reinharden

Apple Dropped the Ball on an NFL Deal

Yes, AAPL has billions in the bank. But giving away those billions isn't how one accumulates them.

Let's be generous and say that AAPL has sold 2.5 million Apple TVs and that each and every one of those users would run out and sign up for the new NFL plan. At a cool billion, that'd be a customer acquisition cost of $400 per year.

At a billion dollars a year expense, to get that cost down to $40 per year, AAPL would need to increase the Apple TV sales to 25 million units a year!

Admittedly, AAPL would recoup some of that outlay by selling the games or subscriptions to the seasons. But I think they need a much larger installed base to sell into before it'd truly make economic sense.


And first I'd argue that Apple needs to get full NFL games on iTunes. And get the NFL "Follow your team" game season ticket back. After that they can worry about things like streaming live games.

Google Is Overpriced: Why Acquire On2 in an All Stock Deal?

Alternatively, the tax treatment for the sellers is way better in an all stock transaction than it would have been in an all cash transaction.

reinharden

Internet Still Offers Abnormal Positive Returns

AOL isn't *really* an Internet company. It's original value was that it aggregated a bunch of dial-up customers into a proprietary walled garden. Eventually it opened the garden gates so that those customers could make it to the Internet.

AOL looked to partner with media companies because it knew it wasn't a media company and thought it needed to become one to grow/sustain the business.

Unfortunately, AOL and TW never really combined forces after the "merger". And AOL became increasingly less relevant as it was unable to hold on to its dial-up customer-base as cable and DSL and FioS all came along to take their customers away.

Now AOL is really just a bombed out shell of a company that doesn't know what it is...


What really is an Internet company?

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, et al, at the end of the day, are simply websites with some users. It's not clear that they've any particular intellectual property providing a moat around their businesses.

CSCO and GOOG are definitely Internet companies. Without the Internet, they don't exist.

Yahoo! isn't sure what it is (it was almost a media company). MSFT wants to be an Internet company, but they're not sure what that means. AAPL is maybe on the verge of becoming something as yet unnamed (but who knows how that'll turn out).

reinharden

Stocks on My Watchlist: Apple, Google, Cardinal Health

To be fair, you should probably back AAPL's $25 billion in cash out of their market cap. Which gives you a trailing PE of 19.4. Personally, for a company that's growing both top line and bottom line in the current economy while maintaining near record margins, I'd think that they'd deserve a higher PE ratio.

If I didn't already hold AAPL, I'd certainly be acquiring it on weakness.

reinharden

Why 'Bing'? Why Not 'Sift'?

Or at least that's what "googol" meant...

reinharden

On May 29 03:42 PM Larrysyr wrote:
> At least "google" meant the number represented by 1 followed by a
> hundred zeroes (inconceivably large before the recent bailouts).
> Naming the search engine "Google" implied you could find any piece
> of information you want in the huge chaos of the internet.

iTunes Breaks 6 Billion, DRM is Dead

I suspect that the "over the air" ability will help accelerate iTunes sales a little bit. Especially when combined with Shazam.

For what it's worth, iTunes says I've purchased 730 items including 584 audio files; however, I've been stupidly fanatic about getting the free songs each week. After 4 years, that's 400+ right there.


Seeing as how I came into iTunes with a few hundred CDs (and eBay and used stores have usually been cheaper than iTunes), I've personally been more interested in ripping music from my CDs than buying new music directly from iTunes.

And since, for the last nearly 2 years, we all knew that iTunes was going to go DRM-free any day now, I've avoided buying any music there.


So, the combination of $.69 back catalogue songs, finally DRM-free music, and over the air purchases for iPhones means that there *might* be some pent up demand...I guess we're find out this quarter.

reinharden

Steve Jobs Explains His Weight Loss as 'Hormone Imbalance'

On Jan 05 03:02 PM Aapprehensive wrote:
> As a physician, "hormonal imbalance" means nothing to me. This is
> incredibly vague. If it wasn't a serious problem, then he would have
> revealed the names of the diagnosis and the treatment. It sounds
> like he is being evasive.

Which part of "private" don't you understand?

The only two people who should know the name of the diagnosis are Steve Jobs and his physician.

reinharden

It's No Big Deal That Apple Is Pulling Out of Macworld

And let's not forget that it was increasingly stupid for Apple to hold their consumer product announcements until a week or three after Christmas, you know, the biggest consumer spending frenzy of the year. ;-)

Now AAPL can unleash updates to the iPod and their consumer Macintosh products in September/October and people will buy them confident that they're getting the latest and the greatest. Of course, that may well make calendar Q1 even weaker for Apple than it has been traditionally...put AAPL would probably rather have the money in their greedy little hands a quarter earlier. ;-)

reinharden

Infineon's Woeful Outlook Is a Result of Apple's Slowed iPhone Production

When reading between the lines with chip providers, it's also important to recognize that the chip sales typically take place anywhere from 6 weeks to 3 months ahead of the retail product sales.

