It's fascinating to me that the iPad is flat and being effectively cannibalized by the iPhone. Can anyone think of a similar example where a newer form factor gets re-absorbed or passed by the previous form factor? (I probably need a more elegant way to say this)
I don't see any reason to believe that is the case. I think a more logical explanation would be that consumers aren't gonna buy a new iPad every year. I bought an iPad 2 for my parents and they're still using it to this day and have no issues with it. Maybe next year I will get them an updated version. But if you look at the iPhone, most people are on a 2 year upgrade schedule.
But you're only looking at one part of the equation which is existing customers refreshing vs net new sales. So while I agree the refresh cycle might be slower than imagined that's not the only thing going on here.
Doesn't it make more sense that without the subsidy the iPad is treated more like a computer that someone upgrades every few years when they have an issue (breakage or speed) instead of every year or two like an iPhone (where you're throwing money away)?
The iPhone is pretty exceptional product, is it really fair to hold everything else to that standard? Are people going to cry foul when consumers don't replace their Apple Watch every 18 months?
Yes i think you're really onto something and it's part of a much broader discussion. There's a lot of negativity around the two year subsidized plans by telcos in the US. Yet would people be upgrading their iPhone's without these programs? Is the iPhone unique vs laptops and tablets? Or would iPhone sales drop dramatically if those programs disappeared as if we had to pay the full price out of pocket the refresh cycle would move out 12 - 24 months.
Another difference is that many people use the iPad as a secondary machine. They have their phone with them at all times. So if the iPad is a little sluggish at times, you won't be too bothered. But if your phone is being slow, you're gonna want to replace it right away. I think that factor, combined with the upgrade cycle, resulted in many people buying an iPad, and except for the really hardcore Apple fans, have just kept that same iPad up until today. Again this is all based on speculation, but from what I have seen from average iPad owners (not techies in the SF bubble) they are happy with their iPad 2/3 purchases even now.
Also don't forget to consider that when the time to upgrade an iPad comes up, you can decide not to upgrade it and wait until it's completely dead or whatever. With the iPhone, you can usually sell your 2 year old phone for at least $200 and use that for a free upgrade to the next model. Since most people are gonna keep their plans for that time frame anyway, it's stupid not to use the subsidy.
It's only been four years since the iPad was introduced, we may have only been through one full upgrade cycle if that. Lot of people are still using iPad 2s and Apple is still selling them (in the form of the non-Retina Mini) so that's something of a vote of confidence for them.
I know many developers wish the thing would die since it's the only A5 and non-Retina iPad.
It reminds me of the way automobile purchases used to be when my grandparent's were my age. It was common for people to buy a new vehicle way before it 'died'.
They are allowing cannibalization of the iPad to the iPhone Plus because the margins on the iPhone Plus are higher, and people actually upgrade it every 2 years. I don't know a single person, including myself, that has had any impetus to upgrade their iPad, so this is a way of shifting people over to a phone model where there is a more defined upgrade cycle.
My mother in law and wife are both desperate to upgrade their iPads, which are an original model, and a non-retina iPad mini.
We may well buy 2 new iPads over the next 10 months. The point being that there is an upgrade cycle that is more like the Mac than the iPhone, but there is a cycle.
I agree, just want to point out that if the iPad is used for gaming it gives one a compelling reason to upgrade. I bought a new iPad because hearthstone ran like crap on my iPad 2.
> I don't know a single person, including myself, that has had any impetus to upgrade their iPad
Allow me to introduce myself :)
I've had the iPad 2, iPad 3rd gen (Retina), and iPad Air, and I will absolutely be upgrading to the Air 2 as soon as it hits the Apple Store (by the way, what's up with them not announcing an in-store release date?). It has become arguably my primary non-work computer, as my 3 year old Windows gaming PC begins to gather dust due to my not playing games any more.
iPads are cannibalized by 3X-5X cheaper Android tablets[1], not iPhone. People have bought iPhone because it costs upfront $200. That's a magic price. Above that price demand swiftly drops.
[1] According to Gartner, there were 68% more tablets sold in 2013 compared to 2012. Android’s share of the tablet market rise from 45.8% in 2012 to 61.9% in 2013 while Apple’s share has fallen from 52.8% all the way down to 36%.
