Posted on 01/01/2016 3:37:02 PM PST by Swordmaker
Jobs was much more like Edison than he was like Tesla. Jobs disrupted many industries, just as Edison did. Jobs directed engineers to do what he wanted them to do, just as Edison did. Jobs would direct the ideas of himself and others into completed projects, just as Edison did. Unlike Edison, Jobs did not put his name on every invention that came out of Apple, which Edison did, regardless or who did the invention. Jobs only put his name on an invention in which he DID have substantial input. Edison always put his name on everything and generally did not credit all of the others with their original ideas. That was not the case with Steve Jobs.
Nikola Tesla was basically a loner. Tesla was a certified genius, capable of achieving things far beyond anything Edison or Jobs was capable of ever reaching, but his vision exceeded his grasp. However, Tesla had absolutely no capability of ever bringing a product to market without using the efforts of others to direct the finishing of his concepts.
Uh, no, sir. The myth that Xerox Parc came up with the Apple GUI is wrong. Many of the ideas from PARC did get incorporated in may GUIs, but PARC got a lot of their ideas from Doug Engelbart's Stanford Research Institute (SRI) including the computer mouse. Apple's GUI bears very little resemblance to SmallTalk on the Xerox Star.
Many of the Apple GUI elements were wholly original to Apple, including drop down menus, contextual menus, draggable windowing, the trashcan metaphor for discarding files, and dragging and dropping of documents onto application icons to invoke that icon to open the document. Steve Jobs also was completely responsible for inventing the graphical type faces on computers which lead to desktop publishing with What You See Is What You Get displays, which came out of his fascination with Calligraphy. He insisted that the Macintosh had to have fonts that would be beautiful and scalable, not just raster pixels in an eight-by-eight grid.
What did Xerox PARC have to do with the iPhone or the iPad, Mycroft? Building an OS based on UNIXtm for the NeXT computer and later for the Mac with OS X? The iPod? Forcing the music industry to sell digital music? Building the integrated Apple ecosystem? Original ideas that came from Xerox PARC? No way.
Damn auto-correct.
“may GUI” = “Mac’s GUI”
Steve Jobs and Tim Cook are like Gloria Vanderbilt. About 25 years ago she figured out how to sell $15 jeans for $150 by making them slightly better than the $15 one and calling them designer genes. All this fueled by the conspicuous consumption among trendy urban types starting in New York then spreading to other packed cities.
Apple is in the same conspicuous consumption business and turned iphones into religious totems for the godless (especially the urban atheists)...all within 8 years. That’s pretty quick for a new religion or cult.
Happy New Year!
So, Baron, your these is that people buy the iPhone for its conspicuousness. . . then they proceed to hide it inside an ugly case to protect it from damage, so no one can observe it and notice it is an iPhone.
Very illogical if conspicuousness and status are their original purposes in purchasing the religious totem. Not very good thinking on your part is it?
Probably not the best solution. I’d like to change company policy first. Apple makes some good products. They just force their customers to upgrade insuring positive cash flow and a solid bottom line. It is expensive to upgrade every couple of years though.
We shall see. Good to be objective if they are doing this good that it gets publicized.
“There are more than 40 analysts covering Apple. Most of those still working (heh) are bullish and have price targets well above today’s stock price,”
lol..if you don’t understand what a contra-indicator that is then you are truly a fool!
How many of those “analysts” work for houses that are market makers for Apple?
Problem with your ‘preferred’ set of analysts is that, they don’t want to acknowledge the simple fact that, Apple got to where it is now on the back of the iPHone, and that’s what I’ve been saying, and I’ll say it again. Apple is mostly dependent on the strength of the iPhone, which, sooner or later will be relegated to just being another good smartphone and not the premier phone that it’s been thought to be for the last 8 or so years. Once that happens, it won’t matter what YOUR set of analysts want people to think; the market will dictate the value of Apple on the lack of strength of the iPhone.
Basically, Apple is the “iPhone Company”, and might as well change their name again to ‘iOS Inc.”.
Basically none of them. They don't make the market for Apple. They post negative FUD on Apple because it draws clicks to their pages. The disrupt AAPL but have no effect on the fact that Apple has just turned in the greatest profitable year of any corporation in history. What these idiot anal-cysts do has no effect on what Apple as a money making machine does.
I fully understand what they are. . . they are consistently WRONG. Why should any one pay them any attention? They have an abysmal track record.
