You thought that guy with the wolf costume who was shorting AAPL was legit (when the stock was $125) and called it +ev. Clearly we should listen to you when it comes to this name LMAO.

Sounds fair. However these services continue to lock in customers and could be key to secular growth rather than getting crushed in an economic downturn.

Well to be fair, I think Tooth has been attacked similarly in the Tesla thread and that's slowly starting to unravel / proving him right. Even though the two cases are complete opposite, it's never bad to hear a shorter's argument (no matter if you think its flawed)

I'm tired of having discussions with people who give a pass to being completely wrong lol this subforum is dumb.

Yeah the Apple ecosystem is sticky
I'm just looking for a sane bull argument that takes into account future risks. You need 13 years at current prices to get your money back, excluding growth and recessions. The tech landscape is going to transform and Apple are far from innovative, nor do they have the best talent. Everything thought Nokia and Blackberry were unstoppable too in 2008 - less than 10 years later they don't even have a phone division any more.

More importantly, why on Earth is Apple going to outperform an index from here? They're a luxury good makers with most of the global rich and a 40% margin. Can anyone make a case for why Apple will outperform QQQ, let alone substantially? That's the question if you're going to own this long term. It's the only question that matters.

Anecdotal, i never bought apple products for the reasons mentioned above. I don't like paying premiums for brand names. I'd even pay a premium to not be associated with religious apple fans lol

Having that said, for 4 years i have a macbook. It's not overpriced imo. You have to look at the full package, the invisible time you save by having close to no problems vs permanent bugs on Windows (especially dumb users like myself). The fact that this stuff seems to last forever. It's vague, but it helped me understand what makes customers sticky.

People who say it's overpriced usually look at the hardware. I'm not sure if that's the right way to compare things, but rather how easily you can create the same experience for a lot less. Not that easy to create a competing religion. Reminds me of another guy who wrote yesterday something like "just copy the customer experience from pokerstars" . Armchair economist lol.

About the value of the stock i have no opinion, not my area of expertise.

iPhones are faster than Android phones and the gap is increasing. (This is before lol carrier bloatware.)

The bull case is obvious. They make a superior product with proprietary hardware that runs super fast in their walled garden. As phones grow in complexity and are required to do more computing as time passes this edge will grow. This would require some knowledge of the underlying tech tho.

But atleast I don't need to use random endpoints to make a false claim. (AAPL has outperformed the index since you started rambling here TS.)

So your claim is that the Android operating system/ecosystem is going to remain inferior because it's slower?
All hardware is proprietary hardware. Samsung hardware is more proprietary than Apple's, as they make most of their own components and many of Apple's. So your use of proprietary here is just silly.

I personally find iPhones slow and annoying. Galaxies are snappier and more feature rich. I have an iPhone because of a nice clean user experience. I contend that's their only advantage that matters, and why they can sell for a premium. It won't last though, as phone interfaces changes and start having to interface with the world. Apple's walled garden is doomed; it was fine while phones were self contained packages that ran phone-specific software.

I turned up here exactly five years ago in one week, having just bought Microsoft LEAPS and recommending Microsoft over Apple. Since then:



<shrugs>

TS,

I can't help you have delusional thoughts about tech. iPhones are much faster than high end Android devices. Is what it is. Sorry you think otherwise, but their advantage in the video processing sector (which also encompasses their sick ARkit) is pretty massive. And thinks like video transcoding are ubiquitous. You're arguing that a Pinto is just as peppy in stop and go traffic as a Ferrari, when most people don't just go at 10mph top speeds. Sorry.

Please quote the post you made ITT. Again FAKE NEWS. Master of disinformation. The Elon Musk of 2p2 posting.

New ATH this morning on the news they bought even more over the last quarter. Since this is largely a market stock will be interesting to see if this can pull the indices out of this range we're in or if the market will drag this back down.

I think the next 2 weeks should be an uphill battle for the market. The bulls may have blown their wad today also. Positive earnings didn't help much, but this certainly did.

Interesting to see AAPL announce mega buybacks and dividends then we find out that Buffett who loves that kind of thing has already pumped in over a billion last month. Probably wasn't news to him. If AAPL is up again on Monday I will likely be selling June 195 calls

I actually don't like selling upside calls right now, vol has come down a lot & you have a massive wedge forming on the S&P that is likely going to be resolved over the next 1-2 weeks. If it rips higher, I sure as hell don't want to be selling naked calls in a stock where implied vol is already pretty cheap compared to a lot of its peers. The one good thing you have going for you is there isn't a catalyst going forward for AAPL specifically by expiration so it could still be a nice trade even if the stock moves up a little and stalls.

