Matt Richman

This explains a lot.

Nathaniel Popper and Nick Wingfield relay some Toni Sacconaghi wisdom through The New York Times:

Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research, said that if Apple developed a clear plan to use some of its cash to pay dividends to shareholders it would help the company’s shares, perhaps lifting them 10 percent or more. But that will not return Apple shares to their glory days. He said the bigger problem bearish investors saw with Apple’s shares was more straightforward: growth is stalling.

There are two problems with this analysis. For one thing, dividend payments do not at all correlate with — yet alone directly cause — an increase in share price. As I wrote nearly two years ago:

As Horace Dediu pointed out, when technology companies institute stock buybacks, they don’t create a lot of shareholder value, if any at all. Microsoft has spent a little more than $97 billion on buybacks since 2004 and its share price has gone up less than 10 percent. Over the last 10 years, it has spent over $170 billion on both buybacks and dividends while MSFT has gone down 19.92 percent. At the same time, networking giant Cisco has returned $50.7 billion to shareholders since the beginning of 2004 while its share price has dropped 35.58 percent. Additionally, RIM’s stock price has plummeted 21.16 percent since it announced a share buyback program less than 30 days ago, on June 16th. Though other factors certainly could have played a part in the depreciation of the share prices of the aforementioned companies, using cash for stock buybacks and dividends clearly isn’t the best way to increase shareholder value.

The other problem with Sacconaghi’s analysis is that, contrary to what he asserted, Apple’s growth is not “stalling”. In the last year, Apple’s bottom line — it’s profit — has grown at 0 percent, 24 percent, 21 percent, and 93 percent compared to their corresponding previous-year quarters. And the no growth quarter doesn’t count, because, as Apple itself stressed, its first quarter of fiscal 2013 was 13 weeks long whereas its first quarter of fiscal 2012 was 14 weeks long. You can’t properly compare the two.

Revenue growth is the same story: 18 percent, 27 percent, 22 percent, and 59 percent.

I seem to remember that the rate at which Apple was growing was itself growing at a few points in time. That may no longer be the case, but just because the rate at which the company is growing is itself not growing anymore does not mean that Apple’s growth is “stalling”.

Some quick back-of-the-envelope math reveals that the company is still growing.

For a while now, I’ve been meaning to write a piece about old media (e.g. The New York Times) and how it will have to change in order to survive going forward. But I think John Herrman and Ben Smith sum it up extraordinarily well:

The media’s new and unfamiliar job is to provide a framework for understanding the wild, unvetted, and incredibly intoxicating information that its audience will inevitably see — not to ignore it.

Quentin Hardy of The New York Times aptly summarizes Intel’s problem:

PC sales are now collapsing, as users are relying more on mobile phones and tablets that rarely contain Intel chips.

There’s one problem with the article, though: ARM isn’t mentioned, not even once. How any reputable publication — let alone The New York Times — published an article about Intel’s dilemma without mentioning ARM is truly beyond my comprehension.

The title of this piece is misleading. Samsung doesn’t actually report how many smartphones it sells. There are estimates from outside firms, but they’re never actually confirmed by Samsung itself. Without more data, it is impossible to prove, as the headline asserts, that Samsung sells more smartphones than any other company. It’s simply not possible.

This event backs up John Gruber’s theory that “The desire for the ‘Oh, how the mighty Apple has fallen’ narrative is so strong that the narrative is simply being stated as fact, evidence to the contrary be damned”. A publication like BusinessWeek should know better. That it doesn’t simply proves Gruber’s point.

This seems similar to Apple’s Jobs-to-Cook transition. Obviously this has been planned out, and the incoming CEO obviously has the support of the outgoing one.

News, but not really.

Kara Swisher has the scoop:

According to several sources close to the situation, the nifty news reading app Pulse is in advanced talks to be acquired by a major “platform” company.

[…]

But sources close to the situation tell me that the winner for Pulse is likely to be one that has emerged as a content powerhouse of late: LinkedIn. The business networking site has been aggressively adding a range of very impressive content to its fast-growing repertoire. In addition, CEO Jeff Weiner, who used to run content offerings at Yahoo, knows a thing or two about the arena and — if I might be familiar — this is just like him. Lastly, the stock has performed strongly, and it’s in a good position to shop.

Pulse is an incredible app. I hope LinkedIn doesn’t screw it up.

This is one of the dumbest things I’ve read in a long time. Titled “Apple’s 128GB iPad Defends Against Intel’s Haswell Assault On ARM”, the piece is predicated on the ideas that Apple released the 128GB iPad in response to an “onslaught” of something that hasn’t been released yet, and that people decide to purchase a tablet based on the architecture of the microprocessor it runs on. 

Read that last sentence again. It’ll make you smile.

Quentin Hardy, writing for The New York Times:

Over the last six months, shares of Intel have fallen about 18 percent, while Qualcomm’s stock is up almost 20 percent. ARM Holdings, which sells designs for low-power chips popular in mobile devices, is up almost 90 percent in that time.

As I said more than a year and a half ago, Intel is done. ARM is the future.