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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, @02:57PM
We do have different experiences. Once I got started on the Mac in late 1984, I never looked back. I lived in an entirely Mac centric world until 1993 when I did go back to doing some cross platform work with Mac and PC Win 3.1. But I thought of Win 3.1 as quite an inferior toy. In every possible way.
But . . . I was impressed with VB and Access at that time. I even suggested to the company president that maybe we should not do cross platform development any more and our next platform should be VB / Access or something similar. We surveyed our customer base and even at that time it was 56 % Mac. That was because our accounting system was one of the very few that ran on the Mac, so naturally we got a lot of the Mac customers who needed our system.
So we continued to be cross platform to this very day where everything is now web based. :-)
But I stopped being a Mac fanboy in about 1999 when I got my first Linux box with SuSE 5.1.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.