Apple the Most Valuable Company in the World? Bet on It.

You wrote:

A dent? Yes. Taking it over? No. Apple will keep it’s core of hard-core loyal users, but that will cap out. They’re already losing total market share, and there are more Android phones being sold than iPhones. Apple catered mainly to the Apple faithful, and didn’t make much of a dent elsewhere.

The battle for the smart device market will end up between Nokia (who’s just a giant), Android (who’s got support from plenty of companies, including the budget builders in China), and Microsoft (who’s decided they want this market, meaning they’ll throw billions at it to get market and mind share).

Apple’s already being pushed out...

So, combine a falling market share with a lower profit margin, and I’m not sure how it’s corporate valuation is supported by other than hype - meaning, it’s in a bubble.

Apple’s valuations aren’t all that high, based on the past 12 months of earnings - the P/E ratio is 22. Of course, if unit volumes of iPads, iPhones and iPods start flattening out or falling, or margins start tanking due to competition from Android products, then Apple stock is going to crater. Consumer products are a double-edged sword because unlike Macs, there’s no real lock-in - net margins are great on the upswing and negative on the downswing. If iPads, iPhones and iPods do see some impact from users buying Android devices, Apple earnings could collapse just as quickly as they went to the moon.

Which brings me to the $64,000 question - as a power user, do you think Android products are just as good as Apple iWhatever products, from a look-and-feel usability standpoint? Also, do you think Apple has even the remotest chance of displacing RIMM’s Blackberry for heavy (business) texters?

Apple’s valuations aren’t all that high, based on the past 12 months of earnings - the P/E ratio is 22.

It's about double it's two main competitors - Microsoft and Google. And both Microsoft and Google have HIGHER net profit margins than Apple (for example, Microsoft's P/E is 11.7, and the net margin is 30% compared to Apple's 18% margin - making Apple's stock about 3X over-valued compared to Microsoft). In other words, it's over-sold, the price is too high. Bubble.

Which brings me to the $64,000 question - as a power user, do you think Android products are just as good as Apple iWhatever products, from a look-and-feel usability standpoint?

Yep. And I think both are behind what SPB Mobile Shell brought to Windows Mobile. I'm waiting for SPB to finish their shell for Android - it's a seriously good UI. Totally intuitive out of the box, completely customizable by the end user (you're not stuck with a specific home page, or just pages and pages of identical little boxes).

Personally, I find the iPhones UI consistent, but not very usable. The home screen does nothing for me - it simply doesn't display the information I want to see. I don't want to have to pop open a few apps to find out what I want to see, I just want it displayed. I prefer this (which is what I have with SPB Mobile Shell on my HTC Touch Pro2):

All the stuff I want to see right there - time and date, alarms, status of messages (e-mails, voice mails, texts, missed calls), my upcoming appointments, and a calendar. All right there, at a quick glance. And sometimes I'll add an RSS ticker on there, too... Live new scrolling.

Now, Android - to me (and I do use it - I do have an Android tablet with Android 2.1 loaded) - is about as functional out of the box as an iPhone. Lots of little icons that you can scroll or page through. But Android allows more customization. It's not just pages and pages of icons, but live widgets you can move around. You can make the phone behave how you want and desire, you don't have to change to how it wants you to work.

So, right now, I'd say that Android offers everything in terms of UI that iOS offers, stock. But with Android the ability to customize is HUGE, and is really starting to open up the creativity of the market. Just like SPB did to the terrible UI of WinMo (Mobile Shell making it a phenomenal UI experience - one even iPhone and Apple employees have been impressed with), you'll see UIs being advanced on Android and ultimately creating a better user experience.

Also, do you think Apple has even the remotest chance of displacing RIMM’s Blackberry for heavy (business) texters?

Nope. I know many, many Blackberry users who jumped on the iPhone train only to move back to Blackberry after a few months or a year. There is no replacement for a physical keyboard. The feel, the touch is simply impossible to replicate. And having a big chunk of your display "disappear" when you pop up that iPhone soft keyboard is unacceptable. You cannot type longer messages on it because you can only see a limited number of lines of text.

If Apple really wants to become a serious player in the business market, it needs to natively support more than one Exchange server at a time, and it has to offer a real, physical keyboard. Soft keyboards simply do not suffice - you lose screen real estate AND your fingers tend to obscure even more of what you don't lose (obstruct view to the entire screen).

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