I don't know who is buying all these tablets Gartner is reporting. Tablet traffic to my website (Alexa top 10K) has stagnated at under 10% for over a year now. Apple is not wrong to look at usage share rather than simply at units shipped. 78% of visits to my website from tablets in the last 30 days were from iPad.
I would be interested to see some market research that shows people replacing their iPad air with a $200 android tablet instead of an iPad air 2. I suspect it's more the case that iPads are not upgraded as often, also, for many, their phone (android or iPhone) can do many of the jobs of a tablet, so they don't even purchase a tablet for that purpose.
> People have bought iPhone because it costs upfront $200. That's a magic price. Above that price demand swiftly drops.
Is that so? I've always wondered what percentage of iPhones sold are the base storage tier. I certainly would never buy the base model, at least until they up it to 32GB.
I think the iPad has a longer replacement cycle - I have an iPad 3 that I use a lot - pretty much daily, and I purchased it on day of release march 2013. While I upgrade my iPhone every two years, I am so happy with my iPad I'm happy to wait another year, or maybe even two - it's fast, has an awesome screen - plus, it will make the leap onto the iPad air all that more awesome when I finally do upgrade.
I doubt that you made money. Just because you made >$200 doesn't mean you made anything. You still have those costs of paying of the entire cost of the iPhone >$900 that you seem to be ignoring, just because they are hidden in your monthly bill.
Depending on the carrier and plan, they might only be "hidden in the monthly bill" in the sense the monthly bill would be the same regardless of whether the device was upgraded.
You mean like the iPod was cannibalized by the iPhone, more or less, and it's revenues have been steadily declining (-28% this quarter compared to Q4 2013)?
No, I believe OP is pointing out that a newer product (the iPad) is being cannibalized by a product originally released earlier (the iPhone). The iPhone cannibalizing the iPod was to be expected - the iPhone came later.
I think it is a pretty astounding change. For a while everyone was thinking "Tablets would kill PCs/laptops". Instead, I think these "super phones" may end up killing (OK, not killing, but at least taking a big bite from) tablets, while laptops remain unscathed because they are still better for heavy duty content creation.
Well that's "normal" progress. To take your example it would be the iPod suddenly roaring back to life after the iPhone had been around 3 years or more and growing rapidly and the iPhone becoming flat in sales. That's why it's so unique (I think)
And over the past few quarters, PC sales either stopped declining or are actually increasing or flat. So the post-PC trend doesn't seem to be in full swing.
The interesting conundrum here, as I see it, is that the iPad is losing its purpose.
Before, it was between phones- which were small-- and laptops-- which were big. But the Air is becoming a lot more mainstream, laptops overall are becoming knife thin, and phones are getting bigger.
I think the iPad was meant to replace the PC for most use cases-- e.g. the email, web surfing etc.
and I think it's been somewhat successful at that. But like pcs people don't replace them every year (wheras phones seem to be replaced every 2-2.5 years).
Now with the Apple Watch, the phone has moved up to be more tablet sized, and the new smallest form factor is the watch.
There was a nice article on an Apple blog the other day (don't remember where) that suggested the problem with the iPad is the lack of purpose built software.
I own an iPad 4 and it's pretty rare that I buy iPad only software. Developers just don't seem to make that much even though the markets a pretty decent size. Mostly it's just simple iPhone apps or games that have been scaled up.
The article was suggesting that because theres no trials or demos in the app store, as well as the inability to return things, people are very hesitant to buy at any reasonable price point and those developers are unwilling to put the time and effort in making it that should cost $20 or $30. Since consumers won't pay more than a few dollars high-quality in-depth apps are in short supply.
In the end it means the iPad feels like nothing more than a giant iPhone, and that's basically been my experience. I really would like to see more large fancy apps that would give the iPad its own strong purpose but for whatever reason that's not happening.
The interesting thing is that I have very little need for purpose built software on my iPad. I get by with Mail (or GMail), Twitter, YouTube, and Twitch, and of course most of my usage is Safari, which really could substitute adequately for all of those except Twitch.
Games are really nice on the iPad, but I only play those the few times a year I fly.
This is probably too geeky for Apple to do, but I wish they offered direct video input on their iPads. You'd be able to use them for extra screen space, hobby projects, dedicated views for things like audio production, temporary screens for headless terminals... so many possibilities! (I know there are apps that do that, but they're workarounds at best and have too much latency and/or quality degradation.)
