“Apple, like any other company, has question marks. However, the question marks next to its name should not trigger the level of hysteria they often do. While Apple isn’t beyond reproach, it should be beyond the reach of lazy commentators and a financial and tech media starved for ratings and relevancy,” Rocco Pendola writes for Seeking Alpha. “For goodness sake, making something out of nothing vis-à-vis Apple hasn’t saved CNBC’s numbers from going in the toilet the last few years. Doing the same things that haven’t worked in the first half of the decade is highly unlikely to produce different results as 2015 nears. But they keep on keeping on with hits such as ‘The ugly number in Apple’s earnings.'”
“Ugly… Oh my!” Pendola writes. “But, hey, I’m an equal opportunity critic. In the diverse pool of thoughts and opinions Seeking Alpha produces daily, we get items such as ‘Apple’s Big iPad Problem.’ That article, like CNBC’s use of the word ‘ugly’ to describe something that’s anything but, skims the analytical surface drawing thin conclusions such as “are Apple’s products starting to steal business from one another?””
“The replacement cycle hasn’t been brought up enough to bring logic to lame cries of Apple’s iPad ‘problem.’ Whether we really need to or not, we have been conditioned by wireless companies and smartphone makers to replace our phones every two years or so,” Pendola writes. “We’re simply not going to replace a MacBook or iPad with quite as much frequency. They’re more expensive or, maybe more importantly, not subsidized. Obvious, but not obvious enough to stave off the crowd that can’t stop lamenting Apple’s perceived iPad problem.”
“Apple sold 39.3 million iPhones (that number continues to trend way higher year-over-year), 12.3 million iPads and 5.5 million Macs last quarter and you’re (not you!) going to tell me that somehow that middle number is ‘ugly’ and a ‘big problem,'” Pendola writes. “Years from now, we’ll look back on iPad concerns and it will all seem funny. But just as hysteria now, logic later is a bad way to run a company, it’s a bad way to invest, which, fittingly, makes AAPL one of the market’s most obvious and best long-term plays.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple sold 12.3 million iPads last quarter. 12.3 million units in 91 days. Right before the new iPads that everybody knew were coming, no less.
Apple has sold 237 million iPads in just over four years. 237 million.
What a nice “problem” to have.