… and counting. Apple PR.
Kaboom! To put this into perspective, the 1st gen iPad released in 2010 sold 300,000 units on its first weekend. It took a full month to reach 1 million units. The iPad 2 was supply constrained at launch so Apple bypassed announcing any weekend numbers. The somewhat tech blogsphere maligned iPhone 4S, sold 4 million units on its first weekend.
Then you have clueless idjits like this who opined that the reason Apple management pulled this dividend/share repurchase plan out of their ass over the weekend, was due to soft sales/numbers being well off expectations for the new iPad. I tell you, the elevator is broken and just unable to reach the top floor for some of these people. It’s sort of like clapping with one hand. No use in even bothering to have a rational debate with people like this since it will just amount to a futile waste of time and bandwidth.
As the meme goes, haters gonna keep hating. Unlike back in the dot-com bubble where we were talking about sky high P/E’s and just excess/hubris all around, Apple is doing this in a “to put it bluntly”, shitty economy. And it’s multiple is way below 30 times earnings. You want an expensive, overvalued stock? Look no further than AMZN with a 135 multiple. And I already said what I had to say about YELP (which as expected, at the end of week 1 of its IPO, closed under $20 share leaving anyone who bought that on the publicly traded markets underwater). Oh, they are going to play with it for the next few months until the holding period is over.
Sure, there is competition in this space. No one is pointing a gun to anyone’s head that they have to buy these products from Apple as there are alternatives out there. That’s a GOOD thing. By various accounts, Android-based devices are being used in great numbers. Different strokes for different folks. Apple’s product appeal to a different demographic and the reality is that unlike in the past, these aren’t traditional Apple customers / fanatics. Apple is making significant inroads into the average customer demographic (and there are lots of these folks out there) who don’t do blogs or deal with all this ongoing online dramas.