Not sure if this meets your needs, but I find Air Display to be excellent for this purpose. Zero quality degradation, and the latency is less than I expected. Quite usable for most purposes. I grant you're not going to be doing video editing this way...but you could certainly use the iPad for the palettes for the app you're using to do the video editing.
If you project the future of computing by looking at serious hackers, perhaps project the future of reading by looking at the habits of serious readers.
I think the magazine form factor is here to stay. I definitely prefer reading journal articles in PDF or paper over html, and in PDF form, I prefer my iPad to my phone or my daughter's iPad mini. I was just at a friend's house yesterday. He had a similar problem with his smaller droid tablet, and he was showing me his 12" droid that he recently bought to solve this exact same problem of reading journal articles.
On the one hand, I wan to agree with you - just looking at my own situation I just ordered an iPhone 6 plus, and I have a MacBook Air. But I'm not ready to writ off he iPad just yet. It still has a major advantage over the mac - iOS is so much simpler to use for the average user.
If you go back 18 months or so there where a whole slew of articles describing peoples experiences trying to go iPad-only for trips. They all ran into problems caused by the lack of direct access to the file system, making the sharing of content between productivity apps quite difficult.
With the release of ios8, Apple has addressed this problem. In particular, extensions are a potential game changer, making it easy of apps to work together. For the time being I'm holding off on predicting the iPad's demise - I'm going to wait and see how the market responds to these new capabilities in ios8. For now it's an open question as to the iPad's ability to replace a normal computer for many people. Last year the answer was no, this year I'm not sure.
I don't know about that. I went to buy a iphone 6 and realized it would not fit in my jeans pocket very well. Decided to pass for now. Since getting an ipad I hardly use the phone for much more than email, camera and actual phone calls and the laptop is really gathering dust. I would much rather have a smaller phone and a tablet than an over sized phone.
It's interesting because I'm the exact opposite. I had an original ipad before I had a smartphone, used it all the time, but then saw an immediate drop in usage when I got the phone. Now as I've gotten more and more used to the phone over the years, my ipad has really started gathering dust.
There is about 2B Smartphone on earth. And it is still growing.
There is only 1.5B PC, some of these not even active, and some are business usage.
Which means there are still lots of people not exposed to the usage of computing. And iPad is where that fits in. For Grandparents, and in some countries, parents. iPad is ALL they need. To consume and do very very lightweight content creation.
Apple is holding onto $200 billion dollars in cash. I do like Bill Gate's whole "Let's be able to survive at least a year even if we have no revenue" but companies holding onto this much cash seems like a social ill (and a pretty good counterargument to the whole trickle-down effect)
R&D so they can produce innovative technology as well as design - Apple's R&D spending is well below the industry average, and they've got no equivalent to Xerox Parc or Google Labs.
Acquisitions, where they make sense - take on products that have good tech but need to be shepherded by a large corporation to become something the wider population can benefit from.
Dividends for investors, so that they can judge for themselves whether they want to hold cash for safety or something riskier.
last I checked before today it was $150 billion but right there in their assets chart it says $200 billion
EDIT: it's more like cash + easily sellable market securities and the like (so not the "real" things in the assets like property for their campus or the like).
1. Apple's P/E is way to low for a company that literally sells the best and highest rated products on the market. Historically you pay a P/E _premium_ for these types of stocks, not a discount. The company is downright cheap.
2. ApplePay has a ton of potential. Just in the other news thread others were complaining that moving to chip & pin cards is basically just changing the fraud, not fixing it. ApplePay's tech passes the smell test, and the people who will be using it have expendable money.
3. The Apple Watch. Who knows how it will sell? I will say I am always impressed with Apple's design and polish and it's hard to picture a crappy product. Maybe it's a hit or maybe it just raises their bottom line, either way it's unlikely to drag on profits.
We'll see how it works out. These earnings include only 6 days of iPhone 6 sales... I worry about Apple in my portfolio probably the least compared to other stocks in the S&P 500. It pays a dividend for crying out loud! I have to remind myself not go over diversification rules...
> Apple's P/E is way to low for a company that literally sells the best and highest rated products on the marke
Nobody really cares of this. The price and P/E doesn't have to do anything with 'how good the products are' (well, not too much at least). What (essentially) matters is risk -- upside and downside risk. Apple looks quite safe at the moment with little upside risk (it's not probable that they'll suddenly double their revenue, but they make a lot of money) and not too much downside risk (very-very little probability of failure, but if something like the iPhone loses its profitability then there isn't really anything else to rely on).
