In 10 years will Apple still be the force it is today?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Over the past several years, Apple just hasn’t seemed to really “wow” us like they used to. Don’t get me wrong, Apple has a great product, but the past year or two they just seem to be upgrading the products they made nearly a decade ago. Apple
Does Apple have anything “groundbreaking” coming down the pipe in the next 12 months?

Do you think Apple can keep this inertia going, (huge EPS, nearly a trillion dollar market cap)?

Will the old saying, “When a hog gets fat, they go to slaughter” ring true for them?

2

Who knows.
People thought Apple was dead 30 years ago, and every year after that.

3

That was during the time Steve Jobs wasn’t with the company. Then he came back and we got the iPod, iPhone, iPad. Since his death, there hasn’t really been any improvements, unless you count the elimination of the headphone jack. If they can’t come up with a new Jobs, I would say no.

And I hope I’m wrong.

4

They won’t still be the force they are today. They’ll be a different force. Even if they don’t have anything new and revolutionary for the entire next decade, they’ve built themselves up enough that they’ll stay big just out of inertia. I mean, really, when was the last time Microsoft came up with something big? And they’re still a major player.

5

This kind of innovation takes serious money: in 2016 Apple spent over $10 billion on research and development.

6

I don’t think Apple has quite the same 'wow" luster it used to. They are being challenged across the board by top end phone producers who delivering comparable or superior hardware product in some cases.

PC hardware wise they are very much at parity with the top end competition and are generally regarded as overly expensive for what you get. Jobs was a bastard but he did break new ground I don"t see the current Apple doing that in anything they have released lately.

7

Right now, the smart money’s predicting that AI is going to be the next yuuuge thing. This time, it’s not just a few professors in a lab somewhere, Silicon Valley is collectively pumping 10s of billions of dollars into AI R&D. Google seems to have the early lead, but Apple has stomped companies that had an early lead before, so who knows. And, by AI, I mean intelligent systems that can replace human workers for well defined tasks (like driving a car or working in a factory or mine or warehouse). These intelligent systems may gradually become more flexible and capable, but human level flexibility is expected to be many decades away.

Anyways, Apple has certain things going for it. It has near limitless money, more money than the GDP of many countries. It has a large fanbase. It has a certain design ethos that makes it very popular when it releases consumer products to yuppies. It has a strong brand reputation. So it’s too early to count them out of the game.

8

If they can be a player in the autonomous vehicle market, yes. That is going to be the next big tech revolution to fundamentally change society.

9

Over my life Apply has WOW’ed us 2 maybe 3-4 times. The iPhone obviously, the iPad and perhaps the iPod or the Mac book Air. Wow was not really a big part of Apple, but they did hit on that a few times.

What they do have, and what built them, is products that work well, simple, and a closed ecosystem that keep it so. However I have noticed a great increase of the other products that now work well as well. So I do question how long Apple can keep it’s reputation in that.

Without another WOW, I do suspect Apple might live on (actually off) it’s loyal consumer base for another 10 years or so.

10

Even before Jobs’ death they were backing away from some of their previous improvements. The current Mac Pro is a joke. Their server is a mere shell of what it used to be. When Configurator and Profile Manager came out I went to a training session where the presenter started off by saying something to the effect that “If you’ve been using Workgroup Manager to manage your computers, this is just going to make you mad”

11

Reported over at slashdot.org today.

Apple Has a Record $250 Billion In Cash, 90% of It Is Banked Overseas

12

This does seem to be where several of the big players (Google, Uber, several of the traditional car manufacturers and of course Tesla) are throwing resources. But how will Apple be involved? Are they going to build and sell their own car? I doubt it. Much more likely, in my mind, is that they sell or license their technology to traditional car manufacturers, like they do now with their CarPlay system.

Are they ever going to have another monster profit machine like the iPod/iPhone/iPad products and the iTunes store? It seems unlikely.

And yes, several of these big companies are throwing a ton of resources into developing AI technology.

13

A while back I read of something I’ll call the Fancy Headquarters Theory. The idea is, when a company has become large, rich, and stable enough, it will build itself a fancy new headquarters building from scratch. However, this tends to be the time that the company’s growth and innovation slow down, and the large existing body of employees, procedures, bureaucracy, etc, make it more difficult for it to innovate and change.

Apple has a huge new headquarters finishing this year. I think it is now a mature company, and we won’t see as much innovation as we saw during the IPhone years…

14

It’s a restatement of one of C. Northcote Parkinson’s Laws — the most famous being ‘Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion’.
…the law that concerns this essay was first published under the title of ‘Plans and Plants, or The Administration Block.’ For ease of reference, it shall be referred to here as Parkinson’s Law of Buildings. This he defines as follows; ‘a perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse… Perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is not time to plan the perfect headquarters. The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done.’

