“As we get closer to Apple’s earnings report on the 26th, Apple investors are finally getting some reliable indicators of Apple’s performance in the December quarter,” Mark Hibben writes for Seeking Alpha. “The fever of anti-Apple sentiment that has convulsed the business media for the past few weeks appears to be subsiding. Apple shares are starting to look like a probably fleeting bargain.”
“The media coverage of Apple towards the end of the year more or less played out as I predicted back in August,” Hibben writes. “At the time I wrote: ‘In the coming months we’ll probably hear all the reasons why Apple is going to fail, repeatedly in infinite variation. The difficult comps will get frequent mention. Leaked supplier reports will claim that iPhone sales are ‘disappointing.’ Apple Watch will be an unmitigated disaster. The litany of negative speculation will seem endless. And it probably won’t end until Apple reports fiscal 1Q 2016 results next January.'”
“The best data indicating Apple’s December quarter performance comes from none other than IDC and Gartner. Both companies agree that Apple’s Mac sales rose y/y by 2.8% in the December quarter to over 5.6 million units,” Hibben writes. “Apple’s PC sales are being driven by a halo effect of the iPhone. Mac sales are an indicator of the continuing appeal of the Mac OS X and iOS ecosystems. If iPhone sales were on the decline, I would expect Mac sales to follow suit. The fact that there’s some upward momentum in Mac sales indicates to me the iPhone continues to be increasing, rather than decreasing in popularity.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: The semi-annual festival of Anti-Apple FUD officially ends on January 26th (depending on Apple’s guidance, as always).
SEE ALSO:
Apple continues to beat the Windows PC market – January 13, 2016
Apple to release Q116 earnings, webcast live conference call on January 26th – January 5, 2016
Moreover, the nearly 3% y/y growth in Mac sales is stunning in the context of continuing large y/y declines in non-Mac PC sales.
I’ve given up on mass media altogether and gone back to books.
The pens of the media have the power to kill the lions.
Remarkable Apple will leave WS anals in the state of idiocity again…
How many times has this been so, we do seem to be in an infinite loop on a yearly or at best on a 2 yearly basis.
Once again,
Those people have an hidden agenda; keeping it low with small bumps up for the short term investment.
The game is strong with these fools…
Is it really surprising? The stock market has painted itself into a corner by relying on rumor and ignoring current performance for stock valuations. The options market adds another aspect since there are clear benefits for certain parties to move the price to a predefined point.
The only thing that changes during this quarterly cycle is the analyst’s perception of AAPL ( or to put it another way, the spin that they apply to Apple ). Apple’s fundamental business is rock solid, on a very positive trajectory and it’s been that way for a decade.
We get exactly the same false rumours every time and even though events subsequently prove them to be groundless every time, the next time around they will be regarded as true.
We’ve heard rumours of having reached ‘peak iPhone’ for nearly as long as we’ve had the iPhone itself. Supply chain checks always seem to suggest problems next quarter. Then when all those rumours are made to look ridiculous after everything goes brilliantly and Apple sells immense quantities of iPhones, success on that scale is declared to be a problem because Apple has become too reliant on just one product – just as it was deemed to be too reliant on Mac computers fifteen years ago, or on iPods ten years ago.