[AAPL] update

Comments in the backlink by long time reader Augustine were insightful and stimulating enough for me to do another short post on the coming decline of Apple.  He wrote, "It was more noteworthy to me that, as more and more carriers are stopping financing their sales via subsidized phones with a contact, Apple is picking it up the slack announcing not the price of its new products but the installment amount. A company is at the beginning of its end when it lends money to its customers to buy its products. Or at least it is if the easy fiat credit spigot doesn't generate the same return as it used too. Apple is too late in this game and will reap tears fit venturing down this slope."

Well, I hate to say this because I really try to get all the marrow out of the bones once I go to the trouble of cracking them open but I got scooped here.   Augustine is correct.  Apple's products are too expensive to pay cash for and so some kind of blow-softening is required.  But instead of doing this into a climate of rising liberalism where customers would accept the rent (liberal) vs. own (conservative) model more readily, Apple is trying this strategy into declining liberalism.  In fact, even the stodgy carriers are escaping the rent to own model.  Rest assured that this is not happening because they want to change.  They are doing this because hardware is becoming commoditized and cheaper and people are opting out of long term contracts which are a must for the model in which the user gets the phone now but pays for it over time via higher service rates.  "Subsidized" hardware model is not really subsidized; its simply the carriers acting as shadow banks.

Apple did not see this coming and so what it is now essentially doing is assuming the rental risk that the carriers are now moving away from.  Does this look like Steve Jobs type leadership to you?  Not to me!  It looks, as Augustine alluded to, like stop-gap-o-nomics.  Steve Jobs led with new models like iTunes.  Tim Cook is running Apple into the ground with his lack of vision and basic lack of understanding about how the herd is changing.  He's fighting the last war.  Someone is going to take a bite out of Apple by envisioning the next war and entering into it on its own terms.

Whether people understand it or not, Tim Cook was fooled by peaking liberal herding signals into jumping onto the "hey, I'm gay too" bandwagon.  That red arrow marks the time of his big public announcement.  It is coincident with Michael Sam getting cut by the Cowboys.  A year later, Sam left pro football altogether to focus on his mental health.   It is no coincidence that all of these things centered around the 3 of 5 in the apple chart.

My model say AAPL shares are going down to $55 before this correction is over and that is best case.  If they don't get rid of Tim Cook right now, Apple could fall completely from its perch and turn into a mania stock.  Nobody and I mean no body is saying this is even remotely possible except me.  But $55 isn't just possible according to the Elliott wave principle, its the most probable outcome even if those who have lost their individualism in the herd cannot see it.