Oops. Bad Guidance. Great Opportunity.

Yesterday, much to our surprise, Apple created a commotion by announcing that they had to lower their guidance for the last quarter that ended on December 29. In short, iPhone sales are not what they expected mainly because of the Chinese market. As the iPhone is still the main driver of Apple numbers, this is expected to have a material impact on Apple’s bottom line. Apple Tim Cook published a letter to the investors and a paragraph caught my attention:

As we exit a challenging quarter, we are as confident as ever in the fundamental strength of our business. We manage Apple for the long term, and Apple has always used periods of adversity to re-examine our approach, to take advantage of our culture of flexibility, adaptability and creativity, and to emerge better as a result.

I’m not an Apple investor but a consumer of their products and services. To me, this could represent a great opportunity for Apple to rethink a few things. I hope they embrace the occasion to clean up their product lines and make pricing adjustments. These would be easy though as they doesn’t require a lot of resources to undertake. For example, on the Mac side, they could kill the 12″ MacBook and the Mac Pro. More swift actions are needed on the software and services side of the equation and these aren’t short term items. I’ll publish my wishes for Apple in 2019 where I’ll elaborate on this further.