Your reactions to Apple lowering guidance for Q1 revenue?
I think we are in for a very interesting year, as we observe how / whether Apple changes its product strategy in the emerging markets especially with regard to pricing.
I was surprised. I will go on record as having been confident Apple would beat the negative rumors with strong Christmas sales.
Iām curious where theyāll end up vs the guidance. I think it is slightly low to guarantee they wonāt go under the updated guidance as well as the original. I think this is priced in so I donāt think the stock would jump if this happens.
Cook wrote that most of the decline resulted from far lower sales in China, and that their intelligence is that Chinaās smartphone market in general had a large contraction. So itās unlikely that Chinese consumers are singling out Apple because of trade war tensions, but itās very possible that Chinese consumer fears over trade war tensions have got them holding off their tech spending in general.
When the tide falls Apple gets hurt, but so does everyone else in the smartphone market. While other competitors have much cheaper phones that might appeal to Chinese consumers, the companies making those phones are making next to no profit on them anyway. And the stickiness of the Apple ecosystem, combined with the historical advantage in app/service sales means that smartphone competitors probably wonāt win much even as Apple loses, and Appleās losses are cushioned by revenues from services and app sales.
Not great news for Apple, but just because Apple isnāt getting the double-digit growth itād hoped for doesnāt mean someone else is taking that profit from them.
This does show however that Appleās fast move to diversify its revenue sources needs to continue, even if phones continue for now to represent large majority of its revenue.
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None. I am not a stockholder. I am also not worried at all about apple, if they loose 5-6 billions out of 89. I am also glad to see, however, that Cooks strategy of making already high-price devices even more overpriced fails. If he had an intention to compensate for failing sales numbers in saturated markets with astronomical prices, it is clearly not working. Which is a good thing for us.
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I am not surprised. And I honestly do not think that the unnecessary trade war or the economical slowdown in China are the only reasons to Appleās slowdown.
I do not think that Apple needs to compete with low-cost devices price-wise. But to be honest, Appleās product pricing strategy during the last 18 months could not go well in the long run, not only in emerging markets. The answer to slowing sales is not to increase prices and to increase them even more. Eventually, a product is just too expensive to justify buying it.
A few years ago, you could recommend buying Macs and iPhones even to non-Apple users coming from the Android or PC side without any hesitation. There was a Mac Mini costing about 500 Euro, there was a decent equipped Macbook Air costing 999 Euro, you could get an iPhone SE for 300 to 400 Euro. All of those devices came with a decent configuration and were priced competitively. They were entry points to higher priced products. Very good entry points indeed!
Today, a strange equipped Mac Mini will cost you about 800 Euro with a decent equipped model starting at more than 1,000 Euro, a current MacBook Air starts at 1,300 Euro. A new iPhone (a model of the current generation) will cost you 849 Euro. With those prices, you will have a tough time to attract new customers and replacing your āoldā devices gets more and more expensive.
If you do not want a base model, you can add at least several hundred Euro to any of Appleās products. If you want to have a Mac with a 2 TB SSD, you almost end up with a price of a small car (which is just ridiculous given the prices of SSD storage these days). Yes, I know that not everybody needs a 2 TB SSD. And I know that Appleās SSDs and products are great and what not. But some of Appleās pricing starts to feel more and more like extortion and there are decent and cheaper options on the market that could be used in Macs, too.
In the end, you have to deliver products that have a market and that are also available to ānormalā customers. You do not need to deliver ācheapā products, but they need to be affordable. And by affordable, I do not mean selling old products as new at a ādiscountedā price (iPhone 7, iPhone 8, the āoldā Macbook Air with the 5th generation Intel i5 processor and other outdated components). You have to sell ānewā products at a reasonable price. And you have to show that you care for your products with regular updates (hello Mac Pro, hello iMac 5K and so on). There is nothing wrong about having high priced options on the high end. But there need to be well-equipped decent priced products in every category. The only category, I see Apple having a decent priced and decent equipped entry product right now that is current, is the iPad.
And if I take a look at product categories like the Macbook, Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, I wonder if Apple actually knows where to go. Try to decide what laptop to buy in the 1,300 Euro price range! It does not take much to be seriously confused about that lineup.
