Many people, perhaps Apple themselves, are ignoring something very fundamental. What happened to PCs? It's not that they became obsolete. In fact that is precisely the problem. They stopped becoming obsolete. In the early 2000s you'd buy a PC and then 6 months later it was outdated. 2 years later it was obsolete. Now you can buy a PC and it will last you more or less indefinitely for everything you might use it for. Even less common tasks like extremely high end gaming are possible by just buying a new relatively cheap video card - not a new PC.
The point is that the same thing is, and will continue, to happen to tablets, phones, and various other forms of consumer electronics. There is an asymptotic decline in value gained between iterations. And that asymptote, thanks to the speed of technological development, approaches 0 pretty rapidly. This inherently means that no computing product is going to be a long term sustainable golden goose.
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The thing I don't understand here is that I think the above is so plainly clear as to be practically self evident. Yet then you have people who are certainly much more well informed on business than myself, such as Warren Buffet, declaring that a $1000 iPhone X is "enormously underpriced" and is clearly going long on Apple as his organization continues to accumulate Apple Stock. I don't understand the dissonance.
I think people are aware of this. The idea is as the upgrade cycle takes longer, people will still upgrade to the latest and greatest when they do upgrade. The other assumption is that the phone upgrade cycle will still be faster than laptops at steady state.
The point is that the same thing is, and will continue, to happen to tablets, phones, and various other forms of consumer electronics. There is an asymptotic decline in value gained between iterations. And that asymptote, thanks to the speed of technological development, approaches 0 pretty rapidly. This inherently means that no computing product is going to be a long term sustainable golden goose.
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The thing I don't understand here is that I think the above is so plainly clear as to be practically self evident. Yet then you have people who are certainly much more well informed on business than myself, such as Warren Buffet, declaring that a $1000 iPhone X is "enormously underpriced" and is clearly going long on Apple as his organization continues to accumulate Apple Stock. I don't understand the dissonance.