What will kill Apple?

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#15

The slow creep of improvements by others.
Much as we like to think otherwise, it’s the profit behemoth it is because of networked pocket computers.
No other product can or will replace that–it’s the most profitable produce line in the history of humanity.
The pace of innovation has slowed because there are only so many new features one can add, and still be meaningful.
That makes it hard to stay perceived as the better product. But let’s assume Apple keeps their quality and price lead.
But alternatives will be almost as good, and among themselves very very competitive.
If alternatives are almost as good, and price keenly, it’s hard to support a big price premium, so that will erode.
Or, if they keep the big price premium by fleeing up market, the market share falls a lot.
It’s then a delicate balancing act of elasticity, because without the huge market share and concomitant installed base, the services revenues fade.
So, the risk is that they fall too far to one side of the current precarious balance.
Accelerating fall in market share or accelerating fall in margins.

I think this dramatically underestimates Apple’s moat. The iPhone has proven itself dissimilar from TVs or similar. Big network effect and perceived or actual switching costs in addition to the great brand. I don’t think an “almost as good” competitor is a threat. Even an “as good.” I am not representative of the marketplace, but isn’t Samsung’s Galaxy as or almost as good? I thought the Galaxy has been ahead at times, such as with water resistance.

It is a huge uphill battle to convert users away from the iPhone. I don’t think simply as good, but cheaper or a bit better at the same price does it. Maybe a bit better at the same price doesn’t do it, but compellingly better at the same price. Let’s say that’s the case. How does a competitor offer something compellingly better at the same price? Beats me. I think it beats them as well.

I think Apple’s competitors also figure they need something more than just as good as Apple. That’s why Samsung gave foldable an early shot. Probably saw that as an opportunity to offer something compellingly different. Maybe they’ll get there and that’s a threat. The problem for competitors is that even if they find some compelling improvement, Apple can be a quick follower. A quick follower with massive resources.

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#16

It is a huge uphill battle to convert users away from the iPhone. I don’t think simply as good, but cheaper or a bit better at the same price does it. Maybe a bit better at the same price doesn’t do it, but compellingly better at the same price. Let’s say that’s the case. How does a competitor offer something compellingly better at the same price? Beats me. I think it beats them as well.

I think Apple’s competitors also figure they need something more than just as good as Apple. That’s why Samsung gave foldable an early shot. Probably saw that as an opportunity to offer something compellingly different. Maybe they’ll get there and that’s a threat. The problem for competitors is that even if they find some compelling improvement, Apple can be a quick follower. A quick follower with massive resources.

A TRANSPORTER PORTAL?

#17

A few thoughts.

  • I don’t think switching platforms is as big of moat as people think - its just that AAPL has done an excellent job keeping up with trends such that switching isn’t even a thought for most people.

  • There don’t appear to be any immediate threats to the AAPL business model - however some are emerging.

  • I think the biggest issue is a slowing down of the upgrade cycle. If 75% of AAPL customers added 1 year to their upgrade cycle it would have a material impact on the business.

  • A changing of consumer behavior would also be a big threat. Right now we use our phones for almost everything; but that could change. If the meta-verse thing starts to take off, or if for instance cars became linked to your phone and another vendor (GOOG for example) had a better “car experience” I think that could siphon off some users.

  • A home robot that that used a different platform would be a game changer and probably get people to switch.

  • Some advanced AI would also create problems for AAPL (I don’t know what these use cases might be; but there will be some for sure).

Most of these can be mitigated by AAPL keeping up with trends - which they have done very well; but a slip up in execution could put some pressure on the business model - which would probably cut valuations by 50%. I don’t see this as very likely however.

tecmo
…

PS: What is more impressive; Jobs getting AAPL to $300B or Cook getting AAPL to $3T?

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#18

PS: What is more impressive; Jobs getting AAPL to $300B or Cook getting AAPL to $3T?

what’s more impressive; lifting 100 lbs. when you’re 8 or 300 lbs. when you’re 22? : >)

happy new year to all!

best,

mike

#19

Here’s a different tack:
The slow creep of improvements by others.

