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from the it-worked-until-it-didn't...-now-what? dept.
Apple has had an incredible decade. Since the iPhone debuted in 2007, the company's sales have jumped tenfold. The stock has soared over 700%. And up until last November, it was the world's largest publicly traded company. But two weeks ago, Apple issued a rare warning that shocked investors. For the first time since 2002, the company slashed its earnings forecast. The stock plunged 10% for its worst day in six years. This capped off a horrible few months in which Apple stock crashed about 35% from its November peak. That erased $446 billion in shareholder value—the biggest wipeout of wealth in a single stock ever.
[...] Despite the revenue growth, Apple is selling fewer iPhones every year. In fact, iPhone unit sales peaked way back in 2015. Last year, Apple sold 14 million fewer phones than it did three years ago.
[...] In 2010, you could buy a brand-new iPhone 4 for 199 bucks. In 2014, the newly released iPhone 6 cost 299 bucks. Today the cheapest model of the latest iPhone X costs $1,149! It's a 500% hike from what Apple charged eight years ago. [...] In 1984, Motorola sold the first cell phone for $4,000. The average price for a smartphone today is $320, according to research firm IDC. Cell phone prices have come down roughly 92%. And yet, Apple has hiked its smartphone prices by 500%!
[...] Twelve years ago, only 120 million people owned a cell phone. Today over five billion people own a smartphone, according to IDC. [...] now iPhone price hikes have gone about as far as they can go. [...] A publicly traded company that makes most of its money from selling phones is no longer telling investors how many phones it sells!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:52AM (1 child)
I don't agree with your assessment of Steve's return to Apple in the 90's. That Sculley guy almost destroyed Apple by releasing mediocre and overpriced products, like Cook is doing now. People stopped buying Macs. OS9, or OS8, or maybe both I don't remember, was a disaster. They didn't respond to Windows 95 properly. Win95 offered good enough plug-and-play that worked (most of the time), good enough stability, good enough memory management, and for $2000 you could get a high-end Pentium 200 PC that outperformed and was half the price of anything comparable that Apple had. Almost all software companies were jumping ship and developing Windows software. Apple was dying and had just enough life left to maybe barely survive into the early 2000's.
If Jobs didn't come back then Apple and the Mac would be just a memory today and would be in the same "What if..." category of the Amiga. Microsoft even invested a few hundreds of millions into Apple in the 90's, just to keep the antitrust people off their back.
(Those were exciting times in personal computing....god I miss those days.)
I'm not a Jobs fanboy at all, but he is the reason why Apple went from a niche, almost bankrupt company in the late 90's to the richest company in the world based on stock valuation.
I must agree that BeOS 4 was an amazing OS. If it just would have been released 5 years earlier...who knows what might have been?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:51PM
As I seem to recall, and from regular MacWEEK issues of the day, was that Apple was almost destroyed by Scully's successor. Can't quite remember his name.
Apple was pushing the PowerPC as the future. First they had to convince developers. And they did. Then they had to convince customers, and slowly, they did.
But Apple didn't believe it themselves. So they made a billion dollars worth of 680x0 Macs that -- surprise -- nobody wanted to buy because PowerPC was the future.
That billion dollar writeoff was part of what brought Apple to its knees. Along with failures in developing it's next generation OS.
Mac OS 8 and 9 came out. But clearly the new OS was nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile Apple's Mac PowerPC hardware ran BeOS which was looking pretty cool.
I do have to agree with you about that. But by that time I had seen through the reality distortion field and saw Jobs for what he really was. A huckster, IMO.
It is amusing that when Jobs returned he had given up on the errors that got him stripped of his power by Scully. He no longer put such ridiculous artificial technical limitations on products. Like the original Mac having only 128 K and never to ever have any more than that. Forever, amen. And never ever to have color. And never to have a separate cpu box and high quality monitor. And never to have expansion slots. None of those things came until Jobs was gone from Apple. Apple might have also been a distant memory if Scully had not taken action to limit the damage Jobs was doing. Developers were screaming for memory, powerful CPUs, high end color graphics and monitors. Expansion slots. In fact, it wasn't until the Mac II (post Jobs) that the Mac really came into its own.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.