Ted
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Post by Ted on Mar 2, 2024 11:38:13 GMT -8
Many people may consider these dark days for Apple seeing as revenue has been flat for over a year now. Some investors are upset about their lost opportunity cost by hanging in there, and that's understandable. The thing about AAPL and stocks in general is that performance of course is never straight up, and we shouldn't harbor unreasonable expectations - esp with the Ever-Doomed© AAPL. We've been here before where there are few catalysts for excitement and where (more than the usual amount of) gloom and FUD can thrive.
For me, I'm fine with giving Tim and the team more time to generate new and compelling hardware, software, services and content. Given that my average compounded annual return from AAPL over the last six or seven years has been ~30% - nearly twice the return of NASDAQ, they've earned my trust and patience. Do as you will, but every time I think I'm making a clever move by selling something in my portfolio, I regret it down the road. With MSFT, GOOG, CRM, AMZN, FB and many more, buying and holding would've made me significantly more wealthy. Hopping around almost always hurts in the long run when buying the highest quality companies. My $0.02. ✌🏼
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Post by Luckychoices on Mar 2, 2024 15:35:09 GMT -8
Many people may consider these dark days for Apple seeing as revenue has been flat for over a year now. Some investors are upset about their lost opportunity cost by hanging in there, and that's understandable. The thing about AAPL and stocks in general is that performance of course is never straight up, and we shouldn't harbor unreasonable expectations - esp with the Ever-Doomed© AAPL. We've been here before where there are few catalysts for excitement and where (more than the usual amount of) gloom and FUD can thrive. For me, I'm fine with giving Tim and the team more time to generate new and compelling hardware, software, services and content. Given that my average compounded annual return from AAPL over the last six or seven years has been ~30% - nearly twice the return of NASDAQ, they've earned my trust and patience. Do as you will, but every time I think I'm making a clever move by selling something in my portfolio, I regret it down the road. With MSFT, GOOG, CRM, AMZN, FB and many more, buying and holding would've made me significantly more wealthy. Hopping around almost always hurts in the long run when buying the highest quality companies. My $0.02. ✌🏼 I agree with everything you wrote, Ted...we may both be wrong. 😁 The stock market is aflame with investors flocking to companies that are labeled as leaders in AI. The Nvidia share price, for example, is gaining amazingly fast in 2024 as a result of both its AI chips, which are used by companies rushing to upgrade their AI offerings, and from its recent stellar earnings report. Meanwhile, as of market close on 03/01/24, Apple stock is down -7% from where it was at the end of 2023, a little more than two months ago. At times like this, it's sometimes difficult for long-term investors to remember why they invest for the long term…but this is exactly when we need to remember it. As I’ve previously commented, even though AAPL has given its long term investors extraordinary results, they have not provided the highest return over the last 23 years. They were bested by Monster Beverage (MNST)...by a lot…and no doubt by returns from other companies as well. Nvidia, however, has soundly beaten both AAPL and MNST since 2006…but since 2001, MNST is the clear winner with AAPL 2nd and NVDA right behind. Last year and this year however, both MNST and AAPL are being left in the dust. As Ted mentioned, and speaking only for my wife and myself, Apple has earned our trust and patience over the last 23+ years. I’m as frustrated as other AAPL Longs about how the market is treating AAPL/Apple this year while furiously propelling any stock associated with AI higher and higher. With no disrespect to members who own META or NVDA, those stocks are prime examples of this activity, IMO. If you’ve owned either or both of these stock for awhile, congratulations on your gains. But for anyone thinking about jumping into those stocks at the moment, I’d urge a little caution and perspective. After a 2023 gain of 184% for META and 246%, for NVDA, the share prices of both are increasing *incredibly* fast in the first two months of 2024. As you can see from the tables below, as of 03/01/24, META is up 42% for the year and NVDA is up 66%. Can that pace be maintained for the rest of the year? Does this look like thoughtful investing or a stock market buying frenzy of stocks closely associated with AI? Who knows? I may be *completely* mistaken…NVDA may end 2024 with a 396% gain and META may be up 252%. I’ve never claimed to understand the stock market and that’s true now more than ever. Note: As always, if I've made any errors in the table, please let me know and I'll correct it.
