Why does Apple stock continue to rally to new all-time highs in the midst of a global pandemic? Jim Cramer explains.
Apple, with a stock that’s up 12.38%. What happened here? I hate to say I told you so, but once again, in the middle of March, analysts fretted that Apple’s best years were behind it and you would be buying at a time when China would be off limits, because of the president and the U.S. would be disappointing because of the recession. Plus, the gap to 5G is considered too far. So how did it rally? Simple: the service revenue. When people stay at home and have nothing to do they tend to go to Amazon (AMZN) and the Apple store. We found out recently from the most seer-like of the Apple analysts, Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty, that the Apple services revenue has had a dramatic spike. I also like that Apple Pay’s contactless technology has become a necessity in an era when you don’t want to touch cash, when you can’t stand that anyone takes your card, and when the keypad has to be the least sanitary area you could ever touch.
Perhaps best of all, the work at home movement forced a lot of I.T. professionals to accept Apple, which tends to be what people use at their home even as Hewlett Packard (HPE) has some nifty models. But Apple has a phone and the Apple laptop is good for zooming. The bias that IT has shown, make that the tyranny against Apple is over; the pandemic ended it.
MacDailyNews Take: We’d offer a moment of silence for the remaining IT doofuses’ moment of clarity, but they don’t deserve it.
By the way, long, long, long before Jim Cramer, we told ya so — 10 days before Apple sold their first iPhone:
The IT guys are in for a rude awakening and the iPhone is only the beginning. They will have to accommodate the iPhone. Too many important employees will demand it and IT won’t be able to stem the tide. The fact is that business people will decide which device they want to carry and their businesses will adapt to it. Just as they did with “Microsoft-incompatible” Research In Motion’s Blackberry. Apple’s iPhone will be a success with business users whether the IT guy wants it or even whether AT&T and Apple tailor marketing to businesses or not.
Note to CEOs: Who runs the company, you or the IT guy? It’s your job to make the decisions and it’s the IT guy’s job to implement your decisions that relate to technology. Just as with Macs, you need to educate yourself instead of relying on someone with their own, possibly hidden, agendas to make extremely important technology decisions for your company. Most of you could be saving a LOT of money right now, but you aren’t because you’ve delegated an important part of your company’s decision-making to people who, frankly, in our experience, aren’t capable of making good, sound, strategic, long-term decisions. Most IT guys (and we know many) are not open-minded enough to be able to consider new, better, more efficient, more effective options that would benefit your company. In fact, most IT guys we’ve met will throw up road blocks and repeat myths until they’re blue in the face in order to avoid change. Especially change that might make their department less critical or smaller. Bottom line: most of you CEOs have given the IT guy way, way, way too much power. It’s time to take it back. — MacDailyNews, June 19, 2007