:

http://www.iweblists.com/us/commerce/MarketCapitalization.html

What do you think about GOOG? They seem to be doing all the right things lately.

AAPL stores are still packed in our neighborhood, even poor people who can barely afford rent seem to be buying iPhones. But I'm just like you, frightened to buy more of AAPL due to their market cap already.

FortWayne says

What do you think about GOOG?

I try not to think about them. I expect they will continue to intrude and spy on every aspect of our lives, probably continuing to grow by being evil.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-is-nearly-40-more-valuable-than-the-city-of-chicago-2017-05-22

Apple is nearly 40% more valuable than the city of Chicago

I agree. I personally used only Linux laptops for 20 years, but last year gave up and got a MacBook Air because my wife loves hers so much, and because every single programming job in the last decade simply issued me a Mac laptop of some kind and I got very used to them.

I run Linux in a VirtualBox VM on the Mac and pretty much have the best of both worlds: reliable and functional hardware (printing! wifi! suspend mode!) and a bit-for-bit identical Linux OS so I can develop or test web stuff there before pushing to production with certainty that the code will run the same.

zzyzzx says

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apple-is-nearly-40-more-valuable-than-the-city-of-chicago-2017-05-22

Apple is nearly 40% more valuable than the city of Chicago

They exaggerate a bit:

At current levels, Apple Inc’s AAPL, +0.03% market capitalization of about $803 billion is 38% larger than Chicago, which had a real GDP of $581 billion in 2016.

They are comparing Apple's market cap (cost per share times all shares) with an annual turnover of all goods and services. To be slightly more accurate, we could compare the value of all residential housing to Apple:

Together, all homes in the Chicago area were worth $772.6 billion at the end of 2016

But that's just residential. I bet with all the office space, Chicago is still worth more than Apple.

Anyway, these comparisons assume linearity where there isn't any. Prices change with volume. So if Apple tried to buy all of Chicago, prices for the land would go up. I think it's called "slippage".

Makes sense to me. I'd rather own Apple than the city of Chicago.

Up after hours on good earning:
After-hours: 159.50

win some, lose some . . .

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/01/apple-earnings-q2-2017-how-much-cash-does-apple-have.html

Apple cash pile hits new record of $261.5 billion
Apple's new record cash pile is up 13 percent year over year.

They can now buy a small country.

back in Jan i said it would be $155 by next Jan.

i guess i need to revise my estimate since the stock has performed much better than i expected: $180 by Jan 2018.

And all those dollars are fiat currency.

HEY YOU says

And all those dollars are fiat currency.

anything outside of cash and bonds go up with inflation.

But can the highest-valued stock continue to go up forever?

jazz_music says

The United States is so small these days, nothing compared to what it once was.

Visualize pledging your allegiance to the shareholders.

...or going to war against the non-complaint.

Yup. Those were the good ole days.
Slave labor everywhere. Now they want minimum wages.
Obedient women. Now they think they have the right to vote.
Native Americans. So many to kill. Now they get upset and sue you.
Life sucks!

$172 after hour and iPhone X didn't even sell yet.

$200 by next earning date.

fingerprint and facial recognition data are only stored on the phone.

BorderPatrol says

fingerprint and facial recognition data are only stored on the phone.

But everybody is free to download it from the phone.

mell says

BorderPatrol says

fingerprint and facial recognition data are only stored on the phone.

But everybody is free to download it from the phone.

not that simple. it's stored in the cpu and definitely encrypted. you can crack the case open and physically access the chip but the data will be garbage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_ID
Apple says fingerprint information is stored locally in a secure enclave on the Apple A7 and later chips, not in the cloud, a design choice intended to make it very difficult for users to externally access the fingerprint information.

In order to overcome potential security drawbacks, Apple's invention includes a process of collapsing the full maps into a sort of checksum, hash function, or histogram. For example, each encrypted ridge map template can have some lower resolution pattern computed and associated with the ridge map. One exemplary pattern could be a histogram of, e.g., the most common angles (e.g., a 2 dimensional (2D) array of common angles). The exemplary pattern could include in each slot an average value over a respective vector of the map. The exemplary pattern could include in each slot a sum of the values over a respective vector of the map. The exemplary pattern could include the smallest or largest value within a respective vector of the map or could be a difference between a largest and a smallest value within the respective vector of the map. Numerous other exemplary embodiments are also possible, and any other exemplary pattern calculation can be used, where the exemplary pattern includes enough associated information to narrow the candidate list, while omitting enough associated information that the unsecured pattern cannot or cannot easily be reverse engineered into a matching texture.

WatermelonUniversity says

fingerprint and facial recognition data are only stored on the phone.

How can we be certain of this?

It would be very simple for Apple to say that, and yet upload fingerprint and facial data.