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chinacat
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AAPL Long since 2006
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Post by chinacat on Mar 2, 2024 16:03:30 GMT -8
IMHO, Apple is doing what it has often done in the past. They will likely not just have an AI product, but rather new great Apple products enhanced by AI.
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Post by nwjade on Mar 2, 2024 16:49:33 GMT -8
The key is aapl's disappointing revenue and earnings over the last what, three or four quarters? If and when growth picks up the stock will be repriced accordingly otherwise it'll trade sideways at best or perhaps face further multiple contraction. It's now a show me stock but I remain long and confident in its long term future...
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benoir
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Post by benoir on Mar 2, 2024 17:05:27 GMT -8
IMHO, Apple is doing what it has often done in the past. They will likely not just have an AI product, but rather new great Apple products enhanced by AI. absolutely. AI will be enmeshed within Apple products. This is the best thing about how apple deals with technology - not to tack it on the product but to infuse it within the product ecosystem so that the user is almost unaware on its presence. All the user knows is that it generally just works effortlessly. The only downside is that sometimes the [stock] market doesn't appreciate that subtlety despite the 2+ billion active devices.
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coma
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Post by coma on Mar 2, 2024 17:32:37 GMT -8
I expect something relevant to AI will be released in 4 months at the WWDC, if not sooner to heighten awareness.
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Dave
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"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
Posts: 4,113
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Post by Dave on Mar 3, 2024 2:30:31 GMT -8
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Dave
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"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
Posts: 4,113
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Post by Dave on Mar 3, 2024 2:39:35 GMT -8
About 8 1/2 minutes of speculation and rumors. Hopefully it’s true.
Apple March 2024 Event Leaks - This Changes Everything Checkout the comments section on this video. It may give some insight into how the market may respond and what many Apple customers are really wanting.
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Post by slanted on Mar 3, 2024 9:38:28 GMT -8
My investment philosophy is grounded in a 1984 AI sci-fi allegory pitting a merciless Austrian cyborg against a resourceful and resilient mother and child. We are living in the Matrix. In the real world Skynet became self-aware in August 1997. In the Matrix, we are only now recognizing NVDA META and MSFT have been finalizing Skynet for decades. They’ve even revealed the Terminators are in deep development. apple.news/AnfmYeNmKQJ62AiYl-2ROjATherefore Apple is doomed…
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Ted
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Post by Ted on Mar 3, 2024 13:31:17 GMT -8
And right on cue, here's an article PED posted today - fwiw:
The Economist: Don't give up on Tim Cook yet
"Sceptics wonder if Apple is now so dominant it has lost its mojo." From "Apple is right not to rush headlong into generative AI" ($) posted Sunday by the Economist:
If you think Tim Cook has always led a charmed life at the helm of Apple, think again. The years straight after the death of Steve Jobs in 2011 were a trial by fire. First there was antitrust: America’s Department of Justice (doj) sued Apple for conspiring to fix e-book prices. Then there was competition: Samsung, a South Korean rival, went to war with the iPhone with bigger, sleeker models. Then came broader concerns. Apple’s new voice assistant, Siri, made rookie errors. Ditto Apple Maps, which went as far as relocating the Washington Monument to the Potomac River. At the time, the question hanging over the company was existential: could Apple’s creative spark survive the death of its founder? One of Mr Cook’s lieutenants was so miffed at the criticisms that he publicly retorted in 2013: “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass!”
A decade or so later, Mr Cook may be having a moment of déjà vu. On all three counts—antitrust, Asian competition, the existential question of innovation and growth—there are parallels between then and now. Competition watchdogs in the eu are demanding compliance by March 7th with rules that for the first time breach the “walled garden” which keeps users and developers bound within Apple‘s playpen. In America the doj’s trustbusters may soon launch a case against Apple. In China, Huawei, a domestic mastodon, is seizing market share. Hanging over everything is the nagging concern, amid a levelling off in iPhone sales, that Mr Cook is missing the opportunity to pull another rabbit out of the hat with generative artificial intelligence (gen ai).
