Neil Cybart analyzes Apple's business, products, finances, and strategy, covering topics like AirPods, Apple Watch, R&D, and its cash.
Commenters list it among good Apple analysts alongside Asymco and Stratechery, and cite it for Apple's offshore cash, store growth, and iPhone user counts.
I suspect this is the case here as well. Mark has never been quite accurate when it comes to hardware leaks, compared to Ming. My guess is all these are intentional from Apple, for a few reasons.
OLED is expensive. I think Apple has learned its lesson with NAND, ( Where its projected NAND and SSD market cost does not align with reality ), Sharp does not yet have an OLED that is competitive, they are focusing on a different type of OLED technology that is much cheaper to manufacture, Ink Jet Print style OLED, one of the original promise of OLED was being even cheaper then LCD. But its quality is not on par with Samsung. Credit where Credit's due Samsung make amazing progress with AMOLED technology, if you think in the few years time what they have manage to achieve is uncanny. S9 now has the best possible display compared to even professional monitors. The only possible improvement left are brightness, power, price and longevity. Apart from Price, the other three will likely see improvement in Note 9, and more so in next iPhone. Samsung has been able to improve its OLED technology with every iteration twice or somecase three times every year.
Apple is paying up to $100 a pc to Samsung for every OLED display. And if you include NAND & DRAM, which is extremely profitable in the last 2 years that is why people joke Samsung make more money selling components to Apple then selling its phone. While not entirely correct it is certainly not baseless. One reason why Apple will never…
If you think I’m wrong, feel free to present an argument that Apple has saved $200 billion in cash to fight court cases, and that they have in some way neglected to spend on priorities to fund this. Your response was ad hominem.
I used a strong tone because you presented a very strong conclusion that I don’t believe to be supported by evidence. You linked a fact you don’t understand (Apple’s cash pile) to the topic de jour (Apple’s new court case). I really do think this is a starting point to conspiratorial thinking: grand conclusions on the basis of a couple ideas. Maybe the way I warned you wasn’t likely to succeed, but I meant it completely sincerely.
Have a look at Apple’s stock buyback history: they spend $385 billion from 2012-2019: https://www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2020/4/23/apples-460-billion-stock-buyback
Dividends are harder to quickly find, but they seem to pay out about $12-$15 billion by year.
The money paid out to investors dwarfs their cash pile.
Two other facts:
* A lot of Apple’s cash is overseas. They can’t easily repatriate without tax consequences
* Apple has about $100 billion in debt. The cash offsets this
> Now I totally understand why Apple have piled up a huge mountain of cash and never spent a dime.
Given the fact above, your conclusion doesn’t seem very logical.
From a business perspective, I would expect Apple to continue introducing satellite/companion products in their ecosystem that customers see as valuable. I think they've long seen the "peak iPhone" moment coming (it would seem we have at least arrived at "plateau iPhone" now [0]), and have been executing a broad, multiyear strategy to leverage the fact that there are over a billion of their devices in active use. That strategy includes: offering compelling services, new products to enhance their ecosystem (AirPods, Apple Watch, etc), and eventually products to cannibalize the iPhone.
I expect there to be a lot of noise from Wall Street now that the iPhone growth rocket ship has stagnated. But as others have pointed out, in a world of smartphone saturation Apple is well-poised to continue being quite successful[1], and viewing the world purely through a "number of units sold" lens is foolish.
[0] - https://www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2018/2/21/the-goldilocks-era-for-iphone-has-begun
[1] - https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/02/24/the-smartphone-endgame-who-wins-once-shipment-volumes-peak
From http://www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2015/6/13/apples-cash-dilemma it seems like Apple may not actually have the cash to do this, not in the USA at least and it would need to pay taxes on the cash it is holding outside the US to pay the majority US labels/producers/artists.
Not that this excuses what they're trying to pull here or anything. By trying to weasel out of paying any US taxes, they can't spend their own money. So in this case they really might be too poor to make this deal work otherwise.
Good for Taylor Swift to stand up to this kind of crap.
I don't know. R&D has seen big increases[1] (from around $3B under Jobs to now around $12B) in spend under Cook. I don't know that doing that lines up with a "focus on immediate short-term bottom line improvements rather than long-term investments".
[1]: http://www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2016/5/11/apple-rd-reveals-a-pivot-is-coming (linked for the graphs, not the article's hypothesis)
The iPad marked for >= 9.7" actually grew last quarter. This article has a graph where the ipad mini is split out as a separate component of the graph. Big phones have eat up a lot og the ipad mini market, but there is still a big market for bigger ipads.
https://www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2017/3/29/apple-is-pushing-ipad-like-never-before
Diagram is about 2/3 down the page.