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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Doren who wrote (150175)	2/13/2013 1:45:33 AM
From: Elroy	2 Recommendations Respond to of 213176

My main interest is a fabless semi stock named Silicon Motion - they make lotsa NAND flash controllers, and a small bit (15% of 2012 revenues) of LTE transceivers. Their LTE transeiver pairs with an internally sourced Samsung LTE baseband in Samsung LTE phones. Thus the interest in QCOM (LTE baseband competitor) and Apple (major NAND flash buyer). I have three iPads (1, 2 and 3), and they're great. However, iPad 3 is not much better than iPad 2, in fact not much at all. And if we buy another tablet, I'll definitely try a cheapo Asian $99 tablet before buying another new $650 iPad 4 or 5. The main thing we do with our iPads is browse, Skype video chat, and the kids play games. I could be wrong but I think our usage patterns (browse, read, chat) are standard for 90% of tablet owners. I'm pretty sure the Asian CheapTab can do that as well as an iPad, so why pay $550 more for the Apple brand? Some will, I won't. Even if the CheapTab is so bad that I hate it, I can throw it away, say that I've learnt my lesson, and then buy a $650 new iPad 5. And I think my $120 Cherry Mobile phone is a much better purchase than my wife's $500 brand new iPhone 5. I've also mail ordered a 23 inch all in one Windows HP PC for $650. My mother bought a similar sized (maybe only 21 inches) All In One thing from the Seattle Apple store for $1,300 or so. I think we'll both be equally satisfied with our purchases (we're both casual computer users). In this case the decision was she's used to IOS on a PC, I'm used to Windows, so the choice is easy for both of us. But, on the margin, the $650 machine will win the decision making process. This is the problem for Apple investors. Apple products are great (lately) when they are the first mover products. But once the cheapo competitor catches up, which has happened with the iPhone and will likely happen over the next 6-18 months with tablets, price wins. And once competitors catch up technologically, price wars push ALL prices down, including Apple's premium prices. The good news is I think a good bit of revenue growth slowdown and average selling price compression is already factored into Apple stock due to the low valuation.

To: Doren who wrote (150175)	2/13/2013 8:10:21 AM
From: rnsmth	1 Recommendation Respond to of 213176

<<But investing? That's a tough one. I've seen too many chip companies go down in flames. Chip design takes superior brains no doubt, but its all physics. Very hard to tell when a company is going to lose it, at least for me. But it is intriguing.>> I held some QCOM Jan 2014 $62.50s for quite a while. Closed them on Monday for a slight gain and put the proceeds into our dividend growth portfolio, opening a position in Digital Realty Trust, a datacenter REIT. This morning DLR announced a 7% increase in the dividend. We'll see how that goes, but I am very pleased with the results in our 24 position dividend growth portfolio.