Apple's Stock Hits New 52-Week High as Roller Coaster 2013 Nears Its End

Steve would've never allowed this to happen.
Apple is doomed.
Tim is destroying the company.

:rolleyes:

What on earth are they thinking? Everyone knows Apple is doomed! Except these deluded investors, apparently.

Well sorry if it hurts you Lilo and the other Apple haters, but Apple is not dying like you seriously hope they do.

I assume Tim Cook will get all the credit in the financial press for this stock recovery, just like he got all the blame when it dropped. Right?

What concerns me most about Apple's future is they are losing market influence. The 80% Android number does matter for this reason.

Say a brick and mortar store decides to adopt some kind of smartphone payment system. Are they going to choose Google Wallet or Apple Passbook?

Wallet works on Android and iOS, Passbook only works on iOS. Passbook's market penetration peaks at ~16%, whereas Wallet's penetration can reach ~95%. This type of influence allows Google to shape the mobile market, in the same way Microsoft shaped the PC market.

If I'm a shop owner, I can serve both Android and iOS users by adopting Wallet, so why bother with the expense of also supporting Passbook? This will _eventually_ cause developers to not bother with iOS, and then iOS will become MacOS of the mid 90's.

Apple will need to either start to tightly integrate Google services into iOS, or they will need to open their services so they can be ran on Android. And that later approach would be extraordinarily tough, because they'd be fighting Google on Google's own turf.

Except there are some big differences from the Windows/Mac fight. First, the Windows PC market was pretty much a commodity, there were somewhat cheaper and somewhat more expensive PCs, but they all ran the same OS and were pretty much equivalent. With Android, there's a wide range of power and quality, going from higher end phones (this is the segment Apple competes in) to really low end phones that technically are still smartphones but in reality being bought to be feature phones. They stay at whatever version of Android it came with,use almost nothing but the basic phone features. There's no money to be made in this low end market and Apple doesn't even compete there. If the market shares were broken out by segment, Apple would do much better - this low end segment is the part of the market that's exploding, which is why Apple's sales can keep increasing while they lose market share.

Second, in part due to the the vast amount of low-end sales that make up the bulk of Android's market share, Apple's customers are more "valuable" to the ecosystem than Android customers are (on average). They spend more on apps, they buy more accessories. and they USE the phone a lot more. That means that developers want to develop for iOS first/only, because that's where the money is. Retailers want to provide support for iOS users, because they spend money.

Specialized services like Passport will be sporadically supported, granted. But general use, like making apps, that stores do. And there's a reason Google makes apps for all their services - they want the ad revenue they get from iOS users because those users will spend money on their advertisers.

So for iOS to go to irrelevancy, either Apple sales have to be dropping significantly (actual sales, not market share) or Apple users somehow have to agree en masse not to really use their devices much or buy stuff on/for it.

If it hits $700 again I'm selling...maybe. :confused:

I would hold it until january. Then sell it and profit.
There were too many product releases this quarter and sales are up... But next quarter will be poor on product launches and the market will get bored, so...:)