“We knew a gold Apple iPhone would be announced yesterday. And we suspected the company might be releasing a low-cost, color option. We even guessed the names of the models correctly: iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C,” Dan Costa reports for PC Magazine. “Indeed it is fair to say the new phones, with the exception of the 5C’s super-plasticky case, look exactly like what we were expecting.”
“So what is the big deal? I see four big wins for Apple, none of which have anything to do with what the phones look like,” Costa reports. “Before we get to that I must at least address the colors. Apple has a long history of launching products in black and white and then adding colors as the lien matures. Just look at its nano line, or even the original iMacs. Throwing in the gold, silver, and space grey (wha?) also gives consumers some options that had been sorely lacking in the iPhone line. The gold model, in particular, is poised to do very well in the fast-growing Chinese market as well as, you know, New Jersey. Adding color is a smart thing to do, but it would be a mistake to think the five announcements below aren’t equally as important.”
The iPhone 5S and 5 big wins for Apple:
1. The Safety and Convenience of Touch ID
2. Free iWork, iPhoto, and iMovie
3. The New A7 CPU With Fitness Features
4. “The Phone That Takes Better Pictures”
5. iOS 7 Launches — The Instant Upgrade
Much more in the full article here.
Would that be why the stock is way down?
@darwin
Try evolving a bit Darwin – thats right crawl out from under the rocks and start walking it really is pretty cool!
Buy of the year before the holiday runup.
If you’re a trader, “Buy the rumor, sell the fact”, rebuy…
Are you STILL not getting it?!? Apple’s stock price has NOTHING to do with the products announced. It has to do with the positions big brokers bought before the announcement so they could use the announcement to drive their own profits, which have nothing to do with Apple’s stock increasing in price.
I’m sure they set themselves up to make tons of money the lower Apple stock goes. It’s not like the announcements were much of a surprise. I’m sure the big guys have ears inside of Apple, its suppliers, etc.
The 5 “WINS” in this list are pretty thin, and I never felt the public EVER clamoring for these “WINS”… They were however asking for a less expensive version, and a bigger version. Both Screen and Battery life and storage. People were BEGGING for a VERSION with these obvious improvements and Apple ignored them. The new phones did not WOW Wall Street OR the general public. Sorry, they just didn’t. Wall Street see’s Apple losing market share and Wall Street does not think these phones will help gain market share or profit. That is the bottom line. Easy as that.
I’m just curious John. Were people begging Apple for a bigger screen, battery, and more storage? From the emphasis in your statement, I must conclude that they were indeed, and that you were privy to those communications, else how could you make such a statement? So, who do you report to at Apple? Or do you work at the NSA as a consultant?
Apple has NEVER designed products to meet what the public was demanding. SJ specifically avoided it. The only thing worse than design by committee is design by crowd. And when has Wall Street EVER been wowed by new Apple products? The usual reaction is derision and condemnation. Market share is a fallacy. How’s Dell doing with its amazing market share in PCs? It’s PROFIT share that counts and Apple leads in profit share.
It’s safe to say we all want a significantly longer battery life. I would happily leave bigger and storage I’m not too bothered about as I’m on a 16Gb phone at the moment. Having just resurrected my 2003 iPod however it is funny my new phone has less storage than a decade old iPod.
Like all my posts. Anyone at apple listening? This from the china event. In fact, a fair number of [the cafe’s] customers are still using older iPhones, but they expressed mixed feelings about whether they’ll stick with Apple in the future—or opt instead for the larger Android-powered Samsung Galaxy smartphone, which is fast gaining popularity here. The iPhone 5C is routinely mocked as “not attractive.”
Darwin Evolved: Equating Apple with the daily price of AAPL is WAYYYY over. We know this is specifically a factor of Apple being #1 on the Wall Street wolf radar. AAPL has been manipulated to hell for nearly a full year now. Never judge a stock by the behavior of day traders. “Live in the now” means “live in the short-sighted”.
Gotta love all the meme phrases that pass through the culture. I still laugh every time I recall the silly phrase ‘Change is good!’. I’m so pleased that one is out of vogue. (For the uninformed: Good change is good. Bad change is not good).
The iPhone joins the Goldmember club where to qualify you need to slather your member in gold paint.
hey left nut – WTF are you talking about – follow Darwin please and evolve…
He is evolved. He’s learned to relax to adapt to a perilous world. We should all try it.
Gold and red are magic colors in Asia.
Just make sure the paint’s not made in China.
I love it, I bought more stock. At least on one occasion Carl Icahn and I think alike.
The only thing more consistently asinine than the stock going down is us asking yet again why this is the reaction to Apple product announcements. It always is.
Those of us who follow extremely closely, i.e. live within the Apple ecosystem, understand the value of the products. Those who are looking for generic traditional growth indicators do not. I.e. Apple didn’t create a $75 no contract phone. Apple is doooooomed again!
Those of us who do understand the way Apple works, how she delivers the best products possible, with the most appropriate technology decisions at any particular point are too busy with our imaginations buzzing around exactly what the changes mean.
We know that barring any unforeseen circumstances like touch ID just doesn’t work, that it will attract security conscious buyers from government and enterprise like crazy. We know that the solid, steadily evolving iOS system is only getting better and continues to make the fragmented, “why can’t I upgrade” bizarro world of Android look like the disappointing pain in the ass it is.
We see the value in the strength of Apple’s iWork and iLife suite being free. That’s a powerful motivator. I could argue the benefits of iWork / iCloud to most people easily, and when you add the aspect of it being free, it’s a juggernaut of an incentive.