2019 and 2020 will be interesting years for Apple and for Tim Cook. The behemoth, Apple has become these days, needs some steering and a perceptible vision to lead the tech industry againā¦
And yes, I still love Apple and I get that my post is more negative than it should and probably needs to beā¦ Sorry. 
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Yes, absolutely. Tech pundits will pound the tables for the next few days talking about this is the beginning of the end for Apple, but I think in the long run weāll see other companies taking bigger hits than Apple overall.
Meh. Appleās economic well being, shareholder games, etc., mean nothing to me. Most unlikely but worst case is they go out of business someday ā nothing any of us can prevent or change on our own.
My feelings exactly!
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Iāve been wondering about Appleās new pricing since the iPhone X launch last year. So add me to the list of people who arenāt surprised.
I still consider the iPhone the best phone on the market, I gave my brother an XR for Christmas. But their least expensive model is more expensive than any base model iPhone in history.
Apple no longer publishes the number of iPhones sold and instead touts their services revenue. Why? Could it be they are already be at the upper limit of what they can charge for their base phones?
This is my biggest fear - a week or two of everyone going full tabloid, acting as if a company that is āonlyā going to make 80 BILLION this year instead of 85 billion is going to the wall. Some of the podcasts I listen to and news sites I read are going to be unbearable 
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Low-price Chinese Android handset makers with razor-thin margins and smaller marketshare would actually lose a lot less and be less affected. And sales of cheap handsets might buoy some Chinese makers, but not by much since they donāt have related businesses in accessories, cloud and apps to increase revenue and margins. Win less, lose less.
Gruber blogged an especially insightful post about this last night, comparing Cookās too-long, oddly apologetic email to what Steve Jobs wrote the last time Apple had to restate earnings, sixteen years ago:
Gruber suggests, āthe takeaway should have been that China is crazy but the iPhone is still kicking the shit out of the entire rest of the handset industry and is only pulling further ahead.ā
Appleās earnings expectations for the quarter relied on China heavily for overall growth, which didnāt happen. Most of the markets that can afford iPhones are saturated, and Apple is doing well in much of the world, and Apple itself notes that āWe also expect to set all-time revenue records in several developed countries, including the United States, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Korea. And, while we saw challenges in some emerging markets, others set records, including Mexico, Poland, Malaysia and Vietnam.ā And itās a powerhouse in upgrading andits percentage of switchers from Android keeps increasing. Moreover, non-iPhone business grew by 18%.
But the possibility of the Chinese economy stumbling, or Chinese sales cratering in a worldwide recession, or consumer uncertainty due to trade tensions, or even Chinese consumer sentiment turning against Apple as a proxy for the US government ā all caveats of which Apple was well aware, and there was only so much they could do in the face of the environment that hit them here.
If there werenāt trade war concerns inside China that market probably would not have contracted overall, as Cook says has happened (affecting all phonemakers to one extent or another). Remember, despite the revision, it will still be Appleās second biggest quarter in the history of the company. Whether this was the high-water mark for the time being (a la skyrocketing iPad sales followed by a dive then slow gains over time), or not will have to be seen.
Luckily for Apple they revived and refreshed their Macs last year, and the sales spike in macOS hardware helped to soften the effect of the Chinese iPhone sales tumultuousness.
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Except that particular complaint is not whatās at issue. Sales are through the roof in US and Europe and elsewhere, and Apple made clear that this issues is very very specifically related to missed sales/growth that was expected in China.
Localytics said iPhone XR activations increased 88 percent, Appleās greatest surge in Christmas iPhone adoptions during the past three years. āWe discovered that Christmas shoppers were heavily focused on obtaining Apple products this year: iPads have become a mainstay of the holiday season and the iPhone XRās momentum shows no sign of decreasing. In 2016 we found that iPads dominated the leaderboards for new device activations over the Christmas holiday, while in 2017 the Google Pixel 2, Pixel 2 XL, and the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X took the top five."
A U.S. study from Consumer Intelligence and Research Partners (CIRP) found that significantly more consumers switched from an Android device to an iPhone within 30 days of the XRās launch than those who switched to the iPhone X from an Android device in its first month.
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Very good reply. All the points you made were well versed. At this point in time Apple appears to be caught in that āBlack Holeā known as Wall Street.
My reaction is that this will probably end up having very little to do with Apple (or iPhone pricing, etc) and everything to do with a (temporary) global economic slowdown in 2019.
