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Apple slips below $600 in first trading day after exec shakeup

• justin0469 14y ago
  IMO, Apple has lost it's touch just as they almost won me over along with thousands of Android fan boys with the iPhone 5. I bought the latest 13" MacBook Air the day it came out. I was impressed by the form factor but that's about it. The stability and smoothness everyone used to rave about just isn't there. I refuse to upgrade to their latest OS. That's not to say Apple is disappearing anytime soon, but I think they have lost their touch. I believe it will be a slow but steady decline in value, down to a more Google-like share price.
  • Samuel_Michon 14y ago
    "The stability and smoothness everyone used to rave about just isn't there." If so, that experience might have something to do with: "I refuse to upgrade to their latest OS."
    • justin0469 14y ago
      Lion to Mountain Lion. I'm not that far behind and I think it's fair to expect a product which has been available for quite some time and shipped with my brand new laptop should be more stable and lived up to hype. That being said, perhaps the problem was believing all the Apple hype that is spread - I had my expectations set too high.
      • Samuel_Michon 14y ago
        In my experience, Mountain Lion is a lot more stable and smoother than Lion. Best $20 I've spent all year. Mountain Lion also adds some cool features like iCloud and iMessage integration, and my personal favorite, Power Nap: "When your Mac goes to sleep, it still gets things done with Power Nap. It periodically updates Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Reminders, Notes, Photo Stream, Find My Mac, and Documents in the Cloud. When your Mac is connected to a power source, it downloads software updates and makes backups with Time Machine. While all that updating is going on, the system sounds are silent and no lights or fans come on, so nothing disturbs you. And when your Mac wakes up, it’s good to go." http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/ http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/
        • justin0469 14y ago
          That does seem cool in concept but when I put my laptop to sleep, I do so to conserve battery not for it to suck up battery by doing all that.
          • evan_ 14y ago
            It throttles the CPU way down, keeps the screen off, doesn't spin up hard drives- in practice it takes almost no battery. Even so, you can turn it off, trivially. I don't know if you think that everyone urging you to upgrade is lying to you or if you're just being obstinate. It's OK if you don't want to upgrade to Mountain Lion but stop complaining about problems that have been solved.
          • Samuel_Michon 14y ago
            I haven't noticed any meaningful drop in battery from this feature. Also, if you have Power Nap turned on while on battery power, and the battery level reaches 30 percent of capacity, Power Nap will be suspended. However, Power Nap only works on recent Apple notebooks with flash storage and cool microprocessors (like your MacBook Air). http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/18/#power-management http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/18/#power-man... http://www.macworld.com/article/1167970/up_close_with_mountain_lion_power_nap.html http://www.macworld.com/article/1167970/up_close_with_mounta...
          • leephillips 14y ago
            I'm guessing that by "connected to a power source" they don't mean the battery.
          • Osmium 14y ago
            If you're really worried you can disable it in System Preferences, but the latest Intel processors have new "active idle" states specifically for this kind of thing.
  • Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
    Hold on, they've lost their touch since they launched the iPhone 5? That's been a tough six weeks for them. Re. OS X Mountain Lion - you should upgrade. Lion was as close to a dog as Apple have release, Mountain Lion is absolutely an improvement. I can understand someone on Snow Leopard not wanting to move to Lion but your Air presumably shipped with Lion. Frankly that's the version you get away from, not hunker down on.
    • justin0469 14y ago
      I meant with my experience with the MacBook Air. It's fair enough to say that every major product (software or hardware) has issues that need fixed but I had hoped with Lion it already would have been.
      • Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
        If I'm understanding you right, you like the hardware but don't like OS X? Yet you're refusing to upgrade to the version that may fix some of the issues you have?
        • justin0469 14y ago
          I just don't want to trade one set of problems for another. Some of the Mountain Lion annoyances are small and fixable (Gatekeeper) but they add up to be just plain annoying. I haven't messed with it much but their limitation on subfolders is just annoying. I'm sure it's aimed at simplifying things for average users but power or heavy users need something that can conform to their style of work.
          • nicholassmith 14y ago
            I was a bit concerned about Gatekeeper but it's turned into a non-issue. Not sure what you mean about subfolders, unless you're talking about the issue with iCloud documents where you can only create one folder, no subs? I think I've saved one doc into iCloud as I only have one machine, I use Dropbox for everything basically. I skipped Lion because I'd heard so much bad, I like ML though, it's pretty solid.
  • brandall10 14y ago
    I don't know if it's Apple losing its touch so much as the competition having gone through that period of playing catch-up, and finally they have (or are getting closer and have begun to innovate in different directions). They've been the industry heavyweight for too long and it's beginning to show. I actually moved to Android with the introduction of the iPhone 5/iOS 6. The maps thing had somewhat of an impact, but it was more looking at how much Android has progressed with Jelly Bean (also considered WP8 which looks very impressive) vs how much iOS appears to have stagnated. As for the hardware, I love my 2k12 11" MBA but I can't say for certain I'll remain in the Apple ecosystem on my next purchase. As a Rails dev I just need a *nix of some sort.
    • justin0469 14y ago
      That's probably true too. I think that Apple's smartphone and computer market share will slowly decline in favor of other comparable options.