Many of us have learned that Apple truly is not interested in being a Korean knock off type company like KIA. They’re building the classic, the models that the others knock off, like BMW. When the new BMW models come out each year, they too are not filled to the brim with every possible kooky attachment, knob, button, and blinker you find in the knockoffs. BMW build’s cars for people who enjoy driving and adds features as they see fit. When it makes sense to add a feature, they do.
BMW doesn’t want to be known for building inexpensive cars. They want to be known for building well made cars and often when you ask their designers who they find inspiration in, you’ll hear Apple’s name.
This whole world that we dwell in is invisible to so called analysts and much of the inane computer industry punditry. So yeah, pretty much, that would be why the stock is down.
A very thoughtful post, Thelonious. We regularly disagree, but I think this assessment is spot-on.
So, what can Apple do to prevent such volatility with its shares? Why is Apple so prone to this rollercoastering while other stocks remain completely immune to it. Is it something that Apple management will ever get a handle on? All this Wednesday Apple has been attacked far worse than when it was learned Microsoft had a $900 million charge on the Surface RT. Apple hasn’t even released those iPhones to the consumer and Apple is besieged with downgrades and verbal attacks. Tim Cook can’t do anything about all this and it really make Apple look stupid.
I suppose I could just ignore what’s going on, but it really is rather annoying that Apple seems so vulnerable to media attacks. Those analyst downgrades coming in an instant are really going too far. How can analysts make changes on target prices and ratings based on nothing but projections of a product that hasn’t even been sold? It’s pretty rare for a company to be re-rated on merely a product announcement.
Well surmised. Cheers!
Love the BMW analogy. As an Apple and BMW owner/user of many years there is a lot these companies have in common. Neither Apple or BMW want the bottom feeder market where price is everything and profits are hard to come by. Rather than cram in the features, these two companies are more interested in purity of product and the pleasurable ways in which users interact with the machine.
Shakespeare, Monk, Shakespeare
Touch ID will be huge if properly implemented. Picture an app that unlocks your front door or your car with just a touch of your thumb on your iPhone. Picture a retail store where you scan an item’s bar code with your iPhone and authorize its purchase with a touch of your thumb. The item’s security strip is then automatically deactivated, allowing you to exit the store with it without setting off any alarms. Clerks no longer scan items and take payments. They simply monitor the exits. Picture touching your thumb to the home button on your iPhone and being automatically logged into all your apps and web pages; your bank, your broker, etc.
This is huge. It is another paradigm shift, but most “experts” can’t see it yet.
Hey MDN, your poll has iPhone 5s Gold twice, but you probably already know that.
I wonder if developers will be able to access the FingerPrint scanner (not the touch id data) to capture their own data for their own applications?
I also wonder if you use touch id, can you turn it off temporarily for those poor souls who are stuck configuring your iPhone for you because you’re too busy to do such mundane things yourself? If not, save the IT guy A FINGER! AH ha ha ha. Not that one.
Thought you meant “give the IT guy the finger”. That’s not very nice. The poor guy is just trying to do his job! 😉
I’m sure developers will be able to have Touch ID act as authentication for their apps. Otherwise it makes very little sense to spend all the time and effort to add it just to unlock the phone.
Apple has confirmed that 3rd party devs will not have access to the authentication method. For now. There are a few barriers to large-scale adoption by enterprise, standards issues among them, but likely this stalling is just Apple being Apple, moving into a new area slowly so as not to knock over the picket fence, one careful step at a time, watching for mines. APIs might pop up in the SDK with the arrival of the 6 or 6s, well after the iTunes experiment and one or two more app trials.
People who judges apple products based on Wall Street reactions are insane.
Apple introduces groundbreaking products – WS Punishes Stocks – Clueless Idiots Scream death Apple.
Google introduces FART, GAS,BS TALK – WS Rewards Stocks – Clueless idiots Scream Death to Apple!
Samsung introduces clone of this or that – WS Rewards Stocks – Even more Clueless idiots scream Death to Apple.
Amazing isn’t it?
Apple is the river of life, Wall Street rafting across to the banks on the other side.
Not a problem. That just means we know Apple will survive and thrive for years to come, and eventually Samsung will get the hell out of our way by dying off (same with Google).
I suspect someday Google will be relegated to maps and search, and eventually search will die off somewhat because someone will come up with a better search engine algorithm and experience. It wouldn’t surprise me if Google jettisons Android within 3 years as it is co-opted and bastardized by companies from China and other places.
Absolutely, doesn’t matter what Apple does, Wall Street will/does pick on Apple.
*Apple doesn’t innovate anymore.
*Apple goes through a drought product cycles.
*Apple C5 is too expensive.
*Apple missed profit margins.
*Apple did not meet Wall Street expectation because they missed profit margin!.
Hello Wall Street, Wall Street is GOD or what?.
You guys nailed it there. Reading some of the crazies on CNN makes you wonder if these guys are for real.
Maybe when Apple has $400 billion dollars in the bank ( and still can’t figure out what to do with it) they will change their tune.
Apple is so funny with their money. I mean in the ha ha way. I for one have no idea what they should do with it, but sometimes it seems like you hear, “Apple went on a shopping spree today, they bought one of those fancy vacuum cleaners with the ball inside cause Jonny likes those.”
“You mean, let me understand this cause, ya know maybe it’s me, I’m a little fucked up maybe, but I’m funny how, I mean funny like I’m a clown, I amuse you? I make you laugh, I’m here to fuckin’ amuse you? What do you mean funny, funny how? How am I funny?” – Tommy DeVito, Goodfellas
I just saw a program from the future.
Look at history’s channel pawn stars s07E02, Chum Lee has a iPhone “champagne ” doesn’t that just came out yesterday?