Apple 500,000,000 iPhones Sold Ping!
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Posted on 03/27/2014 2:36:57 AM PDT by Swordmaker
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Woo-hoo!
Back in my rural Tennessee county, I was the first cellular phone agent, back in the 90s. The phones were in a bag, with a mag mount antenna for the car. Hand-held phones worked only near a cell site. There were only one or two sites for the entire county.
Today, I am in the Philippines, where a mobile phone is a standard accessory with everyone from early teen on up.
It no longer depends on having above average money. Even the poor have their mobile.
It amazes how the new hi-tech systems/sites can handle the volume. We are never out of range or capacity.
Apple doesn't make much money off Internet usage - it makes most of it off selling Idevices. Unfortunately, Apple's market share is shrinking, and its year-to-year quarterly earnings comparisons (total earnings, not EPS, which has been goosed by share buybacks) have been negative for 5 straight quarters. After the plateau comes the whoosh down, as all portable touch screen devices deal with industry-wide price compression by either cutting prices or remaining above the fray and losing significant unit volumes. Either way, bottom line profits get taken to the woodshed.
Yikes! Apple is going out of business soon! Sell your stock, get rid of all your iDevices, immediately!
Oh wait a minute ... I forgot ... Apple has been “going out of business” for the last 30+ years! ... LOL ...
Uh, no... There can’t be enough travelers to do that. It just means that people with iOS devices USE their devices. People with Android not so much. Travel has little to do with it.
Not to worry. . . Apple is taking home 87% of all phone profits.
BUT ... here’s the chart I want to see, and perhaps you can find it for us. How long before these Apple-haters DIE OFF!
It’s sure a bore dealing with their mental illness all the time.
I’ve always been curious about this phenomenon. We have people who find Apple’s products absolutely amazing ... AND THEN ... we run across the very curious phenomenon of the “Apple-haters” who occupy themselves running around on the Internet and forums seeking out customers who find Apple’s products “amazing” — and incessantly telling them how much they hate Apple products and “Apple is going out of business and/or losing money!”
I think it’s some kind of mental disorder of some sort.
I guess they're complementary to the Apple fanatics who populate these forums talking about anything non-Apple is for the birds. I'm neither an Android nor an Apple lover or hater. I'm just pointing to the inevitable trajectory of consumer electronics products. Prices come down, and everybody sees its profits slashed to ribbons. It's happened to every consumer electronics item starting from radios way back when. What is astonishing is the way in which competition in the sector has accelerated.
Not going to help Apple as total industry phone profits plunge. Certainly hasn't helped Apple increase its earnings over these past 5 quarters.
Besides, since nobody breaks out profits by product, this is just a guess by an analyst with roughly the same credibility as the success of his overall buy and sell ratings. I'd say Tavis McCourt, who came up with the 87% figure, qualifies as a permabull, since he had a buy rating on Apple's stock at $700. He was also a permabull on Blackberry, back in the day:
Analysts can make repeated bad calls for years — with no consequences. They just keep covering a company and pull big money for themselves from their investment bank. Nobody even calls them on their bad track record. Why do these guys deserve to keep their jobs in this situation? And some of them even get to go on TV continuing to espouse their lousy point of view.
Last Friday, I was watching Bloomberg TV and have to commend them for calling out one analyst. The analyst in question is Tavis McCourt of Morgan Keegan, based in Nashville, TN, who covers Research in Motion (RIMM). Jon Ehrlichman says: “Please correct me if I’m wrong but I was looking back over the Bloomberg and it says you’ve had an outperform rating on the stock since September 2008. That’s during period in which RIM has lost half its value while the S&P has fought its way back to even. Can you clarify that?”
Tavis’ response: “… No, that’s accurate… um… some stocks go up, some stocks go down. They’ve done much better internationally than what I would have expected and much worse in the US.”
Betty Liu: “Right, but I think Jon makes a good point that you’ve had this outperform rating for a long time on RIM. What would it take to make you change that?”
Tavis: [now angry and somewhat dismissive of the direct criticism] “yeah yeah, look… this would be an easy job if we all just looked backwards…. But, we don’t… and, uh, and, uh, so… you know, I think what it would take would be if there was any meaningful slowing in RIM’s international growth.”
“This would be an easy job if we all just looked backwards.” Well, Tavis, I think the point was that you’ve done a really bad job looking forward for over 2 years now. And it’s not like he upgraded the stock and then back-tracked. He just did nothing. He kept saying RIM was an “outperform” for the entire ride down to a loss of half the company’s market value. And now he says it’s still an “outperform.” What is any investor supposed to make of that?
Apple has INEVITABLY ... been “going out of business” for over 30 years ... LOL ...
You’re starting to remind me of the “Global Warming” advocates.
I'd say one has nothing to do with the other.
Mobile Phones Before & After the Apple iPhone
The one has nothing to do with the other in terms of the subject matter — but the “Boy crying ‘wolf’” is a “methodology” that APPLIES TO BOTH!!
And ...after 30+ years ... there’s no question it applies to Apple ... :-) ...
One big “problem” Apple has with its iPhones is their longevity. Several years ago my wife got an iPhone 4. She used it a few years then gave it to her mom and upgraded to a iPhone 4s. Later she upgraded to a 5, her mom got the 4s, and I got the 4. There is nothing at all wrong with the 4. Because it has been in a case it’s entire life (mostly otterbox), the thing still looks brand freaking new. So, we have a family with 3 phones, and only one actual purchaser. I can’t even say that I particularly have battery issues yet on this handmedown phone. It lasts all day, and I charge it overnight.
Gosh, sounds like Apple’s *dooooooomed!* /s
And “50 billionth download from its App Store”, kind of a lot, really.
500 million iPhones, out of approximately 7 billion living humans, astonishing.
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