is apple now too big to fail?
 

apple was always intriguing because of Jobs. Without him, there have been some banana peels some feel would never happen on his watch.

When he was fired in the 80s, it was not too big to fail, & it did.

But now, is it too big to turn into sears?

Apple is definitely not too big to fail. Technology and the marketplace changes fast, they are too big to fail overnight, their fall if it comes will be gradual due to its size, money and foothold in its areas of business.

It's not too big to fail. The time it'd take from first slip to total failure would be a lot longer though because of all their cash.

their a brand name so if they keep up they will be ok for at least 50 years. it can go bad look at Motorola

I think they are testing how much bullshit they can get away with. Did you see their latest commercial? They are sort of claiming that they invented the 4 inch display on the iPhone 5 because it perfectly matches the size of your thumb..lol.

Most companies just increase their screen size, but Apple tries to claim it was some sort of brilliant design innovation.

apple is a pain in the ass

thats kinda where i'm going. can they just put an apple logo on a toilet & make a billion dollars at this point?

they have like 100 billion in cash & bring in as much money as an oil company. I dont see how it can fail in our lifetime. maybe in a generation or 2 of malfeasance will do the job.

Aren't they just in the same position Microsoft was a decade ago, except without an operating system that almost everyone uses.

No company is too big to fail. I think they are on a great track for the most part because of jobs. It will be interesting to see how long before / if they mess it up.

:2 cents:

nothing is too big to fall

yes dvtimes it is

Thats true

Holy shit, what a fucking stupid ad :1orglaugh

one thing that I really like about apple. you buy their stuff, and it just works with all the other stuff you have from them. I just sold my 2004 21" iMac for 400 bucks. Course it had been upgraded to a terabyte HD and had it's ram maxed out 3 years ago. A pc would have just been scrap metal.

:thumbsup

i always wondered if apple fans notice they unconsciously just repeat apple's slogan all the time.

I hope they fail and then these guys make a comeback

well, it is fact....

I guess being Ex fortune 500 IT sysadmin, MCSE with over 27 years supporting MS make me an apple fanboy...

Apple invented the use of thumbs.

a company or country is never to big to fail. Pickup you your history lessons

Nothing is too big to fail, and I think they are pushing their luck with the iphone 5. I'm seeing quite a few 'iphone' friends with alternatives in hand already, it'll be a trend.

I don't think they will fall from grace all the way, but they will be just another manufacturer and no longer the 'elite'.

They sold 5 fucking million phones in 2 days... More if they had not completely sold out. Currently, the Iphone alone is literally worth more than ALL of Microsofts products combined... Not a statement, a fact.

"One Apple product, something that didn’t exist five years ago, has higher sales than everything Microsoft has to offer. More than Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing, Windows Phone, and every other product that Microsoft has created since 1975. In the quarter ended March 31, 2012, iPhone had sales of $22.7 billion; Microsoft Corporation, $17.4 billion"

Note that is BEFORE Iphone 5...

think i might ask my gf to sell her iphone now, just on the strength of that ad alone... i've never felt irritated by an advert until right now.

You could probably short the stock right here. They need to develop "the next???" to keep going. Jobs was a fucking genius, and he is gone.

The Ipad mini comes out in a week, I'm guessing it will outsell the normal iPad, stock will hit 800 after.

True. True. Whereas on Windows PCs nothing works.

You'd think after two decades people might eventually notice that nothing works on a Windows PC, but no, for some reason, even though their Windows PC simply does not work, Windows PCs have maintained a solid 90% market share, presumably because nobody (except Apple fanboys) noticed that they just don't work.

Meanwhile Apple PCs, which are the only PCs that work, have been consistently ignored by 95% of people, since forever.

So the lesson we can take from this is that Apple fanboys are dumb enough to pay the same for an eight year-old used Mac than they would for a brand new 2012 PC. Cool.

gerco - much of the iphones sales & success occurred before competitors had similar product. Kudos to apple for inventing & being the first player in the smartphone market.

But the market is now competitive, & samsung sells as many smartphones as apple does. plus droid has 50% marketshare vs ios 35%.

ipad - apple still dominates much like iphone dominated for 3 years. wont last much longer.

so unless apple creates a new piece of must-have hardware, where does apple have to go but down?

Fuck No, They Have Already Failed, The Sheep Just Havant figure it out yet but they will!

people camping outside the Apple stores to get an iPhone. fail?

They're not too big to fail, but it doesn't seem that they're planning on failing anytime soon.

