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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) by DannyB on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:42PM
I remember the Apple ][. We used the p-System (and Pascal language). On the Apple ][ and Apple ///, we used Apple Pascal which was extremely close, except the binary formats were different. (Apple Pascal was forked from the p-System 2, and we used the p-System 4 on all other platforms, IBM PC, Corvus Concept, etc.) But it was source code compatible, which was fantastic to build a commercial accounting system and sell it on multiple platforms.
Our favorite was the Apple /// over the Apple ][. The SOS (operating system) was really nice. Ahead of its time. The 3 was a great software design, plagued by a few hardware problems.
Alas, we had to give up on the Apple ][ due to limited maximum memory. But it was fun times. We looked at Lisa very carefully, but did not bite. When we saw pre-release Macs, and even had access to one ahead of release, we decided to get into Mac development -- which meant buying Lisa's because they were the development platform for the Mac at that time. Then we were pleasantly surprised that the Lisa Pascal, and later MPW Pascal were surprisingly compatible with Apple's p-system based Pascal. Once I was working on the Mac I never gave the PC another look. (But I had written 8086 code for the PC to do our fancy quick snappy text window scrolling and updating within 'windows' on the text screen. That x86 code was called from p-System pascal.)
It was sad to see the end of the classic Mac. I had my hopes on Apple's great new Mac OS which never materialized. Except in the ugly form of OS X.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.