<p>People that gripe about the cost of Apple products are missing 1/2 of the equation - resale value. My 4 year old Mac Mini just sold on eBay for 60% of the price I paid. Try that with a 4 year old Windows PC. They are worthless. Same holds true for the iMac, iPad, and iPhone. Try re-selling an Android tablet for the even close to the same percentage of original price than an iPad. </p>
<p>Don’t believe me? Go to Gazelle and look for yourselves at resale values.</p>
<p>Oh and for those that are complaining about the China mfg of Apple products I challenge you to look at the back of your PCs and find the mfg location. China!</p>
<p>BC, I think everyone will just have to agree to disagree. The MB air looks neat and hasn’t been duplicated, that is true. But it’s also in a niche market. Not everyone wants a laptop that flimsy. I’ve played with them at the Apple store on multiple occasions as my sister is an Apple junkie also. Very flimsy and very behind the times as far as processing power is concerned (Compared to normal laptops, including the MBP). I know plenty of people with a MBP, not a single one of them has even contemplated purchasing the Air. If I remember right for about 200 dollars more (base price), you can have a much more powerful computer with the MBP. Of course, you’re paying for it’s size. (Same thing with the Mini).</p>
<p>That being said, my laptop is about 2.5 years old or so and it’s thinner then my friends MBP’s, has a 13 inch screen, a 9 hour battery (to my knowledge, even Apple hasn’t replicated that feat… so all companies have their up’s and down’s), is about 3 lbs, and runs windows 7. I believe I paid about $700 for it. I have no doubts that it will still be functioning 10 years from purchase, as my prior laptop from college still works as well as it did the day I got it. I only know one other person from my school who still has a working laptop and it’s a Sony. Sure, both of our old laptops are bricks, but they work… that’s more then I can say for the above mentioned MB and MBP’s that have crapped out of the years on hard drives and dvd drives and screen backlighting.One friend does still use his old MBP without it’s unlit screen… it sits there on his desk hooked up to a monitor keyboard and mouse as if it were a desktop.</p>
<p>As for reselling a mini after 4 years for 60%, I’ll never understand. That’s even worse then paying full price for a new mini. a 4 year old mini probably has the processing power of about a 6 year old regular mac and probably an 8 year old PC (just venturing a guess here). For 60% of that originally inflated cost due to size that person could probably build their own tiny computer and it would be more current in specs.</p>
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<p>You mean we really didn’t just go through a housing bubble where
of millions of people didn’t pay far greater than intrinsic value
for homes?</p>
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<p>The industry is flocking to build MacBook Air clones.</p>
<p>100 Million Netbooks have been sold.</p>
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<p>Faster processors generate more heat everything else held constant.
The form-factor of ultrabooks means that heat is a big problem if you
use faster processors. Fortunately Intel continues to increase
processing power while decreasing power consumption. Basically compute
power will continue to increase every year.</p>
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<p>My MBP is four years old and is nowhere near as fast as current
machines but it gets the job done. I like a high-resolution screen
and it’s only available on 17 inch notebooks. I use my notebook
professionally.</p>
<p>I do know people with MacBook Pros that have purchased MacBook Airs.
And Sony Vaios (ultrabooks that cost a lot more than MacBook Airs).</p>
<p>There is a market out there for this stuff. Apple just has to add
15 inch Airs. I’d love a 17 inch air.</p>
<p>“The increase in Mac sales was fuelled by the very strong growth in
MacBook Air, as well as the continued strong performance of MacBook
Pro,” chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer said in an earnings
call. “While the portables represented 74 percent of the total Mac
mix, we also generated record desktop sales.”</p>
<p>Oppenheimer linked the growth in MacBook Air sales to the fact that
the latest model is the first to put full-strength processing power
into a thin-and-light device.</p>
<p>[MacBook</a> Air sales help Apple earnings | Financials | ZDNet UK](<a href=“News and Advice on the World's Latest Innovations | ZDNET”>News and Advice on the World's Latest Innovations | ZDNET)</p>
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<p>We have ten or twelve laptops dating back to 2000. They all still work
though one Dell crashes due to heating issues but the Pentium 4 was a
flawed processor in terms of heat. These laptops were used by our kids
when they were young too. Proper care and maintenance can go a long
ways to ensuring that your computers last a long time outside of design
and material defects.</p>
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<p>One of the big reasons why I like Macs is the operating system. It’s
really nice to have the combination of Unix and a company that
provides support for the operating system. I also use Ubuntu but have
to do a fair amount more work in keeping the operating systems
up-to-date.</p>
<p>At any rate, you can’t fight the market. People pay crazy amounts of
money for homes, cars, planes, boats, clothes, jewelry, bottled water,
bottled water with sugar and flavoring, colleges, private schools,
public schools, granite countertops, stainless-steel appliances,
toilets, gardening, security services, cable television, mobile phone
subscriptions - it kind of makes the cost of computers pretty small.</p>
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</p>
<p>Your friend’s very lucky then. After troubleshooting or repairing hundreds of Sony laptops and some desktops and seeing the level of poor design and quality control and high prices since the '90s…I advise family/friends to stay away from them. </p>
<p>With Sony…you’re really just paying for the brand name…because I don’t see the prices justified by the specs/poor QC/design…and based on experiences repairing hundreds of them and having dozens of friends taken in by the Sony hype only to find their notebooks failing several times in or just out of warranty coverage. </p>
<p>Incidentally, I have a Sony laptop in pieces at home*…courtesy of a friend who dumped it on me after getting fed up with a rash of problems from the day he bought it. The backled/LCD screen failing just after the warranty ran out was the last straw for him after all of the other issues which meant that notebook spent much of its time being RMAed for warranty repair service. </p>
