I do realize Apple’s world is crumbling and doom is afoot. But before you give in to the huge wave of negative press, take a look at one chart, the moving average of Apple revenue.
Six colors has one (look at the first bar chart on this page) and MacStories has one that makes this point even easier to see (the 12th chart on this page).
Just look at that curve. It goes up and up, from practically nothing to the biggest company in the world. Quarter after quarter of growth (on average), somehow balancing product launches and inventory so they keep that running average moving up. And that tiny little blip at the end? That seems to be all anyone can talk about.
That’s a hell of a curve, Apple.
First of all, “that” is not all that anyone can talk about. You guys like to exaggerate how much negative punditry there is just as much as the naysayers like to emphasize the negative. In doing so, you guys create page views for each other. That’s a fact if only you all would care to admit it. But then, we are like sports fans who cannot turn away. We read every naysaying word out there and read every word dissing the naysayers. Yup, just like sports.
Second, it is the job of analysts to predict turning points, up or down. There is no job for them if everything is a steady growth story.
Third, the stock market is about the future value of a company, not the past.
It is an awful lot like sports, especially if you dive into the comment sections of the various news sources/bloggers.
I do think those that cover Apple on a more positive note have a right to be a bit snarky over the constant negative coverage Apple has received over the past many years.. to your point, its like constantly predicting the top sports team is about to fall. Its felt more like blanket doom prediction than trying to actually predict valuable turning points.
Now that the eventual dip has happened we’ll see who, after years and years of saying it would happen, trump out the “I told you so” and those that take a more serious approach.
I’m a very long term stockholder in AAPL and a very long term user of Apple products.
I’m much less concerned with the fact that Apple, Inc is out of sync with AAPL than I am that Apple, even with all of its cash and talent and advanced processes can’t seem to make its core Mac users happy by getting annoying bugs out of Mac OS and by doing things like coming out with a new thunderbolt monitor (it’s been long enough already).
Then there’s iCloud reliability and iTunes design and reliability… these things are wanting and we hear a rumor that it might be a turf war within Apple.
For me, these kinds of things are much more troubling than a slowdown in profit growth from a leveling off of iPhone buying.
Too bad that all the graphs are either per quarter or moving averages. I would like to see a cumulative chart for example of all active iPhones for example. Can you imagine a company to sell an ADDITIONAL 50 million iPhones to us in 3 month time? The mind boggles…
I think you have a point. However, I hear lots and lots of complaints about iCloud and iTunes but for the life of it I never had any difficulties with it other than the occasional downtime at Apple with a couple of services. Nothing ghastly at all.
Which makes me think that it is well possible that the quality and available bandwidth in the US might play a significant role in all this.
As a matter of fact there IS a lot of negative punditry around. Especially about the Apple watch now that it turned 1. And I think your ideas of stock markets is theoretically justified. From a practical point market capacity is rather unrelated to the real value of the company especially on the long term.
Why would anybody be talking about anything ELSE? Carrying the sports analogy, nobody talks about who won the Yankees game 4 weeks ago, they talk about who won the game last night. We can’t be sure if the latest data point is an outlier or the beginning of a trend, but that’s why it’s worth talking about.
It seems like every time Apple reports something negative (drop in sales of iPads, year-over-year sales decrease, etc.), all the Apple bloggers would rather talk about how Apple has grown since Steve came back and not even give a second though to the latest data point. I like Apple products as much as the next guy, but you’ve got to talk about the data objectively, not always looking at the data in the rear-view.
“Just look at that curve” but please don’t look at anything else.
You make a good point: there are many pieces to the iCloud system, not all of which are in Apple’s control. However, I’ve had issues with iCloud in different parts of the country, different networks, and in enough varied places and circumstances that I think at least some of the problems lie with Apple.
None of my current issues are huge and one might say I’m nit picking but in fact, even as Apple has improved their online technologies a lot since the very early days of AppleLink and such, there are still issues. And, I’d like more energy focussed on those issues. I do think Apple can walk and chew gum at the same time.
iTunes has authentication issues that are widespread: too much asking for credentials when a person is already logged in. Some of this is by design, some of it is no doubt server hiccups on Apple’s end. Whatever it is, it’s not as smooth as it should be. As you say, these too might be pieces of the “pipe” not in Apple’s control but it doesn’t feel that way to me.
But, in the end, your point is taken and it’s easy to do some pinging when things happen to see where the issue lies. Thanks.
If there is some trouble I have the tendency to check on https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/ even if that is not always 100% correct.
About modality: that is often a problem. In my work I experience the same problem. If something goes wrong the first people that catch the blame are the ones responsible for the front end and we frequently end up diagnosing trouble for others 🙂
I find it interesting that the stock goes down when they have a great quarter and down when they return less then stellar results. Do I worry about it? No. I continue to use Apple products because they have served me well for the last 30 years.
I find that the vast majority of pundits and such don’t provide information that is useful. As others have said, I believe many are more interested in page hits then in providing something of value to the reader. We knew Apple was going to reach this point some day. It’s come so let’s move along.
Now that’s a Greg Maddux curve ball!
Joe
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