Microsoft has exactly the same PE, but it's different. The upside characteristics are the same (not too probable that it's going to grow a lot), but the downside risk is different: Microsoft has many 'legs', it's very unlikely that a large part of their profit just disappears because of losing in one particular market segment, but it's quite likely that they will lose one or two profitable segments
The P/E is a quick proxy for the bond return. Lower the PE relative to reliable, conservative growth, the better the return.
High quality products mean it's unlikely they will release something that shoots them in the foot.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is constantly shooting itself in the foot financially -- from their danger based phones to the slate to the xbox (a lot of market share but also a lot of losses.)
Thus MSFT and AAPL having similar PEs shows that apple's PE is lower than it should be.
People have never believed in Apple, or never "got" it. This is why they thought it would fail without Jobs, they don't understand it.
this is why they discount it.
When they discount it, as measured by PE, this gives the investor opportunity.
1. The P/E is low because of the future growth potential. Investors don't think it can grow at this pace in the future. It's not like a Coca Cola which grew earnings consistently in the double digit percentages over decades.
2. ApplePay has a lot of potential, but not in terms of moving the needle in earnings anyway. A billion dollars here and there isn't enough for Apple to significantly improve earnings. The company is just too big.
3. Same as 2.
The market will price the stock according to the risk it perceives. If you think you know the business better than the market, only then trust your own analysis and declare the market to be wrong and your analysis to be right. That's what value investing is all about anyway.
I've always found the idea of diversification as a rule, or for its own sake to be troubling.
Say you have 100k. You could put it all in Apple, or put 99k in Apple and then buy puts to protect against a sudden decline in Apple with the remaining 1k. (might cost more, not sure.)
Or you could split it up into 6 companies. Are any of the other 5 going to be as high quality as apple?
I think diversification comes from the belief that you can't pick stocks so you might as well pick several and hope they work out on average.
I think that this is not so much the case when you spend a bit of time investigating. I've not found it to be the case, at least. (What I can't do is pick timing, but I can pick stocks, pretty reliably for 20 years or so.)
Right now Apple is at $100ish, and a Jan 2016 $90 put would cost $8ish.
This means that the most you could lose in that time period is %18 of your money... and that's assuming the company completely craters.... if it just drops to $90 because they multiply the dividend by a lot, you don't really care.
If, however, a nuke hits cupertino, you're covered.
I like that a lot better than guessing what Tesla will be at in the future. (I think Tesla is a good company, for instance, but the risk is orders of magnitude higher.)
> I've always found the idea of diversification as a rule, or for its own sake to be troubling.
I agree with you in general, but sometimes you get bit there too.
Back in 2007, I felt that the US economy was in trouble. So I thought I'd be smart and went the full diversification route in my Fidelity retirement portfolio: split it among market funds for different economies around the world. Eastern Europe seemed to be poised for growth, so some $$ there; China was ticking up, so that got some; same for Latin America, Canada and Asia.
But then guess what happened? US got jolted and recovered. But my diversified funds? Most of them are still below what I bought them for in 2007. Especially that f*cker "Mathews China Fund" ($MCHFX). FML.
I hold the opposite view for one reason: The iPhone itself.
With 85% of new phones running Android [1] I think it's only a matter of time before the 'app gap' tilts in Android's favor. At that point it will be game over for iPhone.
On a more personal note I have found my $420 Nexus 5 to be on par with an $869 iPhone 6 - and that can't be good for Apple's long-term financial health.
> On a more personal note I have found my $420 Nexus 5 to be on par with an $869 iPhone 6 - and that can't be good for Apple's long-term financial health.
FWIW, I made the exact same switch as well -- Nexus 5 to iPhone 6 -- and I definitely prefer the iPhone.
I don't know who in the world would want to own AAPL at 20x earnings. They're one big breakthrough by Samsung or Google (or whomever) from having their revenues cut by 90%.
Because Samsung is an immensely diversified company that makes everything from washing machines to apartment buildings. Phones are big part, but just a small part of the overall company.
Why don't you do a little math for all of us instead of providing smart remarks?
What percentage of Samsung's yearly revenue is smartphones? Is that a large part or a small part of their revenue?
What would a 90% drop in Samsung's smartphone revenue do to their overall revenue? Would that be 90% of Samsung's overall revenue or some smaller number? What's that number?
