AAPL
August 11, 2011 at 11:17 PM by Dr. Drang
I stopped following Philip Elmer-Dewitt (@philiped) on Twitter today. I have nothing against the guy, and this isn’t a call for others to follow my lead. I’m just tired of Apple financial news.
It seems like every Mac-related site I visit or subscribe to is spending more time telling my how much money Apple is making and less time telling me how I can make better use of my Macs and iPhone. A little cheerleading is fine, but I don’t need to see daily stories about how Apple is dominating this sector or that. The smartphone marketshare battle with Android, for instance, has absolutely no effect on how I use my iPhone or how I live my life.
And apart from a few soap opera-style incidents, like Eric Schmidt getting booted from the board, the stories aren’t even interesting. Each quarter Apple exceeds its own predictions (because its predictions are a deliberate fiction) and those of most analysts (because most analysts are either necessarily conservative or incompetent). Each quarter about half its sales at the physical stores go to first-time Apple customers. These are stories that could just as well be TextExpander snippets.
Even the math and data graphics done by the analysts—at least the part that ends up in the news reports and blog posts—is pathetically simplistic and dull. Averages and percentages are considered high-level cipherin’. Elementary time series are thought to be brilliantly insightful. Baseball may be the dullest sport on the face of the Earth, but at least you can find interesting calculations and graphs among the sabermetricians. No such luck with the AAPLmetricians.
I started following PED after his interview on Dan Benjamin’s Pipeline podcast. He’s led an interesting life and has a long history with personal computers. I thought his Twitter feed would reflect that, but it’s just a neverending series of links to his articles about marketshare and pie charts. Too bad.
