edit: analyst expectations are averaged from http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-q2-2012-earnings-2012-4
iPad sales are up 150% year over year. How that's disappointing, I'll never know.
This like buying an expensive sports car and having it ONLY go 150MPH when similarly priced cars can reach 200MPH. 150MPH is great compared to a stock Honda Civic, but you will be disappointed when your friends best you with their supercars, because you paid so much. Apple stock is a supercar stock, so when it doesn't perform at supercar standards, the market is disappointed.
Your analogy also misses on a number of levels. But to make it crystal clear, I'll correct it. Today's results are like buying an economy car in a price band where similarly priced cars can reach 60 MPH and finding out that yours goes 800 MPH and being disappointed. For a share of AAPL is priced more like a Kia than a Ferrari relative to its growth.
To clarify: the stock is not expensive by any classical valuation metric. The stock is trading at a multiple of < 16, which is lower than companies in much slower-growing businesses. For example: McDonald's (18), Procter & Gamble (20), Coke (20). In fact, the Dow Jones index of utility stocks trades at a higher earnings multiple. And now there's a dividend in case 100% EPS growth isn't enough for an investor. So unless your idea of an expensive high-flying stock is a stodgy utility, AAPL is absolutely not priced for wild growth and profitability.
Waiting for the Ivy Bridge refresh myself. (not that it's an Earth shattering improvement over Sandy Bridge based machines but I have no urgent need to buy right now so I don't mind waiting)
Source:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-on...
Also, won't the new iPad sales be the highest during the launch week and then settle down?
Also: follow the links to the source. The Atlantic article misquoted its source. That source claims that the consensus is 12 million.
"The most pessimistic analysts are calling for sales of just 9 million; the most optimistic see sales of over 15 million. Consensus is for about 12 million, which would be a year-over-year increase of 155%."
Couldn't find a description on how consensus was derived (is it an arithmetic mean?). Depending on how much of an outlier the 15 million estimate was, 11.8 million actual sales might actually be above the median estimate.
update: found the source http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/19/how-many-ipads-did-ap...
Looks like Apple was well below the median, though PED says the 6 most accurate analysts he has been tracking had a consensus estimate of 10.95 million iPads.
I never thought of that, very good point. I'd actually be very interested in seeing how many iPhones were sold in emerging markets.
Also, just now it was said on the call that they are selling iPads as fast as they can make them, so they are still supply-constrained. They either couldn't make as many iPads as analysts predicted (though, actually, analysts were very close, to say Apple missed the estimate doesn't really make much sense) or iPad 2s tailed off faster than analysts expected.
good point.