So one would expect Apple to reduce orders of components in calendar Q4 because most of those components would be going into products to be sold in calendar Q1 -- traditionally Apple's weakest quarter.


I don't track IFX, so I can't speak as to its previous behavior. But it'd be worth comparing and contrasting the two company's previous quarterly reports so as to get a better feel for the correlation between IFX and AAPL as a predictive tool

reinharden

Web Browser Wars: Google Looking Beyond Market Share

You left a few important points out.

1) Chrome and Firefox are indeed open source; however, Chrome is built upon WebKit which is an open source tool strongly supported by Apple (it's the basis of Safari on the iPhone and under MacOS X). Assuming that all of Chrome is maintained in the open source arena, Apple will benefit relatively quickly. As Firefox doesn't use this software, their benefit will be less direct and immediate.

2) Chrome is designed to slide right into Android. So Chrome is Google's Mobile web browser (akin to Apple's Safari on the iPhone). Obviously Apple wasn't likely to do something so potentially competitive with the iPhone and Google would be nowhere with a PhoneOS without a web browser.

3) Google's line of web applications (Google Documents, gMail, Google Reader, etc) are currently hobbled by the absence of some key features in the web browsers. By providing an open source web browser that is optimized for enabling these web applications, Google is better able to compete with Microsoft's (and Apple's) more desktop centric application suite.

In the final analysis, short of buying Opera, Google really had little choice but to develop their own web browser.

reinharden

Invest Cautiously for the Rest of 2008

One suspects that DELL's current problems have a lot more to do with DELL in particular than any other company. AAPL and HPQ and INTC all seem to be doing okay. STX is nearly supply constrained. And MSFT doesn't seem to be disappointing more than one would anticipate just due to Vista.

While not growing as fast as we'd like, the computer side of the tech industry is still clearly growing.

reinharden

Why Is Google Entering the Browser Market?

It's true that Google has been supplying much of Mozilla's funding though Firefox; however, it makes little sense for Google to "acquire" Mozilla the company. What would they actually be buying? The Firefox "product" is open source (and Google has already paid for it a thousand times over).

And if Firefox / Mozilla / Netscape remnants were more useful, Google would have used that as the base of Chrome rather than the more Apple-based WebKit. And with Apple and now Google pouring resources into WebKit-based products for Windows, I suspect that Chrome and Safari will happily co-exist on Windows for at least a while longer.

reinharden

Steve Jobs: Honesty Is the Best Policy

AAPL has to treat Steve Jobs' health as a private issue. As a matter of law, it is. While the federal legal obligations on Apple Inc. aren't entirely clear when it comes to discussing the health of an employee, California has more clear-cut laws on the issue.

Steve Jobs can choose to discuss his health with people. Apple Inc., until such time as his health is a material fact, cannot initiate such disclosures.

Also, it'd be mind-boggling stupid to get stuck in the never-ending loop of "What is the current state of Steve Jobs' health?"

One, Steve Jobs can die at any time in any number of ways. If Apple Inc. claims he's healthy and he dies of an aneurysm or a heart attack or a stroke the next day, how many class action lawsuits will there be the day after that? Apple Inc. isn't a medical profession -- they can't affirm or deny his health.


Once Steve Jobs goes on the record, the only way to control this issue would be to providing constant medical data with increasing amounts of information. For example, the treatment can affect one's immune system. How long before people want to know his white blood cell counts? Survivors often develop diabetes. How long before people want to know his blood sugar levels? Diet is believed to play a role in avoiding recurrence of problems? Will Steve Jobs have to issue a weekly menu? Will Apple have to disclose that Steve jobs had a steak dinner?

The only reasonable and correct answer is "Steve Jobs' health is a private matter".

reinharden

Low Flash Memory Prices Pressure Chip Makers

One suspects that with flash prices at all time lows and with overall demand practically non-existent, it might behoove AAPL to continue to buy flash on the spot market at these self-same new-all-time-low-price... every week rather than lock-in longer term, possibly higher prices.

I'm just saying...


And, if AAPL is unsure of their own demand, definitely better to stay on the spot market unless supplies start to look tight.

Perversely, generally speaking, in the current market, the longer AAPL goes without entering into new contracts, the less their supplies will cost.

reinharden

SanDisk: Risk Down $3, Reward Up $30

> expand NAND demand by several orders of magnitude.

> Our back-of-the-envelope math gets us roughly 4.5B GB
> of incremental NAND demand in '09 versus 1 billion GB
> shipped in '06 and about 2 billion GB shipped in '07.

Um, going from 2 billion GB in 07 to even 6 billion GB in 09 would represent increasing demand by a factor of 3.

An order of magnitude requires increasing demand by a factor of 10. Two orders of magnitude would be at least a factor of 100. Several orders of magnitude requires at least a factor of 1000...

reinharden