Actually Samsung has been trouncing Apple recently. April-June 2012 Samsung sold three times as many phones as Apple. Hence Apple's lawsuits and attempts to get Samsung phones (the phones that most people want) banned outright.

Apple is a house of cards; reduced to desperate lawsuits to stave off the inevitable. And as much as I disliked Jobs, it does seem he was exactly the talismanic/tyrannical figure the company needed. Apple sure didn't fare too well in the past without him.

Microsoft is a shadow of what it was 10 years ago, and they have a virtually immovable desktop monopoly to rely on. Apple has nothing like that. iPod and iPad sales are nothing like as secure.

Yes, but imagine what protypes he had developed that could be used

actually he said that the tablet was been made before the iphone, but for marketing reasons they put it out later. I wonder how much stuff there is in cupertino

*has been made lol

Depends on what they can "borrow" from competitors.

or maybe these guys instead...

http://gamerillaz.com/wp-content/upl...odore-logo.png

all that back & forth with the thumb gave me tendonitus so bad that if I shook someones hand it would drop me too my knees.
I kept it stationary for a month & it went away.
ds

They are in the position Microsoft was in 2 decades ago and they own the platform everyone wants to be on. Business has not opened up to Apple products, but they will in the next 5 years, adding another 1.5 tril annual market to open.

The MS, Dells of the world all think they can go to chinese, business, etc to save themselves, but managers want to use the tools they like. Right now, businesses are just sticking their toe into iOS products.

Cycles move faster now though. I'd say they have 10-15 years of dominance left and with no Jobs they won't innovate the new paradigm, whatever it is.

they are on critical mass of buyers, they almost cant go now with this brain wash consumers

???? Apple owns the platform everyone wants to be on? What platform is that?

Apple will never fall, its as big and central to life as Kodak Film Company. Oh wait

Who cares? Everybody dies..

Look at how behemoths like AOL and Microsoft have done after peaking. There's no such thing as too big.

ummm heard of iOS? osX? ding ding ding

Here's a reality check:

Mac (OSX) has had a market share fixed at no more than 5% for its entire lifetime. It's a total irrelevance and always has been.

As for iOS, in 2009 it had a smartphone market share of about 14%; recent numbers from two months ago put it at 17%.

Meanwhile, in 2009 Android had less than 4% smartphone market share; two months ago it had 68%.

smartphone market (grew 17.5% last year): Android increased its share of the American smartphone market to 52.2% in July 2012, up from 50.8% in April, while iOS increased its share to 33.4%, up from 31.4% in April.

tablet (market has grown 400% in two years): Apple's share of the tablet market is seen as reaching 69.8 million units which accounts for 62.5 percent of global sales. The iPad dominated in 2011 with a 58.2 percent market share but that number was down from the device's launch year which saw iOS tablet sales take an unprecedented 76.2 percent piece of the pie. The growth will eat away at Android market share that is pegged to fall 2.3 percent from the 38.8 percent seen in 2011.

A record-setting unit shipments of Apple's iPad led to a better-than-anticipated growth for the tablet market during the second quarter of this year, a market research report said.
According to preliminary data from market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide tablet shipments for the second quarter of 2012 are estimated at 25 million units, representing a quarter-over-quarter increase of 33.6 per cent from 18.7 million during the previous quarter and year-over-year growth of 66.2 per cent from 15 million units at the same time last year.

I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers from, but they are flat wrong. Apple has one third of all smartphones and two thirds of all tablets. Tablets are the platform that everyone wants to be on. Notice the market has grown 66% year over year? Tell me what other company has two thirds of a market with that much growth that is over $20bil?

just speculating. but the tablet market had been tried & failed several times over. newton never took off. so i bet they were waiting to see how people responded to the iphone before taking a leap with a product that had failed in the past.

to me the next killer app is in the TV industry. Jobs was trying to get a channel a la carte product for apple TV, but the TV/cable industry monopolists are thwarting him, since overpriced cable is the golden goose of the TV biz. Somehow their monopoly must be broken so the public can choose & pay for their own channels, through web streaming.

just IMO.

New drugs

IDC. Same place that site you lazily copied and pasted your post from got its info. You better tell these sites they are all 'flat wrong': https://www.google.com/#q=68%25+android

That's like boasting about being the world's tallest dwarf.

Total tablet sales in Q2: 25 million. Smartphone sales in the same period: 154 million.

Total iOS sales, for iPad and iPhone combined, in Q2: 43 million. Total Android sales on smartphones alone: 100 million.

If the tablet market increases to a point where other companies seriously start competing with Apple, their market share will be cut down to their core fanboy base, like their other products.

Keep drinking the you-know-what.