  • kalid 14y ago
    I don't know about losing its touch, but wanted to offer some corrections re: "I believe it will be a slow but steady decline in value, down to a more Google-like share price." 1) Comparing share prices between companies doesn't make sense (the share price is total value / total number of shares, the latter can change). That said, GOOG's current share price (~670) is higher than AAPL's current price, and near its all time high (~700). 2) If you meant to compare total values, that Apple should be worth as much as Google... Apple is over twice Google's total value (550B to 220B) so that'd be an enormous decline in value. 3) If you meant to compare relative value (price/performance), Apple is actually a better "deal" for investors in that its P/E is around 14, the market average, while Google's is 21. 14 dollars in Apple will create $1 in earnings, but 21 dollars in Google is required to do the same.
    • Jabbles 14y ago
      "an enormous decline" On the same scale as the growth that Apple has seen over the last 2 years.
      • kalid 14y ago
        Apple's valuation growth is due to selling enormous quantities of products -- their P/E has roughly hovered around ~15 the entire time. If it were 20 or 30 then there'd be a lot of room to fall. But their P/E is about industry average... they just have a megaton of sales. If iPhone/iPad sales decline precipitously (to ~2010 levels) then their share price should fall to roughly that amount [probably more, since it indicates something is terribly wrong and likely to decline further].
    • justin0469 14y ago
      Fair enough :) Bad example with the Google share price and point taken with value / # of shares. You are correct with #3. I know Apple is worth is significantly higher than Google, I just think that gap will close (Google will raise, Apple will lower) over a long period of time - as in years. Could be totally wrong, it's just something I could see happening.
      • 14y ago
• seunosewa 14y ago
  I think the share price drop has more to do with Google's Nexus device announcement.
  • Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
    I think it's 2% which is basically within the range of what might be seen as noise (and now on the way back up). It's the market being the market and fluctuating in the way things do when you give a bunch of people a load of money and tell them to buy and sell things they don't understand. Some of the people selling might be thinking about the Nexus (though I think very few), some might be thinking about the execs, some might have just hit the wrong key but most of it is just stuff that we'll never understand and in the long term almost certainly means nothing. Looking at the market over short periods is a route to madness.
• Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
  Apple's movement over the past three months has been an exaggerated version of the NASDAQ or the Dow, up a bit around September, down to it's levels of about three months ago. In Apple's case that peak coincided with the my hyped iPhone 5 launch which might explain some of the exaggeration. There are many many people who understand the market better than I do but to me at least this is a complete non-story.
  • robinjfisher 14y ago
    Agreed. Over the last year, Apple's share price has swung widely from $363.32 to $705.07. Surely a more accurate statement would be that the share price has increased dramatically. Swung widely implies ups and downs. The current dip is similar to one seen in April and its share price is still markedly up YoY.
    • corin_ 14y ago
      Currently it's hovering around $600, this is $105.07 lower than the high and $236.68 higher than the low. Sure, "swung" may lack the implication that overall the price has been going up, so it's not the complete story, but I think it's fair to say there have been pretty wild ups and downs.
  • pilsetnieks 14y ago
    What if it was NASDAQ or Dow that moved because of Apple? (I suppose Apple is not yet that big but it could happen someday. Maybe a popular stock having much more trades than others could have such impact?)
    • radicaldreamer 14y ago
      The NASDAQ does move because of Apple, it's weighted as 19.8% of the index.
  • chollida1 14y ago
    Umm, Apple isn't part of the Dow http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/stocks/movers/dow/ http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/stocks/movers/dow/
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• nicholassmith 14y ago
  I think these articles need to come with the caveat of "markets move and shift". I'm sure no one at Apple is panicking, it's easy to be lured into watching the share prices as a statistic of success but Apple has enough cash in stockpile that their share price isn't overly important, unless you're a shareholder. If it dropped 20% in a day I think it'd be safe to say there was a loss of investor confidence.
• stcredzero 14y ago
  This demonstrates the difference that contextual knowledge makes. Exec ousters are generally a decent indicator to sell. However, those of us who have been following Apple will know that these particular decisions were good, leaving Apple with a cohesive "four man band." Information asymmetry. It's what makes markets interesting and how people make lots of money.
  • joejohnson 14y ago
    Totally. Wall Street doesn't understand Apple like us HNers do. EDIT: this was sarcasm.
    • jpdoctor 14y ago
      And vice versa.
  • smackfu 14y ago
    Even us smarties don't "know" anything. Apple has been doing fine in the past with these execs. If there is discord, it's not affecting sales. Record revenue, record profit. In the future there is now some uncertainty: was Scott Forstall the key to iOS? Is Jony Ive a good UI designer? Will Bob Mansfield retire again next year? If you don't like that uncertainty, it's a good time to sell.
  • MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    Know is way too strong of a word here. You know a firing is good when it's a salesperson who's been with your company for 6 months and hasn't gotten a sale yet. Scott Forstall was with Apple for what, close to 15 years?, and worked his way up to a SVP position managing the company's most important product -- there's absolutely nothing about this firing that an outsider who only "follows" Apple can confidently say that it was good. If it took Tim Cook this long to decide that the costs of keeping him outweighed the benefits, it definitely wasn't an easy decision and the repercussions are big unknowns.
  • chollida1 14y ago
    I'm going to have to partially disagree with this. I agree there is definitely information asymmetry going on. However, usually a movement in a stocks price is lead by institutional money. This is for the most part what every hedge fund competes on, a competitive advantage. If you think that your observation has escaped institutional investors eyes then I'd disagree with you. I'm completely biased as I'm in the industry but I think most people would be very surprised by just how much the average hedge funder knows about the companies they have positions in. There were rumors circulating a couple days before the announcement that this was coming.
• snowwrestler 14y ago
  P/E is below 14 for an innovative technology company whose products are selling out worldwide. Sounds like a buy situation to me.