Market Currents
More on the iPad Mini: The cheapest model (16GB Wi-Fi) goes for $329. Amazon and Google, sellers...
-
Tuesday, October 23, 2012, 2:13 PM ETMore on the iPad Mini: The cheapest model (16GB Wi-Fi) goes for $329. Amazon and Google, sellers of the $199 Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7, are probably breathing sighs of relief. As expected, there's no retina display inside the Mini, but there is an HD front camera and 5MP back camera, and 3G/4G models are offered (they start at $459). Like the iPad 2, the Mini is powered by an A5 processor. Apple (AAPL -2.2%) is selling off. (live blog).
Other date
TECH ETFs IN FOCUS
Latest Tech Articles
This news story has 109 comments:
The take home lesson from Tim Cook's announcement is that Apple tablet products account for 90% of the web traffic on tablets. That is worth billions to advertisers who are seeing weakness in Google's PC based search ads. Apple is the king of mobile devices and will capitalize on this strong trend. Just look at Facebook's stock price increase after earnings to see what a solid mobile strategy will do to the stock price of a company. Wake up people Apple is cheap at these prices for long term investors.
Wait what? The internet is PC based?
Also, the 90% of web traffic on tablets comment doesn't mean a whole lot. 90% of what traffic? How did they gather this info? Is that 90% of traffic going to Apple.com? Comparing apple owning the tablet market to FB is not a good comparison. FB is an ad delivery service. The fact that X% of FB traffic is on an iDevice means nothing to Apple other than the fact that they are selling a ton of units.
That being said, I agree that Apple is a cash machine right now (and is undervalued), but unless they continue to make groundbreaking innovations (and making higher res 10" screens isn't exactly groundbreaking) they will start to give it back. The iPod was a revolutionary change to how we consume music, the iPhone was the first smart phone that was stylish, functional, and a huge improvement over the current standard (at that time RIMM), and the iPad was a revolution for the tablet market and pretty much made netbooks obsolete overnight. They need to continue being able to make truly meaningful innovations to continue this rapid growth.
"The mini will not come with retina. It has the same specs as the IPad 2"
If they sold it at $279 you would be whining about Apple cutting margins. It didn't matter what Apple offered you and pirota would be whining.
In fact, thought the whole presentation and product refresh about as good and strong as one could hope for.
Although it seems there is 'nothing new' anywhere -- the difficult tech problems solved here in terms of lightness and thinness are impressive. As have said before, no one should expect anything new and radical from any tablet of smartphone maker -- the new and radical has been done -- it is now a matter of execution and details.
Apple will rule this roost until someone comes along with a real game changer (google glasses anyone?). No one is going to beat apple at its own game -- it's supply chain economics, design prowess and overall ecology are simply too strong to beat -- without something radically new.
Or, to put it another way -- apple has won the smartphone and tablet war -- it is not in their interest to promote something radical in those spaces -- it is up to the competition -- probably some new, as yet to be heard from company -- to come up with the radical new device that changes the game.
:D
Nevertheless, the stock is tanking? sell on the news today?
Guess that makes you very clever for buying Amazon and selling Apple?
You can lower your margins anytime to increase volume, its easy.
Increasing your margins to increase profit is hard as it reduces volume.
Apple is an amazing safe and well run company with high margins that can be reduced in the distant future to drive sales, lots of cash on hand and products so in demand they cant make them fast enough...
The share price is crazy cheap.
They can make them fast enough. Heck - Samsung's smartphones have been outselling iPhones and they can make them fast enough. The issue is that Apple chooses not to make them fast enough because it wants to squeeze out the last few pennies from production efficiencies, and it wants to project an image of a product so good that they can't make them fast enough. You can't predict the end point of a nuclear bomb project or a ballistic missile program. Mass production of another me-too smartphone that's been outsourced to Foxconn is several orders of magnitude more predictable and easier. And if I hear one more thing about how Apple's this great manager of its supply chain, when it's outsourced supply chain management to Foxconn, I'm gonna barf.
Speculators who were in in case of an upside surprise took their bets out and moved on.
Didn't fully retreat to prior low. Yet another retest. The retests go on and on until an investor begin to question his/her reason and wonder if the bashers actually trade, then it returns to sanity.
making garbage is easier than making something with very strict quality standards.
thanks. i needed a good laugh today.
http://nbcnews.to/Qczf5k
http://nbcnews.to/Qczf5k
http://bit.ly/PZfYmW
http://cnet.co/TG9CcC
Pretty much everything they make does.
The mini seems made not to compete with less than $250 7" Android tablets but more to give Apple tablet customers more of a choice of the size of tablet they prefer. I don't think Apple has to worry about the mini cannibalizing sales of the the larger iPads
Nope. AAPL knew they were losing sales to AMZN and GOOG and this is the response. Time will tell how it turns out.
Apple is already and will remain the most profitable company in the world.