Is that a large part or a small part of their revenue?
1. "larger screens" were too obvious to be a validation for cook, everyone was seeing it and only some fundamentalists were insisting on 3.5" or 4.
2. apple 4th quarter is tied closely to the exact timing of launch and availability of the new iphone versions in US and an enough number of other countries. it's an engineered quarter in that sense.
3. even years' 4th quarters (2012,2014,2016) and following quarters do better historically due to renewal cycles of past good performing quarters.
4. in the light of 3, next apple quarter will also be quite well for iphones.
iPads aren’t doing so well, worse than analysts expected (but we have known this now for quite some time so it isn’t exactly a surprise). Everything else is pretty much above analyst expectations, weirdly enough, even the iPod (who still buys that?).
To be honest, as a consumer I would be ok with this, if not for the software ecosystem. (I like the iPad and it’s useful to me personally. What do I care whether it sets the world on fire.)
Devs jumping ship is something I do worry about, but it seems with size classes Apple is working towards making changing the UI depending on device size easier – and if devs have to change their UI anyway for the larger phones the extra work of making that UI viable on an iPad is hopefully still worth it in the future. (Or maybe Apple could do something cool with iPads. The hardware is already pretty mature, but on the software side there is lots of room for making it a more powerful device. Maybe that will help sell more in the future. Or maybe not.)
Generally I agree with that. I was underwhelmed by the iPad Air 2 intro (and name for that matter :-). One of the things that stands out for me is that people with "large" phones tend to talk on them with a headset. Once you make that jump then the size of the phone becomes somewhat irrelevant.
I keep hoping they will add phone capabilities to the iPad mini, and create a larger version of the iPad air. The notion earlier of checking out the Surface Pro 3 intrigued me, it is a nice piece of hardware but the reading experience is not as nice as the iPad. We'll see.
Bottom line I agree that from this report it seems like iPad is under performing the rest of the portfolio. Tim if you're reading please make a 12 - 13" iPad, I'll buy one of those today if you make it. :-)
What I do enjoy about the Mac are these small indie devs, selling their software at relatively high prices (read: $50 instead of $3). The Mac doesn’t have all the software, but it has some really cool, high-quality software that shares my values when it comes to design and UI.
The App Store (to some extent even the App Store on the Mac) was never really like that and always a more toxic place with cutthroat pricing. You can’t sell $50 software on the iPad (even $10 software is hard to sell), so the situation is just a different one on that device.
I mean, devs are frustrated with their inability to make money on the iPhone by just charging for software – and that device is way, way, way bigger than the Mac ever was.
Selling software on iOS has its own quirks that makes it different from the Mac.
That said, it has always been harder to find devs that share my values on iOS, so maybe that's a general problem of the platform (maybe it’s just a problem with discoverability and there are in fact more devs that share my values on iOS than on the Mac!) and has not a lot to do with how well these devices sell.
In the keynote they touched on iPhone 6 China release in the coming weeks. I have to assume opening those products up to a market of that size will have a large impact
For anyone confused, the reason Apple is currently only worth around $98/share (when the person above invested $400, and consider it a good investment) is that Apple split their stock in June this year. Before the split it was at $645.57/each, they gave everyone 7 worth $94/each instead.
Since June the 7 pieces has gone from $94/each up to today's value of $98.32/each, or $688.24 pre-split. If they invested at $400/share they'd have made +75% profit if they sold today ($288 profit/each). That is before taking into account inflation, tax, and opportunity costs.
If they owned their stock pre-2005 then they have experienced two splits and their stock is worth twice as much ($800) in the above estimations.
My favorite part of the 7:1 split is that the new stock price could be thought of as a percentage value of the highest AAPL ever was before the split, which was ~$700 or so back in Sep 2012.
My (non-tech) friend was sighing about this too, until he thought some more and realized he would have certainly sold it at $20. Which would possibly be an even worse feeling.
My initial tranche of options were at $42 in 2004; I sold the majority in 2009. I alternate regret, rage, and joy in the fact that my extremely good luck in getting the job at Apple allowed me to completely clear my family's debts, and provide capital to start an (ultimately) unsuccessful company.
This happened to me with Tesla. I bought a hundred shares at $35, and had a sell order that said, "sell if it drops more than 10%." Two months later, around $80, it fell to $70 or something like that, and mine automatically got sold. Then it jumped to $250.
