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Apple Was Headed for a Slump. Then It Had One of the Biggest Rallies Ever
- Despegar 7y agoI think the continued underestimation of Apple since Tim Cook became CEO really just comes down to this: people desperately want a Great Man to worship. Tim Cook isn't revered in that way like Steve Jobs was.
- adventured 7y agoIf Apple develops another new product under Tim Cook that generates $500+ billion in profit over time, he might be. The only interesting product that has been originated under Cook, that isn't a direct derivative of the iPhone (as the watch is), are the AirPods. Cook is an excellent steward and operator, which is why Jobs de facto installed him as CEO.
- MBCook 7y agoWhat are the chances of another $500b consumer product existing PERIOD. From ANYONE? The iPhone may have been a once in a century product, even if Steve was still here. Apple has ONLY made ‘little’ things like the Apple Watch and AirPods. Both are absolutely huge businesses. If people weren’t using the iPhone as a yardstick we wouldn’t stop hearing about how successful Apple is. But they’re the iPhone company.
- zepto 7y agoYou do realize the iPhone was a direct derivative of the Mac, so by your logic even Steve Jobs did nothing that wasn’t derivative?
- jki275 7y agoAre you suggesting Steve Jobs wasn't involved with the development of the Mac?
- zepto 7y agoSome people would say Jeff Raskin and Xerox were where the Mac concept came from.
- jki275 7y agoWhich may be as it may be, but has no bearing on my comment or the discussion.
- zepto 7y agoAre you suggesting that Tim Cook was not involved in the development of the Apple Watch or AirPods?
- jki275 7y agoWhen did I say that?
- zepto 7y agoThe point was about the meaningless of calling products ‘derivative’.
- jki275 7y agoThe Mac can hardly be called derivative. If you want to go that deep into that kind of logic, you're really reaching to the point that all things are "derivative" of basic physics and no one has ever done anything that's not "derivative". It's pointless argument.
- zepto 7y agoIf you don’t think the Mac is derivative of the Lisa, which is derivative of the Xerox Alto, then I’m quite surprised.
- m0zg 7y agoSteve Jobs was Apple's Bill Gates. Tim Cook is Apple's Steve Ballmer - great businessman, but very little charisma or vision. It's remarkable how reliably these patterns repeat. Sundar Pichai is Google's Steve Ballmer as well.
- Despegar 7y agoI think Pichai is Google's Ballmer, but I don't think that applies to Apple at all. The better comparison for Cook is Bob Iger.
- m0zg 7y agoI think you're vastly underestimating the business acumen of Ballmer. His personal antics and lack of filter notwithstanding, he (and not Satya) is the only reason why Microsoft is a $1T+ company today: he was the one who started Azure and SaaS/subscriptions at Microsoft.
- hindsightbias 7y agoIf only I had listened to everyone and sold my APPL stock when he took over... /s
- mistrial9 7y agoIt appears that few companies have benefited financially as much as Apple Inc from literally decades of outside FOSS development (bsd etc). Are new Apple software engineers still asked to sign a paper that they will not contribute to FOSS at any time during employment? Are they legally bound from discussing the existence of that agreement?
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoI don't think you can be legally bound not to discuss the existence of an agreement. Your employment contract can say things like confirming the existence of this agreement can be grounds for dismissal, and that might hold up, but if it said something like you can be sued for confirming the existence of this agreement I think the courts would consider that non-binding. However as I am not a lawyer, any lawyers here can comment on that?
- mushufasa 7y agoyou can have a nondisclosure agreement about a business relationship. that's pretty common. nondisclosure is not the same as denying it exists -- you just can't volunteer the topic / information.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoOk normally I'm aware of non-disclosure agreements concerning trade secrets. But I don't think you can have a non-disclosure agreement that says you cannot admit this non-disclosure agreement exists. This would also be generally problematic if you are being asked things that you cannot disclose, then you cannot disclose why you cannot disclose them.
- ComputerGuru 7y agoI don’t know about employment contracts, but Google around for info about National Security Letters and gag orders. It’s certainly a thing, at least when the other party is the federal government.
- twright 7y agoI wonder if more speculation around the stock is driven by not reporting iDevice sales numbers each quarter. Speculation aside, Airpods really have taken off, at least as a status symbol. So much so that I know a kid who has airpods but (until he got his dad's old 6s) was without a device he could use them with. He would just flick the case open and closed like a fidget spinner.
- scarface74 7y agoWhy would unit “sales numbers” matter as far as stock price? They report revenue and overall profit. The Apple Watch is already a larger revenue generator than the iPod ever was. AirPods are either thought to be larger or soon will be.
- twright 7y agoA motivation for no longer reporting unit sales was that analysts paid way too much attention to those numbers. I recall several quarters where device sales fell just a little and people would proclaim the soon death of the company[1]. Though unit sales can be inferred from revenue, as the company moves into services it benefits them to group all device sales under one line item because it's a business category that doesn't have the crazy growth it used to. [1]: (2016) https://www.zdnet.com/article/iphone-apocalypse-end-of-apple-as-we-know-it/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/iphone-apocalypse-end-of-apple...
- mnemonicsloth 7y ago> “A lot of the knock on Apple is that they haven’t been very innovative, but they changed the game more than anyone else with things like AirPods and ancillary things,” said Mr. Bryan, whose firm in Arden Hills, Minn., has $2.6 billion under management and owns 41,000 shares of Apple. So Apple can innovate, but not on anything important. Steve is rolling over.
- nkkollaw 7y agoThey did innovate with the butterfly keyboard, LOL!
- scarface74 7y agoThe iPhone was a once in a lifetime thing. The phone market was already a 1 billion device a year market when the iPhone was introduced. Now it’s 5 billion. The Apple Watch is much more impressive technically than the iPad. Once you had the iPhone, the iPad was easy. It also was just a big iPhone and didn’t come into its own until 2015. The Apple Watch is also generating more revenue than the iPod did at its peak.
- imeron 7y agoIs there a study out there which tested if Apple's stock and other S&P500 stocks are pushed ever higher by all this money pouring into unmanaged ETF indexes? E.g. if you buy an S&P500 index-tracking ETF you automatically buy a bunch of Apple shares too. This might mean that the trend of buying ETFs will help Apple stock price staying high.
- pedrosorio 7y agoYou can compare the return on Apple stock price vs S&P500 price for the past year: AAPL: 318.31 / 156.30 - 1 = 103.65% S&P500: 3295.47 / 2643.87 - 1 = 24.65%
- cdiddy2 7y agoIts literally all stock buybacks. When the fed says monetary easing they just start to dump money into their own stock
- mleo 7y agoIf it was just stock buybacks, the market cap would more or less remain the same due to increased price but less stock outstanding. The market cap has nearly doubled as well since 2019 low.
- cdiddy2 7y agothats not true. A billion dollar stock purchase can push the market cap of an asset much more than a billion dollars. Even if you retired the shares you bought after.
- neonate 7y agohttp://archive.md/rnix5 http://archive.md/rnix5
- elfexec 7y agoNot just Apple. Microsoft had quite a rally itself over the past decade. So did tesla, netflix, facebook, AMD, Amazon, nvidia, etc. The tech sector did very well during the loose monetary period since the financial crisis. It's insane looking at Apple and Microsoft. They are valued at about 1.39T and 1.25T respectively. The trillion mark by itself is amazing, but if you just look at the fraction alone, Apple's fraction is nearly 2X Disney and Microsoft's fraction is 2.5X Tesla. And microsoft pays you a dividend every quarter. Rising tides lift all boats, but some more than others.