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iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

nytimes.com

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Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#371

Post by jv0010 »

ericabiz wrote: post #4

I run a repair shop. We've repaired over 3,000 Apple devices for customers. We are always chatting with our customers, so we get a ton of feedback from them about what they're doing with their phones. We hear a few things consistently: 1) Providers have switched from "free upgrades every 2 years" to a plan cost and a monthly phone cost, so people now really know how much their phone costs--and many would rather save…

Repair shop owner here as well. Couldn't agree more people are just continuing to use their old phones. We have big companies even asking to continue to repair iPhone 4S phones to date.

Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#372

Post by adventured »

tma-1 wrote: post #21

> The Company also announced that its Board of Directors has authorized an increase of $50 billion to the Company’s program to return capital to shareholders. Under the expanded program, Apple plans to spend a cumulative total of $250 billion of cash by the end of March 2018. My god, that $50 billion expansion is 7% of the company at the current market cap.

It's actually an even more astounding 8.65% of the current market cap ($578 billion).

I'm glad to see them returning capital to shareholders. However I worry about the debt they're taking on in order to do so, due to most of their cash being overseas. If things continue to slide for them, for whatever reason (iPhone loses favor, smartphone sales keep contracting globally, something replaces the smartphone, etc), it will pin them into a disastrous situation of extremely high debt and crashing sales (while having committed to very large payouts to shareholders).

Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#373

Post by adventured »

partiallypro wrote: post #243

Sales faltering...just wait until the margins dip. Hardware margins the size Apple has enjoyed are incredibly rare and never have lasted with any company, period. Their hardware margins are on par, or even above many software vendors, which is just unsustainable. It's a great product, but the upgrade cycle is lengthening, and margins are going to fall. Same happened to the PC, same started to happen with the tablet,…

> Hardware margins the size Apple has enjoyed are incredibly rare and never have lasted with any company, period

Intel has routinely maintained gross profit margins of 60%+ for decades on its microprocessor sales. Their hardware margins put Apple to shame.

Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#374

Post by rpgmaker »

guywithabike wrote: post #283
rpgmaker wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hope #2 gets traction. It's been disappointing to see the SE not do as well as I wanted it to. I'm not an iPhone owner myself but I'm hoping the SE popularizes the "small" form factor phone again.

Tim mentioned on the earnings call today that the SE is supply constrained because the SE is selling far better than they projected that it would.

That's good to know. Thanks!

Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#375

Post by rtpg »

bluthru wrote: post #334
darkclarity wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a big reason why private businesses are better than public ones. There's no need to push for unsustainable growth at the behest of busybody investors.

I feel Apple would be better as a private company but it's too late at this point.

Is there a way for a company like Apple to secretly buy back stock? I feel like at one point it would show up in the books...

Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#376

Post by aetherson »

coldtea wrote: post #342
rrggrr wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll say this: Amazon Echo cut Apple's growth balls right off. That's a $2b revenue business Siri can kiss goodbye.

> I'll say this: Amazon Echo cut Apple's growth balls right off. That's a $2b revenue business Siri can kiss goodbye. $2b is spare change for Apple -- I don't see Echo going places anyway, it will end more or less like the Kindle is now. In fact, Amazon's whole profit was around $100 million last year -- and it's the first year it ever had any profit IIRC. I don't see those $100 million profit per year threatening th…

If you're talking about "threats," I don't see what retained earnings have to do with anything. Amazon's revenue is roughly half of what Apple's is -- Amazon is significantly smaller, but it's in same ballpark as Apple, not orders of magnitude smaller.

Amazon prices its products for thin margins and aggressively moves into new product spaces (sometimes with spectacular failures). Apple prices its products for thick margins and returns a lot of money to investors with stock buybacks. Using profits as a metric to compare these two companies holistically is specious.

Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#377

Post by semi-extrinsic »

secfirstmd wrote: post #361
_delirium wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might not even get a perceptual performance boost at all. I recently upgraded from a 2013 Moto G to a current-gen Nexus 5x and it feels about the same, maybe even slightly slower, in terms of latency for common tasks and how often it gets bogged down. I think part of the problem is that the new phone has a higher-res screen, which some apps (like Facebook) adapt to by shipping much larger icon sets, loading highe…

Dam, I was just about to do the exact same thing... Hmm, now i'm kind of out of options. As after Samsung Galaxy note experience, I said I'd never buy Samsung again.

Typing this on a 3rd gen Moto G, it's also stock Android, cheap, fast and the "right" size. As in, big display, but I can still (just) hold it and type with one hand.

Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#378

Post by rtpg »

eli wrote: post #84
blondie9x wrote: post #64

The era where cell phone companies offered phone subsidies as trade for a customer's long term commitment has ended. The impact this is having and will continue to have on smartphone sales is profound. It is much more likely that customers will upgrade their devices less frequently. We are already beginning to see the impact in Apple and Samsung earnings.

I don't really buy that. Can you point to any evidence people are updating devices less frequently? Apple sold more iPhones in Q1 of 2016 then they did in Q1 of 2015 so are you extrapolating from a single down quarter?

This report[0] (from 2014, but the trends cited seem to have continued from other places) have cited the end of 2-year upgrade incentives (or rather, cheaper monthly fees after 2 years) as a primary reason for a drop in cellphone sales.

In particular, in 2013 40% of respondants would upgrade phones after 2 years... in 2014 that number dropped to 15%.

At the same time, the number of people who said they would upgrade at "obsolesence" went from 15% to 35%.

There's a decent amount of evidence that 2-year contracts trigger a lot of phone upgrading. The end of that whole cycle is going to continue to cause pain to anyone selling cells.

[0]:http://reconanalytics.com/2015/02/2014-us-mobile-phone-sales...

Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#379

Post by rtpg »

adventured wrote: post #372
tma-1 wrote: post #21

> The Company also announced that its Board of Directors has authorized an increase of $50 billion to the Company’s program to return capital to shareholders. Under the expanded program, Apple plans to spend a cumulative total of $250 billion of cash by the end of March 2018. My god, that $50 billion expansion is 7% of the company at the current market cap.

It's actually an even more astounding 8.65% of the current market cap ($578 billion). I'm glad to see them returning capital to shareholders. However I worry about the debt they're taking on in order to do so, due to most of their cash being overseas. If things continue to slide for them, for whatever reason (iPhone loses favor, smartphone sales keep contracting globally, something replaces the smartphone, etc), it w…

Well, they can always bring their cash back right? (it will be taxed, but it's still a formidable warchest) Or somehow pay back debt through some overseas shenanigans....

Not a great situation to be in but I can't imagine it getting big enough to where Apple could no longer handle it. Maybe I'm underestimating interest rates

Re: iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs

#380

Post by coldtea »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #359
coldtea wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The government has decided to keep inflating the bubbles with capital injections that wind up temporarily keeping stocks afloat and ultimately wind up feeding insane real estate bubbles So, just like the US in 2008?

Ya, just imagine if the US, instead of crashing in 2008, decided to feed their bubbles with way more debt-fueled stimulus than they did. That is basically where China is today.

More than $1.5 trillion to Detroit and $1 trillion to Wall Street (plus the usual subsidies to all other sectors, including some trillions of military spending).

Besides, at least China has actual manufacturing jobs and exports instead of tons of service jobs...

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