A weird thing happened this year: Apple put its brand new iPhone on sale just a few weeks after release. Well, it wasn’t an outright sale. Faced with poor sales, the company boosted trade-in values of old iPhones so that you could get an iPhone XR for up to $300 off. These slumping sales numbers are part of a trend, too. People just aren’t buying as many iPhones as
A weird thing happened this year: Apple put its brand new iPhone on sale just a few weeks after release. Well, it wasn’t an outright sale. Faced with poor sales, the company boosted trade-in values of old iPhones so that you could get an iPhone XR for up to $300 off. These slumping sales numbers are part of a trend, too. People just aren’t buying as many iPhones as they used to, so Apple has been scrambling to figure out its future.
What will it look like? It might look pretty rotten, in my opinion.
I know, I know. “Rotten” is a too-easy quip to describe potentially troubling times for a company named after a fruit. But I can’t stop thinking about the company’s trajectory, especially the degree to which it’s just stuttered in the past few months. I also can’t stop seeing reports of Apple’s plummeting stock price. Just last week, Apple entered a death cross, which is a very bad thing that happens when a stock’s 50-day moving average falls below its 200-day moving average. The same thing happened to Google, Facebook, and Netflix earlier this year, which some observers believe signals the beginning of a bear market or even a recession. I’m personally circling back to this rotten Apple idea.
The last time the United States faced a major financial crisis, Apple was a much different company. It was almost a dozen years ago that Steve Jobs showed the world the first iPhone and announced that the company would be dropping “Computer” from its name to become Apple Inc., a consumer electronics business. By the time Lehman Brothers abruptly collapsed in September 2008, Apple had become the third largest mobile handset maker in the world and launched the App Store, which Jobs said would become a billion-dollar business. This year, Apple bragged about how people spent $300 million on App Store purchases on New Years’ Day alone. And that was after App Store developers made $26.5 billion in revenue the year leading up to that milestone day.
Apple didn’t just survive the Great Recession. The company skyrocketed in value and stretched its tentacles out into all kinds of new categories. Not only did Apple make a tablet, but the company’s iPad has become the most popular tablet in the world.
