Smart speakers caught Apple flat footed. The HomePod was a flop, with numerous reports revealing Apple cut back orders after weak demand. My biggest problem with HomePod was that it only supported Apple Music, not Spotify. This made no sense if Apple wanted to dominate the market. HomePod could’ve been another platform for app makers, like iPhone, Mac, and even iMessage which has its own App Store and developers.
Wearables are not the future of tech. Apple may be the largest watch maker, but watches are a tiny market, and that’s like being a humpback whale in a koi pond.
Apple has dipped its pinky toe in augmented and virtual reality, having an app section for augmented reality and creating a few applications like a virtual measuring tape and a virtual ping-pong game, but they haven’t created their own headset to compete with Oculus or HoloLens. Now virtual reality is nowhere near where it needs to be to catch on as the technology still isn’t there and the price tag is too high, but even then, anyone who has put on a virtual reality headset will tell you how impressive the experience truly is. And yet Apple is moot on VR.
Apple’s investment in original content is a joke, buying Carpool Karaoke and hiring Oprah. Just like smartspeakers, Apple’s original content seems to be a lackluster response to what other tech industry giants like Amazon and Google are doing with their own original content. Amazon Studios is making well received content being shown in movie theaters, like The Big Sick, and Google’s YouTube is getting into original content with the well-received show Cobra Kai.
Most important of all is the fact Apple continues to drop the ball on apps that are data intensive in order to function properly. Siri require lots of data to be able to answer questions, which is why Siri sucks. Apple Maps requires lots of data to construct maps, which is why Apple Maps sucks. So Apple may be angling to take the higher ground by saying it doesn’t use your data, and that’s fine, but when data-intensive apps start to suffer, it may be time for Apple to take a new approach.
The butterfly keyboards on MacBooks have been universally faulty, to the point Apple has started a free repair program. The removal of the headphone jack is still being questioned 2 years later. The tablet market as a whole is shrinking. Android phones are just as good if not better than iPhones.
Now Warren Buffett may have doubled down on buying Apple stock, and from an accounting view that’s an obvious choice. Apple is by far the most profitable company right now. But that doesn’t make it the future of tech. And when Apple picks fights with companies like Facebook, it’s probably why there’s no Instagram app for iPad.
I’ve been watching Apple’s market cap for the past 6 months, and right now it’s the lowest it’s ever been, hovering around $906 B, when it’s usually around $936 B. Amazon is catching up at around $825 B, Google is trailing at $806 B, while Microsoft is lagging at around $760 B. Personally I find following market caps more fun that serious, but the fact Apple has flirted with the trillion dollar market cap but hasn’t passed it for this long while other tech companies keep closing the gap, it’s starting to look like Apple is no longer the groundbreaking tech company of the future.
Submitted June 25, 2018 at 06:26AM by Warpeous https://ift.tt/2IpFu6i
