Posted on 04/18/2013 12:51:30 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Apple may be the world’s most celebrated electronics company, but its formerly high-flying stock price has plummeted to Earth over the past six months, declining 40% since last September. On Wednesday, that trend continued when Apple shares tumbled 5.5%, briefly pulling company shares below $400 for the first time since December 2011, and wiping out more than $20 billion in shareholder value.
Wednesday’s decline was apparently triggered by a disappointing sales forecast from one of the company’s key suppliers, which fueled fears of weakening demand for Apple’s signature iPhone and iPad products — and added to growing concern about a weakening global electronics market. Apple’s dramatic stock slide has cost the company the title of the world’s largest company by market capitalization, a distinction that once again belongs to energy giant Exxon Mobil.
The question now is whether Apple shares are likely to keep falling. Apple, which reports earnings results next Tuesday, is now trading at slightly more than nine times earnings making it extremely cheap relative to the broader market. Even so, many analysts are cautioning that the stock could fall further still — with some pulling out the classic warning that investors shouldn’t attempt to “catch a falling knife.” Or, as Auerbach Grayson analyst Richard Ross told Forbes: “Until this stock can show me something, there’s no reason to be a hero.”
Apple had already been facing growing competition from the likes of Google and South Korean electronics titan Samsung, weighing down Apple’s stock price in recent months as investors wait for the company’s next breakthrough product. Then, on Tuesday, Cirrus Logic, which supplies Apple with audio chips for the iPhone and iPad, warned of “a decreased forecast for a high-volume product” from one specific customer.
(Excerpt) Read more at business.time.com ...
Without Jobs, all the way.
Every dog has its day, but so the same dog will have its fall.
It is not Apple’s job to try and match the hype and madness of Wall Street investors and hedge funds. How can they possibly control that?
By all accounts, they are still a strong company with great products, making a lot of money.
I’d say the hype came from Apple itself, always has, and there is nothing wrong with that. The problem is that they are not innovators anymore, more like follow the new leader Samsung and then come out with a “NEW’ model to slightly one up some feature. There are just too many good, equivalent or better products out there for a better price. And while the majority of people seem to Microsoft haters, the segment of Apple haters has been growing for some time.
Not relevant. Apple has fallen out of fashion, and therefore out of favor, so it is to be shunned.
Apple used to have a sense of humor, used to be cool.
Now they're as full of themselves as IBM once was.
Nothing wrong with that, but sooner or later you've got to take a bite out of the Reality Sandwich.
I have heard it said” The Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
How far CAN it fall? To zero, of course, like any stock. How far WILL it fall? That’s a proper question.
The question is, Why didn’t I buy when Jobs came back, or at least after the iPhone introduction?
Now they're as full of themselves as IBM once was.
Nothing wrong with that, but sooner or later you've got to take a bite out of the Reality Sandwich.
And not from the Reality Distortion Field Sandwich Shop.
Maybe; though I think that they really made two big mistakes -- the nice thing about Apples was that they were different than the rest (I'm not arguing good or bad here) -- first was when they dropped the Motorola for the x86, second was when they became "just another *nix".
Both of these can be justified, true, but there are underlying mentalities, philosophies that both of these tap into. In the case of the x86 the underlying philosophy is that everything can be extended (look at the instruction set) and mistakes in not-quite-fundamental design can be glossed over by a later extensions. The case of Linux though is even deeper: these are the philosophies of C/C++, things like "everything is a file", or the "little tools able to be piped together" which doesn't work in-practice, or more "make it more complex". I also despise that this gives ammunition to my CS peers who, having a little knowledge, say crap like "in order to program an OD you need to use C [or assembly]" having no idea that there's a lot of OSes that don't; moving the Apple away from assembly/Pascal makes it more difficult to give them a good counterexample because they'll point to popularity (or the move itself as proof of the languages being unsuitable).
Now, C++ is admittedly starting to get away from some of it's C/Unix heritage by taking into consideration not-uncommon problems [which are becoming more common] like parallel-programming... there's a huge bit of irony there though: C++ will be a huge collection of mismashed ideas/designs compared to Ada (which was designed with such things in mind).
*nod* - I agree; they've lost a sense of "we do it this way" to a sort of "we'll do whatever's popular" (which worked out ok when they were popular).
Wasn't there a joke/saying about Jobs having a Reality Distortion Field?
All the way down. This was always the problem with being “hip”, eventually fashion changes, even if your stuff was good you get abandoned. Much better to be a product everybody uses but won’t admit, uncool but popular has much longer term profitability.
See that’s why it’s funny, when it comes to Microsoft everybody jumps on the band wagon and yell screw you! Considering Apple is guilty of many of the same things Microsoft is defiled for, most people almost worship them like a cult.
Apple had been over-priced by speculators just like gold. Big deal.
Who wants to buy all of that expensive Icrap anyway?
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