{"id":15231,"date":"2016-04-28T10:00:05","date_gmt":"2016-04-28T14:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/2016\/04\/a-bad-quarter-for-apple-is-a-great-one-for-anyone-else\/"},"modified":"2016-04-28T10:00:05","modified_gmt":"2016-04-28T14:00:05","slug":"a-bad-quarter-for-apple-is-a-great-one-for-anyone-else","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/2016\/04\/a-bad-quarter-for-apple-is-a-great-one-for-anyone-else\/","title":{"rendered":"A bad quarter for Apple: Is a great one for anyone else"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Apple&rsquo;s most recent quarterly results were less than spectacular but, while that&rsquo;s probably better news for its competitors than its usual continual record-setting, don&rsquo;t schedule the victory parade yet.<\/p>\n<p>Writing for the <em>Forbes<\/em> contributor network and candy cane freebasing den, Ewan Spence says &ldquo;A Weakened Apple Is Vulnerable To Samsung&#039;s Attack.&rdquo; (Tip o&rsquo; the antlers to <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/jonyiveparody\">@JonyIveParody<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<div id=\"gpt-showcasemobile-2\" class=\"articleBloxAd side-promo side-module side-ad mobile-only smartphone\"> <\/div>\n<p>Samsung?<\/p>\n<p>[The Macalope runs to the window]<\/p>\n<p>Macalope: You, there! What year is it?!<\/p>\n<p>Boy: &rsquo;Tis 2016, sir!<\/p>\n<p>Macalope: And people are still saying Samsung is going to beat Apple?!<\/p>\n<p>Boy: [Shrugs, wanders off to buy a goose.]<\/p>\n<aside class=\"nativo-promo smartphone tablet desktop\" id=\"\"> <\/aside>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&hellip;Samsung is on a roll. Momentum is building&hellip;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Samsung&rsquo;s year-over-year growth? <a href=\"http:\/\/www.idc.com\/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS41216716\">Down 0.6 percent.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>That&rsquo;s some roll. Is that a potato roll? Poppy seed? Dinner roll? California roll? Salmon skin hand roll? Because it&rsquo;s seeming not a business roll.<\/p>\n<p>Hey, they did do better than Apple. But the smartphone market has gone flat. Now it&rsquo;s mostly a game of stealing share from others. Samsung has high customer satisfaction but so does Apple and Apple&rsquo;s share is famously low, so it has more room to grow. Ben Bajarin at least thinks <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jwan584\/status\/725339676459061248\">Apple has an edge<\/a>. We&rsquo;ll see. The Macalope doesn&rsquo;t like to make predictions about things that have more moving parts than the <em>Game of Thrones<\/em> title sequence.<\/p>\n<p>Remember how Xiaomi was highly touted as the company that was going to dethrone Apple because their phones were so cheap and if there&rsquo;s one thing that Apple customers want it&rsquo;s cheap phones? That was a good one. Remember how even Lenovo was going to crush it after buying Motorola from Google because&hellip; uh, mumble, mumble, look out Apple? Yeah, now they&rsquo;re both no longer in the top five.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>More importantly,&nbsp;Samsung&rsquo;s ascendancy is kicking&nbsp;in just as Apple hits one of its roughest patches of the decade.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>It is a rough patch, to be sure. For Apple. For any other company it&rsquo;s a kittens and puppies surprise birthday cake delivered by a dozen adorable talking wombats when it isn&rsquo;t even your birthday. Why, you&rsquo;d have to go all the way back to 2014 to find a first calendar quarter so bad for Apple.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>While&nbsp;the raw numbers are a concern, the bigger risk for Apple is the damage to the perception of the iPhone brand&hellip;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Yeah, people really think iPhones are crap now.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The move to larger screened devices ignored a product cycle of iPhone 5, 5C and 5S users refusing to upgrade&nbsp;&#8211; and now the four-inch iPhone SE has arrived it&rsquo;s cannibalizing sales of the larger and more expensive devices in the portfolio.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Wow, the Macalope is so old he remembers when pundits said everyone wanted big phone because big phones are big and big is always better.<\/p>\n<p>Pundits like Ewan Spence who said last September before the introduction of the iPhone 6s:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The potential for the iPhone is greater now than it has ever&nbsp;been.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Now what does he think?<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Every [Apple] product line has a black mark against it in the media&hellip;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>And this is different from any other year how, exactly? Every single product has announced has come pre-failed by the media.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&hellip;the game isn&rsquo;t always about reality, it&rsquo;s about perception.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>And, rest assured, <em>Forbes<\/em> will always be there to not help clear up the difference between the two.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apple&rsquo;s most recent quarterly results were less than spectacular but, while that&rsquo;s probably better news for its competitors than its usual continual record-setting, don&rsquo;t schedule the victory parade yet. Writing for the Forbes contributor network and candy cane freebasing den, Ewan Spence says &ldquo;A Weakened Apple Is Vulnerable To Samsung&#039;s Attack.&rdquo; (Tip o&rsquo; the antlers&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15232,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/midatlanticconsulting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}