Had you bought stock in Apple Computers when the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, you’d have received quite a nice return on your investment over the past 25 years. Had you bought Apple stock in 2001, when iTunes was introduced, your nine-year ROI would look pretty stellar, too. Heck, if you’d bought some AAPL in 2007, when the iPhone came out, chances are you’d have doubled your money in three short, mostly lackluster stock market years.
But what about now? Is 2010, the year of the iPad’s introduction, time to buy or time to sell shares in the company Steve Jobs founded?
Self-described mobile industry enthusiast, author and chronicler Tomi T Ahonen is unequivocal: “[Apple’s] time of ascendancy has come to an end.”
To be fair, Ahonen’s analysis and forecast focuses mainly on the iPhone and his reasons for declaring that “Apple’s market share peak among smartphones, and among all handsets, on an annual basis, is being witnessed now.”
And while his long, meticulously documented tolling of the bell for Apple’s fortunes in the mobile phone market is unrepentant in its certainty that the company cannot withstand the rapidly advancing competition from the likes of RIM, HTC, Samsung and Nokia, Ahonen writes glowingly of Apple’s brilliance and of a “time when the Apple phone fortunes will turn again.”
The short story is that Ahonen believes Apple must evolve its iPhone strategy beyond “one phone per year” and “[get] into the smartphones race ‘for real'” by giving us a model range of iPhones with features such as SMS and QWERTY keypads.
His article is long and filled with self-congratulation as a mobile industry analyst, but it makes for quite compelling reading and is sure to spark controversy in its certainty that the decline of Apple’s smartphone market share is imminent and inevitable.