Nah. There are a few brands which, for whatever reason, manage to persist with premium pricing even as competitors ‘catch up’ in the product offering. Coke and Pepsi come to mind (even tho as a duopoly it doesn’t exactly fit) with their lock on distribution, control of the supermarket shelves/vending machine trades, and yes, great quality. But there are probably 20 look-alikes with far better pricing (Sam’s Cola, etc.) which barely make a dent, and that’s been true for a century.

Frito-Lay is another which controls distribution and marketing and keeps 80-90% of the shelf space even though there are dozens of regional competitors with similar, sometimes superior quality. In manufactured products you could point to long standing luxury lines like Mercedes, Tiffany, Nike, Levis, Rolex, Armani, etc. as examples where “slow creep” hasn’t harmed the leader.

Apple’s advantage isn’t distribution, of course, it’s perceived quality and so long as they don’t screw that up they’ll be good for a long while.

One thing unmentioned so far that I think could derail them is regulation. There’s a lot of chatter about anti-trust these days, particularly with regard to tech, and especially about Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon. Some of it is likely justified: there is no reason Facebook should also own Instagram and What’s App, for instance, except to make it harder for advertisers to price shop on reach and delivery of audience. I find no reasons those businesses couldn’t be severed without harmful effects for either consumers or advertisers.

Google has a bunch of intertwined businesses, but certainly reaches the threshold of what has traditionally been considered a monopoly. How and which it could discard I haven’t thought much about but I suspect many of the complaints of smaller companies are valid (scraping Yelp reviews makes it unnecessary for people to visit Yelp, making it harder/impossible for Yelp to monetize eyeballs, for instance).

Amazon may or may not be guilty of some practices; certainly “Prime” gives them an advantage over other online sellers, whether that is legally indefensible I don’t know. And Apple has, by its own admission, engaged in anticompetitive behavior (the no-poaching deal with Google) and may have other issues (the non-negotiable skim from the App Store, perhaps).

It is hard to envision the separation of some/many of Apple’s various ecosystem components without harming the parent, but I can see Apple getting swept up in the zeal over Facebook and Google, even if it doesn’t belong there (I am not taking a side here). Just noting that regulation is a risk.

A note: being a monopoly is not per se a violation of antitrust. It is the abuse of the monopoly, unwitting or not, which gives rise to the introduction of legalities into the economic system.

Anyway, I would put “China” as the most likely, whether it’s invasion of Taiwan, some Apple VP calls Xi a tyrant, or some sort of tariff or other issue. But I would put “regulation” as the second most likely cause to impair Apple and bring it to a slow griding deceleration.

One hopes that neither of those comes true, of course.

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#20

I think that little can kill Apple. They have a very wide moat, enough that I would deem them Steadfast (meaning that they are still around after 20 years, and their earnings predictable to be above some lower bound after 10 years).

I posted a thesis about Apple in 2012 which underlined engagement of developments as important (similar to what caused DOS to remain dominant for ludicrously long despite the technology literally a decades behind competitors) and these developers having a large learning curve and career-destroying switching costs. Unknown to many, this is still the main reason Apple is doing so well today. They have a pretty good phone product on top, but the size of the developer community is ludicrously large - and deeply dependent. The product could falter far longer than people imagine (look at DOS vs the other extremely more advanced OS environments around at the time), and they will still retain the developer partnerships and be completely dominant in software for a long, time. Don’t compare this to Nokia as their development community was a joke. Google would be a threat, except that if they heavily marketed their own phone, hardware competitors would jump ship (it would be like Microsoft bringing out their own PC, which would kill DOS, and they were smart enough to not do that).
https://discussion.fool.com/intrinsic-value-29846517.aspx

I wrote a 6 part thesis in 2012 for which this is just one part and I strongly encouraged purchasing. I predicted that earnings in 20 years (that is 2022, so now) would move towards services, and even from here I think it will be important for Apple when looking out to 2032.

