I’m super excited to announce the Apple Investor Event 2023. This will be the third Apple Investor Event I’ve hosted but it’s been a long time since the last one. The event will take place November 9th, 2023 in Downtown Boston Area (precise location will be announced soon.) The program is a series of talks Continue reading

Apple has so far returned $761.5 billion to shareholders. 143.3 billion in accumulated dividends and $618.2 billion in share buybacks. These are the gray areas in the graph above. The question that often comes up is: isn’t this capital return program a misallocation? In particular isn’t buying back shares and retiring them a waste of Continue reading

Before the iPhone launched in late 2007, Apple was trading consistently at a P/E ratio above 30. Here is a table for the P/E ratio on each Friday’s closing price from May to August, 2007. The iPhone launched on June 29, 2007. Date P/E Ratio 5/23/07 31.5 5/30/07 31.6 6/6/07 34.1 6/13/07 33.7 6/20/07 34.6 Continue reading

iPhone 15 has just been released and, as usual, all the products in the iPhone line-up have received new prices. The following graph shows the current product line-up (US prices before tax) and the historic price points for all the previous versions of iPhones since inception. It was amusing before the launch to see reports Continue reading

After the Apple iPhone 15 launch event of September 12, 2023 I was a guest on the Claman Countdown show on FOX Business News (FBN) and here is the video. https://www.foxbusiness.com/video/6337041605112 In advance of the event I was asked for a few thoughts that might be topics I would like to discuss. My answer was: Continue reading

As I remember it, at least 10 years ago, I began to hear anecdotes from developers who built apps for both iOS and Android about their economics. The story is that they tended to have twice as many users using Android but that iPhone App Store revenues were roughly twice those of Google Play Store. Continue reading

The App Store ecosystem crossed $1 Trillion in 2022. To be precise, in a report published in May 2023 by the Analysis Group the ecosystem is estimated to have exceeded $1.1 trillion. This ecosystem is defined as the total transactional value of the sale or distribution of digital and physical goods and services through apps. Continue reading

One of the biggest puzzles of my adult life was this question: Why do people pay to attend live events when broadcasts and/or recorded versions are free? Not only do people tend to pay for live events, the costs are extraordinarily high. Earlier this year, 32% of planned concertgoers expected to spend $500 or more Continue reading

The data is finally out. Apple Services and perhaps Apple itself can be quantified and predicted as never before. As we shall see this data changes almost everything we know. It is even more shocking that this most important data set has been released by Apple itself. (Though it did so in order to comply Continue reading

Almost a year ago, on March 1st, 2021, I tweeted a snapshot of the “FAANG” P/E ratios. They were: Netflix: 88.63 Amazon: 73.94 Microsoft: 34.65 Google: 34.75 Apple: 32.89 Facebook: 25.53 Today same companies have the following ratios: Netflix: 19.34 Amazon: 46.08 Microsoft: 30.17 Google: 22.35 Apple: 27.79 Facebook: 13.67 What a difference 13 months Continue reading