That is the main goal for a company is it not?
Seems most people have forgotten or Facebook and Amazon would be worth 20% of current valuations.
Which device to buy, which stock to buy are two different questions.
Not Apple customers. Why leave a pile of money on the table trying to pretend everyone is your customer?
Apple could have owned the PC market. It chose to price its products at a massive premium right from the start. The rest is history. The same will happen with the i-products. Sony had a great run with the Walkman when it was new. Then it became just another me-too product vendor.
When my current MacBook Pro goes out of warrantee, I might have to go out again, just as it took me practically 30 years to get into its ecosystem.
Oh well that's life.
If you're invested in software – which people forget sometimes costs a lot more than the hardware if you're a professional user – then switching wouldn't be very economical in dollars or in time spent retraining yourself.
Price is the last refuge of the marketer, and Apple products have always been premium products, so there's no need to discount the brand by being the low price leader. $329 is a good entry point, and is close enough to those low price Android tablets to make you consider moving up. This up-sell is consistent with Apple's marketing and business philosophy.
Value = ProductService Offer / Price
Apple simply has the greatest latitude on both the denominator and numerator to out-match all the competition.
Not to mention 1 year later you can still sell it for $200. The me-too pads, will be in trash.
that seems silly. Galaxy Tab is garbage, however I'd still accept it as a gift, just because i wouldn't want to offend the thoughtful person giving me a present.
Perhaps shares go down this week, but absolutely no way am I selling 1 share after I realized what these guys are doing today. Long live Mr Cook.
why worry about _MARKET_ share when you have all the _PROFIT_ share...
I own a PC and an IPad2 which travels everywhere with me and is totally reliable each and every trip. The battery lasts and lasts over 8 hrs without any issues.....You get what you pay for!!!
Did you know, the super high res screen in ipad 3 is not in the ipad mini? Stupid mistake by Apple for sure. If you want to dominate the small tablets, why not make a screen with super high resolution to offset the screen size?
The short of it. Apple fans are like groupies at a boy band concert and will shell out an extra $130 and wait in lines for 5 days because they are supported by their parents.
The competition is catching up so Apple has to sell things at competitive prices now.
But more importantly, its painfully clear they can't dominiate in terms of market share, not globally.
Apple should shrink and focus on niche products. They should care more about their customers like Apple used to. They've abandoned their principles and enjoyed a short term rise, driven by targeting product specs to demographics, pushing features for the sake of features, making new accessories and focusing on upgrade paths. In a nutshell, everyone loses.
It's obvious the design advantage they held over Microsoft in the old days is not converting to current times. They aren't pushing it like that anymore - they are fighting for market share and profitability and dropping the standards. That's why the competition is now so attractive, at least by comparison.
Apple won't be able to meet the demand for the new Mini for 6-8 months, so why not make their normal generous profit on what they can deliver.
Part of the reason for the constraints on production is that Apple has resourced most components, taking at least $13 Billion away from Samsung, fulfilling Steve Jobs' strong desire to punish Samsung for theft of intellectual property.
When the next release of the Mini comes out -- probably in less than a year, the lowest price will probably drop to $249.99. It makes sense to leave some room for competitive price-cutting in the future. Keep in mind that--at $200--Samsung, Google, B&N and Amazon aren't making any money.
In the meanwhile, my son found a very nice and no-cost hack for me, which transformed my WebOS (boat anchor)16K HP TouchPad into a very nice fast 10-inch Android tablet -- which cost me only $100.
Who cares about today's price action or yesterday's or last weeks? It's been the best company and the best stock in the world for about a decade. Sell your shares and stop whining. I'd love to load up further at lower prices.
Competition has a way of doing that.
And no, it's not different this time.
Owning a stock when one is emotionally obsessed with a company's products, is a very risky combination.
People lose their objectivity.
And no it does not matter how much they sell nor how much you (underlined) like it.
Only how much money they make in doing so.
Also - didn't that ipad mini resemble something already in the living room that men and women fight over after the nightly news???
In a year or so I see an ipad mini for every TV... like to see them put the technology together to be the new universal...
I paid 3500+ for the 8.4" Touch Screen UConnect in my car, so it's relative to one's needs, of course, that's built in - with Navigation, Climate Controls and all that jazz.
I'm willing to pay for a tablet, but I cannot have it locked to a specific OS. I want to load Ubuntu Linux; since one of my hobbies is.. coding, lol. I *need* flexibility on the machine more than portability. Portability is something I can live without, flexibility on the device is not.
And no - the iPad, the MS Surface are anything but flexible in terms of what I personally need.
So it's not for me, but I'm glad to see them doing well. Competition in Technology benefits the consumers - if only Apple or MSFT existed - it would suck for the consumer. They both need to stay viable, or at the least, be replaced by something just as viable.
So you can't really say "Apple is better" or "Apple is worse" - that is totally subjective.