Even whilst nothing “kills” Apple, some investors might be overconfident about how much higher Apple’s earnings will be ten years away. They’ll be higher, but there is only so much $$$ you can extract per customer once you have near market saturation.

A good argument for Apple’s having no problems with per-customer a spend ceiling is that most people consider what they get out of using their phone to be far higher than the dollars they are spending each year on the phone.

This bodes well for the future, not only related to the phone, but related to what we spend for our mobile access to the internet generally, for which the product will vary over time but we will still want to have the best version available, and won’t want second best. There will be a market for “nearly as good, but cheap”, but there will also be a market for “only the best”, and you can think of the markets as distinct, the latter never going away or being replaced with the former.

I think Google is a much better investment than Apple, though, and that mostly because of Apple’s relatively high multiple right now (32x). They will unlikely grow earnings as fast as Google over ten years, so should have a lower multiple than Google’s (28x), not higher.


Apple
Normalized earnings per share	5.6
Average earnings per share	9.74
Earnings multiple at year 10	20
IV10   				277.56
Price today			179
IV10/Price			**1.6**
		
Google	
Earnings per Share normalized 	95
Average earnings growth rate	13.00%
Earnings per Share at year 10	322.48
Earnings multiple at year 10	25
IV10   				8062.1
Price today			2900
IV10/Price			**2.8**

IV10 defined (in 2022) as the worst-case estimate of intrinsic value of a company in 2032, no inflation adjustment or earnings discounting. For most firms this is close to $0 as our worst case is a wipeout, so this only works for firms with extremely strong moats.

Berkshire’s IV10/price today stands at 2.4, which is higher than Apple’s 1.6. Selling Apple would not be profitable in done in isolation, but a combination of selling Apple and buying back Berkshire shares would be. Replacing with Apple with Google would be even better.

  • Manlobbi
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#21

Apple’s hardware quality actually is quite poor. My kids have multiple MacBooks, iPhones over the years and some of them broke down for no obvious reason within a few months. I have been a user of WinTel products for 30 years and never encountered similar problems. However, the ‘cool’ factor is so strong and the software is so much more hassle-free that it is still irresistible.

#22

these developers having a large learning curve and career-destroying switching costs. Unknown to many, this is still the main reason Apple is doing so well today

Just not true. The iOS development market is not a very huge market and not a very unique skill set. I have developers who code both Android and iOS, almost fungible.

#23

It is a huge uphill battle to convert users away from the iPhone.

There are many who think iPhone eco-system is valuable and its moat is insurmountable, etc. May be most of it is true.

Today is a harsh reminder of moat, perceived excellence, etc. Sadly, effective today Blackberry shutsdown its services. Remember Obama with blackberry? I remember how my IT department refused to allow iPhones and supported only Blackberry.

Things change. Technological moat is ephemeral. This doesn’t mean Apple is toast or vanishing tomorrow.

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#24

An upcoming generation will be so uneducated that they are not able or interested in buying computers as such. They will just thumb their cell phones.

WHAT? I can’t imagine how people would prefer accessing the Internet through smartphones instead of desktop or laptop computers. Smartphones are superior at portability, but their inferior ergonomics make them unsuitable for tasks that require an attention span longer than about 20 seconds. Even laptops are inferior to desktops when it comes to ergonomics. My attention span is quite a bit shorter when I use a laptop than when I use a desktop.

Because PCs depreciate rapidly, Linux users like myself can find great deals on used ones. For just %50 to %100, I’ve been able to buy a nice used desktop PC that runs circles around brand new low-end computers that cost far more. The latest version of my favorite distro, MX Linux, can run well on PCs from the Windows 7 era. How well can the latest version of MacOS run on a Mac from that era? How well can Windows 11 or even Windows 10 run on a PC from that era? Of course, this is a potential threat to both Apple and Microsoft.

