Those just aren't good numbers for a company that, over the past decade, has been literally the most profitable in history. They aren't "bad" numbers, but for Apple they're sort of a disaster. The iPhone gravy train is running out of steam, basically.

And that means things, like for example the stock has to decline and/or dividends increase because it becomes more productive to put that money into companies that are growing. Investors care about news like this.

It seems like a lot (a lot) of readers here are looking at the article as if it says "Apple sucks. Their products suck. No one should buy this junk. They're going to fail."

That's not what it says. It does say that Apple, as an investment, is changing from one kind of thing (a growing tech behemoth) to another (a basically static industry giant), and that change is news.

Apple's P/E ratio is around 17, which seems perfectly reasonable for a mature company these days. Investors aren't expecting growth.

I agree that this is stabilizing the stock price. I also think that they are still spending plenty of money on innovation, it's just that they have too much money to know how to spend it appropriately.

The stock is an incredible value (even still) because share repurchases and dividends continue to occur and they continue to make tons of money. And it will benefit from upside when they have another hit. Yes, I am long.

You would think that, but they actually purchase when it’s expensive :)

The extent to which that expectation tilts toward wanting/demanding growth, varies from one stock to the next. Some companies do not trade with a heavy tilt toward the requirement for growth. Others do, and if a company misses on that growth expectation, the stock will plunge. Whereas other companies go without growth for years and maintain a relatively high PE ratio.

If this were not the case, any company with zero growth or a contracting business would be treated as worthless - or otherwise granted an extreme discount - by the market.

McDonald's saw contraction in its business for years, the market still saw fit to routinely grant it a 20+ PE ratio while they shrank. Coca Cola has been in a similar scenario, they've had horrible business performance for years, yet they have a 30+ multiple. Boeing is getting its corporate brains pounded in right now, in every possible regard financially, and yet the stock is very high (and their multiple is about to be astronomical). There is zero expectation for growth in the near future for Boeing.

So what's the basis of Coca Cola's valuation if it isn't growth year to year? Well, all sorts of things enter the picture depending on the stock. KO pays a dividend. KO has an extremely valuable and enduring brand. KO appeals to conservative investors who feel safe owning it (in a world in which ~$13 trillion in debt is trading at negative yields). KO gets put into all sorts of conservative investment vehicles, that helps prop up the stock. KO has a very large international business, so it gets an investor exposure outside of the US; some investors like that (even if doesn't make a lot of sense as a good investment argument in this case; investors are often not rational). KO buys back their own stock, which props things up a bit. KO has maintained fat margins even as their top line has contracted, investors surely like the overall profitability. KO has large, long-term owners, such as Buffett / Berkshire Hathaway, which lends confidence. And no doubt there is also a segment of investors that think KO may one day return to growth again (even if there hasn't been evidence to support that premise for many years), or otherwise make moves to expand the business (eg by acquiring Monster). Most of the arguments and cause for KO at a 30+ PE ratio, have nothing to do with expectations for growth, however.

Apple could go years without growth, and still maintain a surprisingly high PE ratio, a 15-20 multiple for example. You could see them go without growth for many years and the stock merely goes sideways, while the expectation for growth entirely disappears (if stocks were all heavily priced based on future expectations for growth, Apple would have already fallen off a cliff, as nobody expects much growth for AAPL going forward; investors are at best hoping they can replace falling iPhone revenue with service revenue over time). Or maybe the market sours on their performance, they fall out of favor, and they go back to having a ~10 PE ratio as they did in the not so distant past. Plenty of this stuff is emotional (a stock getting tagged in the financial & business press with a negative growth story that dogs it for years) or momentum-based, it often makes no logical sense.

