After more than a decade of continuous growth, the Cupertino-based company reports its first drop, mainly caused by weak iPhone sales.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-s-growth-has-halted.164617.0.html
Apple products and friendly operating systems are unquestionably a positive experience for many users. The design precision, expected performance and durability of their products in most cases far exceeds what is available from a multitude of Windows and Android machine suppliers. So why are sales slumping? I think "saturation" and "cost" is the factor. Too many choices of "almost Apple quality" available. The market for "the very best product" at the Apple "excessively high price points" appears to be markedly shrinking. For the "upper class", no problem... for the "middle class" with increasingly limited "discretionary spending" budgets... they are "priced out" of Apples luxury market.
Bob, great point.
I myself, have a multitude of apple devices, however, my latest purchases were Windows devices. The company relies on the "wow factor" for Macs. And the iPhone market is relatively saturated. The latest iteration was an "S" version.
I'm not saying that Apple is a bad company, its not.
continuous growth has a name: cancer.
continuous growth in business is a myth, a pipe dream chased by (mostly) Western companies and their share holders.
For Apple it took a while to saturate the market, and in a response sales are going down. You don't need to be a economics major to see that coming ;-)
Rob, that's exactly what I think. Let's look at the audio world, for example - there are still plenty amplifiers and speakers that have been released two or three decades ago and still kill anything new in their price range. Not to mention RELIABILITY. The smartphone market continued to grow artificially for a few years due to minor improvements and thanks to hungry emerging markets. The next step would be for some company to have the balls to make their handsets capable to work properly for at least a decade and, after a few large batches of devices, to focus on software services to earn money.