In short, with its market value down by 10% since mid-December, and Microsoft, thanks to gen ai, vaulting past it to become the world’s most valuable company, sceptics wonder if Apple is now so dominant it has lost its mojo. So jaded is the narrative that many pay little heed to the buzz about the Vision Pro, Apple’s snazzy—though lavishly priced—mixed-reality headset. What hopes they have are pinned on the company’s annual developer conference in June, when they want Mr Cook to announce whizzy gen-ai upgrades proving that Apple can join the chatbot hypefest. That, though, is not how the company does things. Nor should it be.
Yet you do not have to be a true believer to see why Apple may be right to take its time. First, there will be more to gen ai than chatbots. They appear to be a revolutionary technology. But so far they are just a better (and accident-prone) way of putting in a que ry and getting an answer. That is not Apple’s forte. “They are features, not products,” as Horace Dediu, an expert on Apple, puts it. Nor does Apple compete with other tech giants, such as Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet, to run cloud-computing platforms with large language models (llms) on which other firms can build gen-ai apps. Instead of relying on cloud services, it seems to be working on ways to embed gen ai in its own devices, bolstering its ecosystem. Since 2017 it has been using homemade chip technology called neural engines to handle machine-learning and ai functions that its gadgets use behind the scenes.
Still, don’t give up on Mr Cook yet. Apple is bound to be working on gen-ai products that do not leave egg on its face—just, as is its way, not in the open. At this stage, the vast sums needed to train ai models favour deep-pocketed incumbents over scrappy upstarts, which will work to Apple’s advantage. You can almost hear Cupertino muttering, “Can’t innovate anymore, my ass!”
My take: Right now, June seems a long way away.
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bud777
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Post by bud777 on Mar 3, 2024 15:36:37 GMT -8
My investment philosophy is grounded in a 1984 AI sci-fi allegory pitting a merciless Austrian cyborg against a resourceful and resilient mother and child. We are living in the Matrix. In the real world Skynet became self-aware in August 1997. In the Matrix, we are only now recognizing NVDA META and MSFT have been finalizing Skynet for decades. They’ve even revealed the Terminators are in deep development. apple.news/AnfmYeNmKQJ62AiYl-2ROjATherefore Apple is doomed… I can think of nothing more reassuring concerning the threat of mis-used AI than the knowledge that it will be done by Microsoft. I struggle to communicate how inept this company has been at software development. Even when someone shows them what to do and how to do it, they muck it up and take years fo drive the worls to accept their failures. As an example look at Windows. starting from a MAC and all the MAC code ( it was freely available to anyone who paid $100 to be a "developer") it wasn't until Window 3.1 that they produced anything remotely useable, then they went through God know how many iterations before finally reaching a pinicle in Windows XP from which they slid in a death spiral with follow-on attempts to wrap something around the turd to make it palatable. But I should not focus just on Their user interface fiascos, they is plenty to talk about in their repeated failures to create an actual operating system. Once again, they were not starting from scratch. Most mainframe producer and certainly all mini computer producers had developed sophisticated Real-time operating systems by 1975. DEC's RSX-11 comes to mind. Microsoft failed to even come close to a decent R/T exec until they hired Dave Cutler to bail them out. These guys are a dime a dozen in software engineering. Quick to find the latest good work, quick to adopt it, and then they just don't pack the gears to do anything with it. If anyone in the world can take the good work done by Open AI and turn it into a newer version of Mr PaperClip, count on Microsoft. There WAS a time when software was built correctly, memory was used efficiently and programmers worked to a schedule and a plan. Now we live with the hand waving of "Agile" where whatever gets built is the spec. Back when software engineering actually meant something and programs were error free, there was a perhaps a danger that software could be too powerful. But software development has devolved into prima-donnas playing with UNIX and Python. There are rare exceptions. SPACEX certainly has it's act together as do the Military developers who still use structured development. I think there is a role for AI to facilitate this form of development, but I do not epect to ever see it from Microsoft. I hope I am just a bitter old man who was around at the dawn of this computing age and who glimpsed what might have been. But honestly, its a long way out of this hole and I don't think AI is going to save us, at least not in it's current hands BTW, lest I come down too hard on Microsoft, Apple seems to have followed a similar path into autos. At least Apple had the common decency to cancel the product instead of forcing it on the world. Rest easy boys, you have nothing to fear but Clippy
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Post by nwjade on Mar 3, 2024 17:53:47 GMT -8
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Post by hledgard on Mar 3, 2024 18:56:55 GMT -8
I am with you on your post, bud777. I am old and have been with Apple since the late 80's. And as I have mentioned on this board before, I have really reservations about the AVP and the use of AI . And my area of work was Software Engineering.