But I was gambling with it (it's the only time in my life I've bought a single company's stock like that), and I think in retrospect the result is quite good. I just can't shake away the "if only..." feeling. :-)
When I got my car in March 2013, I decided it was so amazing that I should buy some stock. I don't really invest in individual stocks so I bought 100 shares at $20. A few weeks later I sold 50 for $35 (an amazing % return). Then I watched it climb to $280, wishing I bought 1,000 instead and hung on.
Despite my missed opportunity, I think the car is far better than any other vehicle on the road. There really is no comparison. 8-speed double-clutch automatic with paddle shifters? I prefer no transmission. I could go on and on.
Hopefully, someday in the distant future, all of our cars will be non-smoking.
When the G5 Powermac came out I gave some serious thought to putting that money toward stock ($3k at ~$15/share). I needed a computer too badly though...
I did end up buying at 280, 320, 500 though. Sold it all off just before the last split.
Yep. IIRC, The delay was due to not getting a brokerage account setup properly, and then having the stock pop from 12 (almost book value, or $4billion) to $17. At which point I decided that the move had already happened.
My dad still remembers (and complains about) when his stockbroker was calling him begging him to buy stock in the nearly bankrupt Apple saying it was a good opportunity.
Even a tiny investment would've paid off easily even by the mid 2000s.
Pretty useless to mourn about such hypotheticals. I had a few bitcoins about 3 years ago that were lost to a failed harddrive (beyond repair -- believe me I tried to get it come back). I think about how much I would have every now and then... but meh, this is an opportunity lost that's just somehow more realizable than probably a handful of other opportunities lost that I can't even identify. So, just keep on going, be vigilant and hope for better for another day.
But most people would probably sell when they double or triple their money. You'd have to be insanely prophetic to hold on to the stock this whole time without taking profit.
Yeah, but it makes a good story. I know I got scared after making quite a bit of money on a small (few hundred dollar) buy in TSLA when it started dropping and got out. I thought I got lucky to make a few times return (I did) and didn't want to push my luck so I sold my few shares.
Today TSLA is worth at least 3x what I sold for, but I never would have held though all those ups and downs let alone for two decades. I didn't buy the stock as a real investment, just a little fun in a company I liked.
Prophetic, or patient. I've seen about 60x return - once AAPL popped into a higher stable orbit, I didn't feel it was risky to hold onto it (a drop would still be an overall profit). I was not desperate for the money, so I stopped thinking about it.
No doubt. It's not that I don't think my other investments won't surpass Apple in appreciation, but it likely will on a risk-adjusted basis. I never invested 75% of my portfolio in anything, but I did for Apple.
Probably because the iPhone 6 and 6+ weren't released in Q4, so you'll see the China growth effect in 2015 Q1 instead (and hence the optimistic guidance for Q1 2015).
Under the age of 32? 100% of windows users i know of in that demographic do so exclusively for PC gaming. Anecdotes will always be less useful, but this strikes me as a repeatable trend among college campuses and young professionals... to say nothing of a generation of children growing up with iPads.
I don't personally know a single person personally under the age of 32 with a Mac. For kids under 18, their parents almost universally buy them cheap $500-700 laptops at Costco. They're basically a yearly disposable item at that price (though most of those same kids have iPhones). None of my friend's kids in college seem to have changed that purchasing habit since it's pretty sensible.
If you gathered all my friends and family together with all their computers, probably <15% would have Macs. Of the people with Macs, only myself and one other person work in tech.
At my local coffeeshops, about half of the people there mess around on some kind of tablet, of the other half, most (maybe 90%) are on corporate Windows machines or Surface tablets (they're really popular around here with the corporate sales types for some reason). And then I and maybe 1 other guy or a college aged kid with a 3 generation old used Macbook are the only people running any version of OS X.
I use a Mac because it's what my work issued to me - a West Coast based startup btw. I'm about to change companies soon and I already know my new place is going to issue me a Windows machine.
I live in the wealthiest town in the wealthiest county in the United States. Most of the neighboring counties are also in the top 10. My county is also in the regional home to one of the 5 largest tech industries in the United States.
This is 4 years old, and I suspect Apple's position has only improved since then, but see http://fortune.com/2010/08/07/big-macs-on-campus/ . To your "dueling anecdotes" point, it's also clear from this article that some universities are much more Mac-centric than others, given that one survey of 5 universities showed 70% of incoming freshmen came with Macs.