Q1 is the holiday quarter, this is their biggest quarter by far. The stock price has been going down for months now, so we shouldnāt be surprised.
Value for money = satisfaction minus price.
Apple have pushed up prices so far that the increase in satisfaction from upgrading a phone or a laptop doesnāt match the cost.
Iām hoping the earnings warning is a wake up call.
Apple has lost the plot a bit and needs to deliver products that people value rather than forcing too many (high cost) changes too fast.
I like the ecosystem but I have held back on replacements/upgrades. I am sure I am not the only one. A couple of examplesā¦
I picked up a new 6s for my daughter, it has Touch ID (so my finger will work as well as hers) a headphone jack (so no dongle for her to lose) and I can buy 2 for the cost of a current iPhone (if she breaks it).
On the Mac side of thingsā¦ unpleasant keyboards with perceived high failure rates, expensive touchbars that no-one wants, dongle hell and killing the MagSafeā¦ Result: a lot of people (including me) are āmaking doā with the old machine.
Iām hoping the 2019 machines lose some of the cost that Apple has built in (without adding value) and consequently allow Apple to maintain margins while providing sufficient value for money for me to part with my cash.
Sadly, I suspect that I will be disappointed
This is mostly correct. The other factor is the availability of lower cost alternatives in China, mainly from their domestic manufacturer Huawei. Combine (1) a contracting economy over 2-3 quarters in China, (2) a soft ātrade warā with the US, and (3) lower cost alternatives from a domestic manufacturer, and one should not be surprised by the hit Apple took.
Pro Tip: Read ALL articles on Appleās business and economics written by tech bloggers with great skepticism. They usually know their stuff when it comes to devices and apps, but when they delve into business, legal, and economic matters, vast majority of the time they have absolutely no clue what they are talking about or spout stuff that is flat-out wrong.
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That horse is already dead. The Chinese economy is the main issue (with consumers turning against Trump proxies as a potential problem as well - we recently saw Chinese consumers boycott Canadian Goose in a similar fashion). According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China retail sales in China grew 8.1 percent in November, the slowest rate of growth in 15 years, and growth in exports plummeted to 5.4 percent in November, from 15.5 percent in October. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government-led think tank, recently cut its growth estimate for Chinaās economy from 6.5 percent this year to 6.3 percent. While that seems like a small difference, it signifies a big drop in consumer spending when spread out over the countryās 1.4 billion people.
Ford CEO Jim Hackett complained earlier this year that the Trump tax penalties on steel and aluminum were costing it $1 billion last year alone. That pain has been exacerbated by a slowdown in car sales in China: auto sales there fell 14 percent in November over the same month in 2017. And Tiffanyās shares fell 9.6 percent on Nov. 28 after the it released disappointing third-quarter sales that were hurt by weaker spending from Chinese tourists in the United States and Hong Kong. Soā¦ thereās a Chinese Economy problem primarily going on here; letās not read into this particular Apple failure specifically in China as somehow relating to its worldwide pricing.
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Appleās prices are too high, even for Apple. A few years ago you bought Apple because it was the best, and you were paying a premium for quality and futureproofing. Now itās hard to justify the expense, particularly with competing products catching up in quality.
OTOH, like @bowline, I love Gruberās take: āJobsās arrogance got him into trouble at times, but at other times it was his saving graceā ā namely, when he had to deliver bad news to the market. Cookās āgenuine and inherent humility holds Apple back on days like today. Apple needed less āIām sorry, let me explainā and more āFuck you, this is bullshit, let me explainā.ā
But they do. Until now, investors were happy to give Cook a free hand, as they were with Jobs before him, because Apple was delivering returns for investors. If Apple fails to meet investor expectations, the investors are going to start requiring closer oversight. And when the money-guys start taking control of a company, that never ends well for the customer. Or for the company, in a few short years.
If Cook canāt right the ship financially and keep investors happy, Apple in the 2020s could start looking a lot like Apple in the 1990s pre-Jobs return.
Nope, you are not. I canāt get myself to pull the trigger on any of the new iPhones this year because of 1) cost, 2) my iPhone 8 works just fine, very fast and responsive, 3) no new features that made it a āmust haveā. Iāve had larger screens in the past with the plus models, and Iām colorblind so the photography stuff doesnāt appeal to me, lol