A misprinted calendar is always going to be useless because you cannot trust it.
No way if people have to lease or pay between $700 and $950 for the newest phone are they going to do that yearly anymore unless they get paid a lot.
There is no way Apple can get the same sales they used to have without subsidies IMO.
That will leave a mark on their profits.
BTW, have you noticed how Apple’s market cap is now ‘just’ around $587 billion? Yeah, that’s huge, but, it’s still a lot less than what YOUR analysts were predicting when they were lauding Apple as the first trillion dollar company (in reality, the first trillion dollar company was Microsoft).
In addition, have you notices how that other ‘one trick pony’, Google, has been moving in on Apple’s market cap number? Google is now around $522 billion in market cap. Let’s see, do you think that YOUR analysts will be pronouncing Google as the next trillion dollar company?
LOL! My set of analysts? There are about two or three out of over FORTY analysts who are consistently negative and CONSISTENTLY WRONG. These same anal-cysts are always the same two or three. . . and yet to have ever been right. These anal-cysts are hoping that one day, just by the odds, they'll be right.
Your position, as indicated by your loaded adjectives, is as usual negative on Apple.
On the contrary, AAPL grew 1200% before the iPhone appeared. Then you anti-Apple Hate Brigade members were saying it was all built on the iPod.
The facts still stands that Apple still claims 94% of ALL of the profits in the Mobile phone market with only 14% of the market share. Samsung has 9% of those profits and is dropping like a stone. Yes, that totals more than 100%, but that is because all of the rest of the mobile cell phone makers are posting losses in their race to the bottom of the barrel of commodity products that just don't sell well in price competition with each other.
You think that none of the other makers' phones aren't being subsidized? Frankly you are wrong. None of them are being "subsidized." What you characterize as a "subsidy" is merely a time payment plan over two years. . . and always has been. It's just been hidden in the monthly plan payment with a small to large downpayment depending on the up-front cost of the phone being bought on time. The more expensive the phone, the larger the initial cost to initiate the two-year plan. What do you think was going on?
In fact, CA Guy, it was in the interests of the carriers to sell the customer a LOW COST cell phone on a monthly plan or even give one away with ZERO down, because it would be paid off quickly, and the monthly charges NEVER went down, so the profits were far larger for them than if the customer bought a premium phone such as an iPhone at $199 or the even more expensive Samsung Galaxy flagship which went for $249. Those took far longer to pay off the residuals. If the customer got a cheapy zero down phone, all the left over excess payments were profit gravy for the carriers.
Apple is well prepared for this, already selling their iPhones and iPads with time payment programs in their on-line store and brick-and-mortar stores as well as at all major carriers on programs such as AT&T's NEXT and the other carriers have similar plans. When the next model comes out, you can just trade in your current phone and reset the payments and get the latest and greatest, much sooner than you could before under the old two-year contract system. This is actually better for Apple's bottom line as users do not have to wait for contracts to expire to upgrade. I've been using that plan for my iPhones and iPads for the last two years. Works great and I always have the latest up-to-date models.
It is one of the reasons that Apple had a stellar 2015.
There is no $199 iPhone.
I don’t doubt they stopped it all, but most common folks seem to have Apple phones, so I see them losing a big share of their market to slower sales.
Yes, the analysts, which are not my analysts, probably will. They are not Apple partisans like you seem to think. On the other hand, Google's valuation is not built on anything tangible but on advertising sales that are also intrinsically entangled with Apple iPhone sales; over 60% of their mobile advertising revenues are from Apple devices. The growing use of ad-blocking software makes their growth problematic.
Come now, you cannot be that dense. Apple flagship iPhones were offered at $199 for the 16GB, $299 for the 64GB, and $399 for the 128GB, initial two-year contract payments. The rest of the balance would be paid over the two years of the contract. If the user cancelled the contract, they owed a cancellation fee to pay for the balance due. Simple, but apparently you were not aware of what was happening in that contract. Dense.
As of January 8th, AT&T is discontinuing the two year contracts in favor of their NEXT program. Who do you think you are pulling the wool over the eyes of by claiming there were no $199 iPhones. That was what people thought they were paying. . . especially when they thought they could get an Android phone for "free."
And a very Happy New Year to you, Dennis, my FRiend!! For me it's back to work tomorrow (took the 'tween week off)... May 2016 bring you joy and fulfillment, and success in all that you undertake.
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