Parkinson calls in evidence a series of historical examples of architectural grandeur accompanying organizational/institutional decline. In the case of the Vatican, for example, ‘the great days of the papacy were over before the perfect setting was even planned. They were almost forgotten by the date of its completion.’ By 1933 the League of Nations was seen to have failed, and yet its ‘physical embodiment’, the Palace of Nations, was not opened until 1937. He argues that Louis XIV moved to Versailles in 1682, the year his career reached its apex, and thereafter, as the sumptuous Palace was gradually completed, so his power inexorably declined. Parkinson gives a number of British examples, including Blenheim Palace, Buckingham Palace, the Palace of Westminster and the Colonial Office, but identifies New Delhi, started in 1911, several years after the decline of British imperialism began (with the 1906 General Election), as a perfect example of his Law’s applicability.

Johannes De Berlaymont

15

It seems tome that the current OSs (Windows and Mac) are basically a huge dagwood sandwich of rebuilds piled on rebuilds piled on bones, supporting software that is rebuilds piled on rebuilds piled on bones. Someday, somebody is going to start from the ground up and enter the market with a whole new integrated product. Version 1.0.0. Apple and Google and Microsoft will go the way of Compuserve and MySpace and Netscape.

16

Hmm, I just checked Apple’s PE ratio and it’s 17.64. That’s not at all bad in general and really good for a company with it’s track record and cash on hand. I’m surprised it’s not higher.

So, financially it’s in good shape now, the investors like it but not too much, etc.

One big thing with tech companies it’s really hard to determine what’s going to break out and be a big thing. Little things happen frequently and are sort of predictable. Something gets faster, bigger, whatever. But they’ve reached that limit with phones in most categories. The only parts with a lot of room for improvement are batteries and bandwidth. I don’t see Apple making a giant leap in batteries and they aren’t in the comm business.

Their phones bring in a lot of money from their online store. But there are long term issues in the app market side. People are increasingly keeping older phones since they are good enough. These people slack off buying apps over time.

The media side is another matter. Even people with old phones watch/listen to stuff. But in terms of the overall market Android is easting them for lunch. It’s not enough to grow, you have to grow at least as fast as your competitor. (Yes, almost everyone who makes Android phones is losing money, but the goal is to survive, not make a ton of money now.)

As far as platforms like desktops, they are barely releasing significantly improved products and slowly at that. This is not a real growth area for them.

Then there’s the odds and ends like AppleTV. We can pretty much ignore that. Most people do. (17 months and counting since the last product release.) Amazon and Roku are getting their OSes built into TVs. People have talked about Apple releasing a TV for years. But even that talk is dying down. They are losing the couch war. And it’s a big freakin’ war.

So, not really a lot going on in the small improvement thing area.

So, it’s back to The NeXT Big Thing(s). No one can know for sure what they will be, when they will hit, what company will get there first. It’s mostly luck.

Maybe Apple, maybe not. Sure, they could throw a ton of money at a lot of things and see what sticks to the wall. But that’s a good way to lose a bunch of money. So they are selective. We won’t know if their choices are good until the smoke clears.

Remember, visionary geniuses tend to look a lot like people who lucked out and survived.

17

Really doubtful.
What would this new product do that the existing one’s don’t? The strength of OS X and Windows is the depth of software available. Linux has tried to gain a toehold in the desktop market, and has pretty much failed. Chrome is an alternative for people who don’t really use computers. The Be OS was a technical success and a market failure.

There’s a reason why Unix and Unix-like OSs run the majority of the world’s computers (including handhelds).

18

Do you see Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Samsung, LG, Amazon et al making giant leaps or is it only Apple that your arbitrary room for improvement areas don’t bode well for?

Is that why Services revenue continues to grow every quarter?

Seriously, if you want to talk about who’s eating whom’s lunch, according to App Annie, iOS consumer spend is up 45% year-over-year in Q1 2017, which is twice as much as Google Play in Q1 2017 and a gain of 10% over Google Play from Q1 2016.

lol the “we lose money, but we make up for it on volume” argument. Always a winner. Platform marketshare means precisely dick, unless you have a working hypothesis that quantifies it somehow. You say the goal is to survive, not make money now- so it would be your contention that no Android manufacture would want to trade their financials for Apple’s? Sure.

Yet Mac sales are up 4% and Mac revenue is up 14% this quarter. And that’s with a shitty lineup. PC sales are up 0.6% this quarter according to IDC, in case you want some context. Gartner says they’re down 2.4%.

19

zbuzz, there’s no question that Apple is doing really well now. The issue is the future. Gliding on current products and a large chunk of cash isn’t going to automatically lead to winning many years from now. Especially in the tech business.

I think my whole post just went whoosh by you, so just skip it and move on.

20

I think it’s interesting that Warren Buffett recently (within the past six months or so) bought Apple stock. I believe his stake is currently worth about $18 billion.) He’s said before that he shies away from technology stocks, saying that he doesn’t understand tech, and also only seems to buy a stock or a company when it’s relatively cheap.

And given their current cash hoard, some analysts are having fun suggesting various acquisitions Apple could make. Tesla and Netflix are two of them; Tesla obviously would get them into autos, while Netflix would get them into content and media.

I’ve even heard the suggestion that they might acquire Disney. One analyst suggested that they’d have to pay about $250 billion for Disney and the resulting company would be worth about a trillion dollars.