Not that long ago Facebook had a 20 PE, while actually still producing healthy growth. Meanwhile over there is Coca Cola with zero growth for years, zero expectation for growth, and getting granted a higher PE ratio (KO also arguably has an even worse negative story re sugar). That's an example of comical irrationality in charge and FB getting tagged with a negative, emotion-heavy story in all the business press. Then 'magically' it fades, the extreme negative emotionalism fades from the business press, and FB's multiple expands. This is the aspect of human nature that in part led Ben Graham to his statement about the market being a voting machine short-term (emotional heavy; reactionary; did the quarterly results surprise, miss, beat, et al.), and a weighing machine long-term (what is the enduring value of the Coca Cola company, what are its assets, how much is their business really worth, will that persist for many years to come, what will their cash flow look like over the next five or ten years, etc).

So there may not be an expectation of exponential growth forever, but literally declining revenue vs inflation is a different conversation.

If apple made $100 in 2018 q3 and 101 in 2019 q3, then they made less than 100 in 2019 q3 using constant 2018 dollars. It is declining revenue. That's a bit scary. For one quarter might just be a blip.

With their last quarter's profits ($10bn) they could buy back about 50m of their 5bn outstanding shares ($208/share right now); that's 1% of the company.

It may be that the S-Curve is good enough. Make a huge profit and return it to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks. Share price doesn't have to increase based only on hyped growth.

I agree on Apple having been more or less stagnant for a while now. It's no surprise when you look at their products IMO. They seem to mainly be consolidating the market share that they have. As a consumer, you get immense advantages from staying inside their ecosystem, but there seem few people left who aren't yet in their ecosystem and are open to getting into it at the same time.

But calling this a "disaster" is a bit much. The "iPhone gravy train" is still going very strong, albeit a tiny bit slower. They have lots of other products that sell very well. They make a huge amount of practically free cash from their plattforms. If their services and content creation efforts are even semi-successful, they will continue to diversify away from being just a consumer electronics company.

Good grief. The quote in context was "These aren't "bad" numbers, but for Apple they're sort of a disaster." You really insist on skipping not one but three qualifiers? I specifically stated they weren't bad, that the analysis was relative to Apple's historical performance, and I even put a "sort of" in front!

And I stand by that. If you have a company whose stock is priced at a level defined by a decade of profitability the like of which the modern world literally has not seen, these numbers represent a pretty radical correction even if there are lots of Fortune 500 companies that would love to have a balance sheet like this. They aren't Apple.

What did it say when you linked it?

It is close to Apples all-time high now.

So, how they always did it -- from the iMac (1997) to the iPod, iPhone, and iPad?

Apple never did "revolutionary" improvements. They put out a great product, and did incremental updates for it -- in older times the updates where even smaller.

Back in the day people went to WWDC and cheered for minor design changes or a new "now in color" screen on iPods...

I stopped reading NYT after their obvious crusade on Facebook followed by their embarrassing "privacy" series. Most of these companies disgust me, but NYT's reporting almost made me feel a semblance of sympathy for them due to how ridiculous it was.

I don’t think it’s limited to tech. You’re likely experiencing the Gell-Mann amnesia effect here.

They do this a lot. It is (rightfully) pointed out any time a right leaning website story is posted, with the whole "Note this is from X publication, and they are right leaning, so take that into consideration" comment. For some reason NYT seems immune to this criticism though.

Not from where I've been sitting: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+NYT+b...

You could argue NYT took a while to get called out, but not that they aren't getting called out.

Most likely result is Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook buy them off for some trivial (for them anyway) amount of money.

It's also a contrarian position because most people love their tech, and contrarian positions and outrage drive clicks.

This isn't just about contrarian views. This is the fact that, thanks to big tech, any nut job can have the same real-estate and influence as a more established journalistic organization that has many people that internally also argue about how to convey messaging to the public.

I say all this as someone who frequently criticizes the mainstream media for also drumming up drama where it doesn't exist, and misinforming the public. So I'm hardly a cheerleader for them. But at least there is some sort of self-policing going on, and a realization of the responsibility they carry in society. There isn't much of that the big tech companies like Facebook.