From a technical perspective, AAPL hitting an ATH as the rest of tech and the market is still well below theirs is pretty bullish from a relative strength POV.

You might as well sell calls in SPY or QQQ (although I'm not sure I'd do that until we break out of this range one way or another).

Since Trump was elected, take a look at AAPL vs QQQ/SPY and you get an idea of just how strong it's been (2 year chart works fine) despite a lot of noise otherwise.

AAPL going to a $trillion market cap soon FWIW. The bull is charging hard for a bit at least.

195 calls sold for 1.95

happy to take a buck out of them or sell some puts if it goes too far against me

I've been using an iphone 7plus and Galaxy S9 Plus side by side for a couple weeks.

90+% of the time they are basically indistinguishable. The big differences I've noticed:

1. iPhone defaults to Safari no matter what apps you're using. This is really annoying because I use Chrome to sync history and so on.
2. iPhone is noticeably more consistently smooth in its performance. 90+% of the time they are both snappy enough to be just fine but the S9 occasionally just hangs for a split second. It's usually not a long pause but it's enough to be really annoying.
3. S9 got a frigging headphone jack
4. I don't know if it's just me but there are some spots in NYC where I'd mysteriously have no signal on the iPhone but 4 bars on the S9.
5. Siri's ability to transcribe my Chinese is significantly better.
6. The S9P's back is so crowded that with an UAG case it's just incredibly ugly.

7. Android versions of a lot of apps are just randomly more aggressive with ads and it's harder to just shut them down. (this is annoying enough that I am certain I'll get another iPhone to replace S9+ in a year or so, if not sooner)
8. The S9 curved edges are just annoying. Makes it harder to click things on the edges with a case on.

Decent feedback. The iPhone closed ecosystem model simply works. It's a lower anxiety, more highly polished experience. Fonts and icons look better, apps are more trustworthy, phone to phone contact is more standardized (iMessage), everything is that little bit smoother and more reliable.

There's no reason it should be like this. Google is run by tards who fail at everything except core CS, search and ads and big data interfaces (Google maps, Google finance before they shut it down), things at which they're very good. There's no consumer end product that they do well. With different leadership at Google, Android could be a nice experience rather than the hodgepodge of half assed crap it is.

Microsoft had a shot at taking over this space a few years ago, but it seems they don't really have the will to do a good job on it. I'm not sure why. Perhaps antitrust is part of it, to which they are subject but not others. Perhaps it's the attempt to integrate a Windows code base too early. Perhaps it's cultural/having a distribution network to take care of - they beat Apple to the iPad by a year with high quality prototypes, but it was canned in upper management.

I don't really understand why Samsung doesn't compete using the Apple model. They have the size, user base and the hardware control. Android can be patched over to work better. Maybe it's just the result of a fractured ecosystem that's hard to fit all together.

While no one provides the Apple experience and the economy does well, Apple will continue to do ok. I do think over time the differentiation in quality will disappear, and Apple's unnatural premium will go poof. 40% margins just don't sustain for decades.

It's part of being an open system. The addons and modifications behave in unpredictable ways.

Other part of it is Android attracts more value oriented consumers, necessitating other ways of monetization. This was even more obvious early on with some apps charging 1 dollar on iPhones while being ad supported on Androids. I just didn't know even when sites and apps that are "free" on both platforms also behaved differently until recently.

This reminds me of the self sorting shoppers go through. Apple is basically turning into the Nordstrom/Neiman Marcus of mobile ecosystem now while Android is JCPenny/Macys. That has a lot of value (manifesting in ability to maintain 40% margin) but it also boxes Apple in.

Samsung homemade ecosystem blows, they have a few decent addon but phone get less stable overtime than pure android.

Yesssssss there goes the argument

Apple distortion field is still active apparently. It has apparently become socially acceptable to walk around with airpods.

They are all over the place in downtime Manhattan now.

I have them too. Wouldn't have thought they would add so much value as they do. Don't want to go back

<3 airpods

Welcome to the future

XS Max, with Apple Care and sales tax, $1400.

Take my money.

Yeah, as someone who owns both phones, the gap is almost laughable. The brand new Samsung camera is absurdly worse than the iphone7 camera. Just awful. That alone is enough for a bull case in 2018.