News Sales of Macs Down 34% Year-over-Year, But Apple Is Optimistic

"Being the world's largest supplier of consumer electronics by revenue and the world's most valuable public company is a hard job. You not only need to meet customer's expectations, but also exceed those of investors."

This is true for all companies and important to remember.
 
  • Like
Reactions: SSGBryan
The universe maybe infinite but our world and its business cycles are finite. You can't grow forever. Eventually you run out of new customers and have to rely on existing customers.

The iPhone, iPad and Macs are all mature platforms. There's only SO much you can do with either of them. Case in point, the most exciting thing about the yearly released iPhone's are the new colors. There's no new exciting idea like Siri, selfie camera, rear camera, internet access, App store etc. It has already been done by Apple and copied by others.

So the only options Apple has are incremental upgrades and new colors. A sign that Apple understands this, is that they now sell iPhone's for every buyer. So buyers now ask whether buying a new phone when there phone works just fine is justified. Then Apple is faced convincing customers with higher pricing in a turbulent economy. All of this can add to soft sales.
 
For some of us their haven't been any important innovations that justified a new phone since text messaging.

I know I'm an outlier, and even I have an iPhone 13 because of upgrades when my employer changed providers. I find it adequate although I miss the 12 mini or SE I had before because of it's smaller size.

Eventually every innovator is in a mature industry.
 
"Being the world's largest supplier of consumer electronics by revenue and the world's most valuable public company is a hard job. You not only need to meet customer's expectations, but also exceed those of investors."

This is true for all companies and important to remember.
Bah. You don't need to exceed investors' expectations. It's nice when you can, obviously, but you've got to have fools for investors if you're consistently exceeding their expectations.

The real trick is how you simply continue growing such a large company. The bigger you get, the fewer markets represent worthwhile growth opportunities, as you begin to saturate your existing markets. That's why some people figured it was a foregone conclusion Apple would try to get into the automotive industry. Along those lines, I wonder how much bigger Apple will get, in the content production business.

BTW, I'm a little surprised nothing was mentioned of the Chinese market. Didn't Apple recently have its first Apple Store closure, in China?
 
Apple's optimism is likely going to last a quarter to 2 at most. The products they have been churning out are predictably lacking in innovation and boring. To add salt to the wound, the SOCs for iPhone, iPads and Mac have seen very marginal improvement in performance since the A14/15 and M1's release. They are faster mostly because of high clockspeed, and more GPU cores, which both likely will result in higher peak power draw even on 3nm.
 
Apple's optimism is likely going to last a quarter to 2 at most. The products they have been churning out are predictably lacking in innovation and boring. To add salt to the wound, the SOCs for iPhone, iPads and Mac have seen very marginal improvement in performance since the A14/15 and M1's release. They are faster mostly because of high clockspeed, and more GPU cores, which both likely will result in higher peak power draw even on 3nm.
Well, unlike the M2, the M3 is actually made on a new process node. So, I'm expecting to see a real performance improvement from that.

Anyway, I don't really care if Apple falls back to Earth, a bit. As far as I'm concerned, they've done their part in showing that ARM is a viable mainstream computing platform and evangelizing the benefits of on-package DRAM.

I do hope they continue to refine their AR tech, for at least a couple more generations, as I feel they're really breaking new ground in that area. You can laugh at their headset and its price all you want, but anyone familiar with the cutting edge of AR tech wouldn't dare say Apple isn't innovating there. For people who truly want/need AR, that's genuinely exciting. I no more likely to buy-in than I was for Microsoft's or Facebook's solutions, which I also skipped. I just want to see the tech continue to get improved.
 
Bah. You don't need to exceed investors' expectations. It's nice when you can, obviously, but you've got to have fools for investors if you're consistently exceeding their expectations.
Agreed that exceeds is the wrong word here. Must Meet expectations. And investors may have to meet the reality that growth cannot be infinite.
The real trick is how you simply continue growing such a large company. The bigger you get, the fewer markets represent worthwhile growth opportunities, as you begin to saturate your existing markets. That's why some people figured it was a foregone conclusion Apple would try to get into the automotive industry. Along those lines, I wonder how much bigger Apple will get, in the content production business.

In mature markets strategies of optimization and efficiency to preserve yield and profitability make sense.

Vertical integration where you absorb the full profit chain of your product.
- Rolling you own chips - Done
- Content creation ?
- Apple brand Phone service provider ?
- Apple brand social media ?

Cost reduction strategies.
- Work force reduction
- Better market segmentation
- Reduced expensive marketing