#25

WHAT? I can’t imagine how people would prefer accessing the Internet through smartphones instead of desktop or laptop computers. Smartphones are superior at portability, but their inferior ergonomics make them unsuitable for tasks that require an attention span longer than about 20 seconds.

Don’t have to imagine it. It is here today.

I’m with you bro. I high speed touch type. Typing on a tiny screen is an abomination to me. Steve Balmer famously dissed the iPhone because it had no keyboard. I would have done the same thing.

But Balmer and I were wrong. Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat don’t require an attention span longer than 20 seconds. The small screens have won. We’re dinosaurs.

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#26

An upcoming generation will be so uneducated that they are not able or interested in buying computers as such. They will just thumb their cell phones.

WHAT? I can’t imagine how people would prefer accessing the Internet through smartphones instead of desktop or laptop computers. Smartphones are superior at portability, but their inferior ergonomics make them unsuitable for tasks that require an attention span longer than about 20 seconds. Even laptops are inferior to desktops when it comes to ergonomics. My attention span is quite a bit shorter when I use a laptop than when I use a desktop.

While I pretty-much agree with you, I find that some of my friends have abandoned their computers altogether, not only desk-tops, but lap-tops as well, and do everything on their smart-phones. Then they e-mail the stuff they need to print out to me for printing. Grrr.

I have an app on my cell phone that enables me full access to my broker (TD-Ameritrade) web site. But the screen is way way too small to actually use it. Fortunately, I do not have to be on-line all day at my brokerage, making trades all day. Gawwd!

#27

What killed RIM? It was the market leader. iPhone, product design. I remember Prem Watsa made a big bet on RIM and it didn’t pay off.

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#28

And I remember Apple being discussed at the time and why WEB hadn’t bought - seen as too risky with Samsung etc product cycle, then Apple was viewed as a network, services, brand…

I too had some RIM (very small, lost about 20%) and it put me off buying apple back in the day, now 3trn…

#29

their inferior ergonomics make them unsuitable for tasks that require an attention span longer than about 20 seconds.

My son uses his phone for 4 hours straight at home. Young people use their phones lot longer and for things that require attention span too, like he read a book on his phone, on our 4 hour car trip.

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#30

Last night our youngest asked to talk to his mom and me. We put down our phones and tablets, turned off the TV and all sat down together…fearing the worst.

He hesitated, then blurted it out…he wanted to use his Christmas money to buy a new Samsung phone.

We are an Apple family, we implored. Your brother, sister, mom, dad, we all have iPhones and iPads.

Nothing could convince him. He wants Android. He wants Samsung.

#31

Last night our youngest asked to talk to his mom and me. We put down our phones and tablets, turned off the TV and all sat down together…fearing the worst.

Hilarious. I am glad, though, that you put down your phones and tablets and turned off the TV.
Also glad his girlfriend, if he is old enough to have one, is not pregnant. :wink:

He hesitated, then blurted it out…he wanted to use his Christmas money to buy a new Samsung phone.

We are an Apple family, we implored. Your brother, sister, mom, dad, we all have iPhones and iPads.

Nothing could convince him. He wants Android. He wants Samsung.

That is very interesting. Has he actually used an Android-Samsung telephone? I happen to have a Samsung Galaxie S7 (now out-of-date, I suppose), and have used an iPhone in the past. I do not very much care which I have, but changing from one to the other is a pain (learning or re-learning curve). I do not use most of the features my cell phone has, and leave it off entirely some days. Most of my friends have iPhones, though, and some no longer even use their computers anymore.

#32

Last night our youngest asked to talk to his mom and me. …fearing the worst.
Yeah, I know that sinking feeling, I always experience that whenever my wife says she wants to talk to me.

#33

Last night our youngest asked to talk to his mom and me. …fearing the worst.

Yeah, I know that sinking feeling, I always experience that whenever my wife says she wants to talk to me.

I never had a wife, but I have learned by sad experience that whenever a girlfriend said “we need to talk,” (they usually did it on the telephone) it meant the relationship was over.

#34

I think most youngsters do it by text or just block / ghost nowadays.