jbelkin

AT&T: The (Apple) Brand Destroyer

There's a lot of random bits in here. First, the PE ratio is a 1890's measurement that does not take into account the deferred revenue that Apple has banked but not reported for the iPhone nor the $30+ BILLION in the bank so if that's all your using to take the measure of a company, you might want to upgrade from index cards.

As for the fire, you have ONE or even a few fires out of 200 MILLION ipods sold - do we know for a fact if the person was using an apple charger and not one they picked up for $4.99? Or is the car battery & voltage converter to blame? Was the car parked in the Sun - sometimes close to 150 degrees plus already and then the car battery goes nuts? But of course, blame Apple for 1 fire out of 200 million sold? There are more people who drown in their own bathtubs EVERY YEAR ... who do we blame or try to sue there?

As for the Google Voice thing - there is no law that says they have to approve every app for their products - when it's a competiting product - that's just a fact of life. Just as a bookstore can choose not to sell a book called THIS BOOK CHAIN IS A**, STEAL THIS BOOK (it's only censorship by gov't actions not private enterprise).

Unlike Dell's lackof quality & R&D ... Apple is disliked by open sourcers and hackers and programmers who think they know best on how to w5rite a UI ... they will TRADE useability, UI & ease of use just so they can write their own OS. For that, they have the Google phone (which it shoudl be noted, Google makes ZERO money off of providing the tools) while 98% of consumers do NOT want to program a phone - they want to use it so while 10% of the tech webloggers are loud haters (100,000?), 98% of 6 BILLION people want an iphone. That is the difference.

Apple's AT&T Deal Is Costly

For a guy who claims to be a numbers guy, you don't do much calculating yourself.

Apple is selling an EXTRA 400,000 or 1+ million phones where other cell phone manufacturers might sell a few thousand more ... that's right - not on the network but still buying ...

This would be a problem if Apple was subsidizing each phone sale but it's NOT- every one at FULL PRICE 100% of the time.

As for people who can't/won't switch to AT&T ... how much does AT&T make for this customer? That's right - ZERO.

How much does Apple make? That's right $400 to $500 DOLLARS!

Versus ZERO.

It's ALL found money. Even better, Apple has to provider ZERO tech support - how much savings is that?

And with everyone that goes overseas that's not "legal," that just adds to the cachet of the product. How many products are considered FREE ADVERTISING & MARKETING for a company yet they made $450 TODAY?! Not to mention every Iphone sale is potential iTunes sales (even overseas ones either have stores or if they have a US credit card can buy tracks & movies) ...

By your math, since everyone on this planet doesn't have an iPhone, that's a trillion loss?

So you prefer possible future monthly revenue versus a $450 sale today? The future monthly stream is never guaranteed even if you sign up a carrier - people drop out, people don't pay ... but you don;'t factor that in because it's too hard?

The real world is more complex than just A+B-C ... or perhaps you should stick to analysing industries that aren't so complex.

Was Verizon Really Wrong To Pass On The iPhone?

Verizon's bigger problem is CDMA.