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The Market Ticker – The Desperation Of Apple Fanbois Is Palpable
This morning has been the wretch-fest with all the angst on Apple and it's stock price performance.
The latest is the fascination about some sort of “wrist device.” Now the sell-side charlatans are really down to the last straw they can grasp.
Let's put this BS to rest eh? You can make a wristwatch-sized device that plays music or similar. In fact there already is one; the “Shuffle” or any of its competitors such as the little SanDisk Sansa that I have.
But playing music requires almost no power, and thus you can obtain reasonable in-service use for something that's (1) inexpensive and (2) works for the occasions where you want to have a very small package for playing music.
As soon as you stick something that transmits RF in that case power budget goes way up and battery life goes way down. And despite the higher power density of lithium ion batteries over the last decade or so there's simply no way to get 1,000mah or more into a package that fits in your wrist and is of reasonable size. My Garmin GPS watch (the Forerunner 305) that I use for running and biking has a ~900mah battery and its size forces the form factor of the device, along with limiting “in service” time to about ~5 hours per charge — not enough for an “all day” wearing, and that's a radio receiver.
The simple and inescapable fact is what I've talked about for years: All hardware producers ultimately devolve into commodity status, and commodity hardware manufacturers all eventually trend to single-digit gross operating margins.
This reality, along with the utter impossibility of continual exponential growth (especially when it occurs in double digit quantities) without winding up with every bacterium being eventually “blanketed” with your alleged “technology”, is what always pops these bubbles.
I am continually reminded of the follies of 1998 and 1999. Northpoint/Rhythms/Covad anyone? These folks all came into my offices a bit earlier on trying to get me to “partner” with them to deliver DSL, at the time the “great thing”, to people's homes. It was a good pitch, honestly, and a number of my competitors took the bait.
I took out the calculator instead, and quickly concluded that there was simply no way that the numbers would work over the intermediate term. I thus declined, and ultimately was proved right, evading what would later turn into an unmitigated disaster for anyone who got sucked into it.
The game hasn't changed folks, only the screaming of those hawking the wares.
PS: The terminal phase of all bubbles is when the implausible is all that's left to sell. We're there in an increasing percentage of stocks generally, and that in turn means that if you wish to keep some of what you have accumulated over the last couple of years you'd be wise to pay attention rather than follow the crooners right off the cliff.
Disclosure: No position at present in the worm-ridden apple.
2013-02-11 06:15:05
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