<p>Ironically, he’s now been running an Apple for 2 years without problems.</p>
<ul>
<li>And yes, it has at least one Foxconn component clearly labeled inside…and possibly more I haven’t noticed yet.</li>
</ul>
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<p>Nice. How did you do that? I have made money investing in Apple but never made any money trading Apple. When it zigs, I zag. I have not found any technical indicators that work well with Apple. </p>
<p>I have had more luck trading crude oil futures using Wilder’s ADX. There is big risk though – if there is a black swan event (Israel bombs Iran, Obama opens the oil reserves) and I am in the wrong position, it could be a big and quick loss.</p>
<p>BC, I was actually going to say the same thing in regards to cars and houses and whatnot. In the end the price of the computer seems kind of small.</p>
<p>Everyone likes what they like and that’s why there are so many options.</p>
<p>I personally am not a fan of Apple’s OS. I don’t mind Ubuntu, we run it on one of our laptops. Speaking of that, are you familiar with Ubuntu for dual core android phones? Any experiences there?</p>
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<p>There’s a guy that I follow that picks about 5-7 stocks and holds them for periods of time and exits at certain times to get back in after pullbacks. I watched him doing this for a while and we had AAPL in common and I started following some of his moves. Some of the companies that he trades are not my cup of tea but I’ve made some good coin off of his picks. He posts his holdings and his trades.</p>
<p>He also does intraday stuff using TNA and TZA - I think that those are triple-index ETFs. He posts his charts for his rationale for getting in and out. The trades run from under an hour to two days.</p>
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<p>The most advanced phone that we have is a Motorola RAZR - the kind that came out around 2003. They cost about $55 at WalMart, are very sturdy, do fine with making phone calls and text messages and I wouldn’t lose any sleep if we lost one.</p>
<p>I thought that it would be fun to look at the stores with the highest
annual sales per square foot.</p>
<h1>6: Gamestop, $1,021, used videogames</h1>
<h1>5: True Religion Apparel, $1,096, jeans (average selling price $260)</h1>
<h1>4: Lululemon Athletica, $1,800, athletic apparel (I just had a quick look at their website for shirts and they run from $42 to $64)</h1>
<h1>3: Coach, $1,824, handbags. (the front page of their website lists handbags ranging from $398 to $498; if you scroll down, there’s a wider range of prices with at least one at $1,200)</h1>
<h1>2: Tiffany, $3,085, jewelry.</h1>
<h1>1: Apple, $5,647, electronics.</h1>
<p>Sometimes we go into shops at malls and my son asks me who buys all of this stuff and I tell him that there are a lot of people with serious money or the ability to spend a lot.</p>
<p>Source: [Bottom</a> Line - Apple tops list of the most profitable stores in America](<a href=“http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/26/10496703-apple-tops-list-of-the-most-profitable-stores-in-america]Bottom”>http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/26/10496703-apple-tops-list-of-the-most-profitable-stores-in-america)</p>
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<p>Is that the Leavitt bros site you referenced earlier or someone else? I have been following Mark Arbiter for the overall market and he seems to be pretty good for timing the market overall. He is predicting a 5 percent pull back, but it does not seem to be happening. If WTI goes to 120, I think we will have a crash and that guy at ECRI will look like a genius.</p>
<p>Speaking as a member of the 99% living among the 1% (see Mrs. Turbo’s dot com jackpot for details :)), what I would say to my kids at the mall when asked who is buying all the stuff would be slightly different:</p>
<ol>
<li>There’s lots of people who think they have money</li>
<li>There’s lots of people who have some money but not as much as they think</li>
<li>There’s lots of people who don’t have a lot of money but have to sustain some parts of their ‘lifestyle’, be it North Face, Apple, Starbucks, etc because other parts of their lifestyle are not sustainable (as in, why the Japanese buy all these consumer electronics?)</li>
<li>There’s some people who have lots of money </li>
<li>There’s a few people who have serious money (different than #4)</li>
</ol>
<p>Apple lucked out in that their success hit the market when people had lots of disposable money and felt good. Had the iPhone come a year later, it’d be a footnote in history. 2007 was a great year for those who were high flying, then all of a sudden… Boom.</p>
<p>2008-present for most people is categories 1 thru 3. A couple years back our middle school ‘resource officer’ (read, school police) was showing off some iPhone app used for this or that related to school police. He asked the kids if they had any questions. DD2 asked with a straight face… “how can you afford the iPhone while you and everyone in the school staff constantly complain that the salaries paid to school personnel are not good enough?”. </p>
<p>In a growth economy, Apple’s achievement should be celebrated as well as it should. In a stagnant economy as we are right now (and as we’re headed for the foreseeable future, Europe style) one can only wonder if the money that ends up in Apple’s coffers could have been put to a better use…</p>
<p>It is one of the traders that subscribes to Leavitt Brothers. There are other guys that do well but I cannot follow their systems as they go against my personality or operate in time frames that I cannot play in.</p>
<p>There are two schools of thought that I’m seeing: ride it up and get out when the indicators signal a pullback; or, go to cash now. There’s so much stuff happening around the world that the best that you can do is to react after it happens. </p>
<p>A lot of shorts have been burned in the current rally trying to call a top.</p>
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<p>Strange view of history.</p>
<p>Apple’s earnings started growing in late 2004. Their earnings have been
growing since. Yes, right through the recession.</p>
<p>There are several other large-cap tech companies that grew their earnings
through the recession too. I recall how gloomy things were but my company,
and many others, kept reporting higher earnings numbers while banks and
home builders were imploding.</p>
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<p>We have that kind of banter in our town forums on a regular basis though
the discussion is a lot more heated.</p>
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<p>We’ll see. They are being pressured to pay a dividend. The money that
they make goes to shareholders, employees, vendors and governments.
Does Apple help with the velocity of money? I think so.</p>