I really like what you said ! Thoughtful.
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4aapl
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Post by 4aapl on Mar 3, 2024 20:35:27 GMT -8
While I like that he tries to take out all of the pauses, it annoys me that he speaks of rumors or speculation as fact, and I'm a bit surprised that he doesn't bother re-recording when he makes a big mistake compared to his supporting posts he highlights in the video. Maybe I'm too old school, but saying a company was losing $83k per vehicle while highlighting the post that says $43k per vehicle seems like a non-trivial difference. Personally, I think it's much more likely that Apple stepped away from the Apple Car because it would be a lack of focus and didn't follow the mindset of other "outside traditional areas" steps they made in the past. To me margins just aren't absolute, especially when talking about much different price points, while also considering the entire Apple ecosystem. Generally we don't have the complete picture of the profit margins for each device, but we speculate that the higher level products are an upsell that has a higher profit margin, which would also mean the lower end has lower profit margins in addition to lower overall profits. Basically, profit margins vary. I guess I just don't see laying out that Apple would have to sell a vehicle at $100k or even $150k to make lofty profit margins as something that should be considered a fact. And that's true of any item. It's great that Apple on average makes a nice profit margin, and we know it is higher in some areas (software) than others. But a big part of that is both working on things that have a large enough audience, and producing things (software/hardware/ecosystems/etc) that are valuable enough to the end user that Apple can sell them at a decent level, and more than make up the R&D they put into it. Because that is the thing, whether on software or a vehicle. There are a lot of costs related to it that need to be recouped, which is why he can say that some of these EV makers are losing such huge amounts per vehicle. It was fun to hear of all of the likely upcoming things, in his other video. Even if the info isn't unique, it's nice to hear it all together in a fast based video. Let's see the M3 in more things!!!
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Dave
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"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
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Post by Dave on Mar 4, 2024 2:28:27 GMT -8
Okay, I’ll just say it. Apple thinking that it could break into the automotive business by producing a car of its own was stupid! And the fact that it took them 10 years to realize it and stop hemorrhaging money and resources into this foolish project is frightening. Money and resources that could have been used more wisely. These are the types of mistakes that can bring a great company to its knees and can cause internal conflicts within the company which it may never recover from. A public apology to the shareholders would be nice, along with a promise that it will never happen again. I know, fat chance. Thanks Tim.
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Ted
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Post by Ted on Mar 4, 2024 7:47:36 GMT -8
Okay, I’ll just say it. Apple thinking that it could break into the automotive business by producing a car of its own was stupid! And the fact that it took them 10 years to realize it and stop hemorrhaging money and resources into this foolish project is frightening. Money and resources that could have been used more wisely. These are the types of mistakes that can bring a great company to its knees and can cause internal conflicts within the company which it may never recover from. A public apology to the shareholders would be nice, along with a promise that it will never happen again. I know, fat chance. Thanks Tim. Boy, hindsight sure is 20/20, Dave. Risk is a huge part of business. What if Apple had your outlook on phones? "We've never done that before, so we should just stick to our knitting..."
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Dave
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"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." Yogi Berra
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Post by Dave on Mar 4, 2024 8:32:39 GMT -8
Let’s just say that General Motors decides to design and build a cell phone. After all cell phones have become an integral part of automobiles today and it should be easy to transfer GM’s vast experience of automobile production into cell phone design and manufacturing, right? No, of course not. If Apple had ever succeeded in bringing an automobile to market think of the dealer / repair network infrastructure that would be needed. How many more billions of dollars would that have been? Building an Apple car was a bad idea from the very beginning and should have been recognizable as such from the very start, not 10 years later. A foolish waste of shareholders money.
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