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Only Google Can Save Apple Now

Austin Smith

Published: April 19, 2024 7:00 am

Things are looking bad for Apple, with shipments in decline, the EU and the US filing major antitrust cases, and the company abandoning it’s electric car ambitions Apple needs something big to turn the company around. The company is absent AI, and rumors that they’re working with Google may come to fruition and save the company.

Transcript:

This is Doug McIntyre, the editor-in-chief of 24-7 Wall Street.
I’m in New York, and I’ve got Lee Jackson, senior editor of everything that has to do with investing in public companies, in or near New Orleans, right, Lee?
In and near.
Across Lake Pontchartrain, but real close.
Close enough for government work, as they say.
Absolutely.
So Apple, the news keeps coming, all of it bad for Apple.
Yesterday, One of the big research firms that covers tech came out with a study that said Apple had dropped from number one in smartphone sales in the world in Q1.
They’re now number two.
Samsung went ahead of them.
Apple had about a 9% drop in unit ship compared to the same quarter last year.
Now, I mean, how does it get worse?
And I know we’ve talked about this quite a bit.
I think that, you know, coming out with a new phone every 12 to 18 months, I think is starting to hit a wall.
And people are like, look, I, you know, unless you’re the biggest Apple fan in the year, are you really that excited to go get an Apple, you know, 16, iPhone 16?
I don’t know.
It doesn’t look like it.
I’m wondering if you look at a new iPhone, What can’t you do and when?
You can’t get a better camera.
You can put one in, but no one knows how to use the current camera because it’s so complicated.
I mean, I can use it to talk on it and do a selfie.
I think most Americans are like me.
Maybe they know one more function.
It’s got a better chip in it.
It’s faster.
Who cares?
What is the chip going to do that matters to me even slightly at all?
The battery has a longer charge.
I don’t care.
When I go home at night, I plug it into the wall.
Okay.
So it’s like the features of an iPhone really haven’t changed in any significant way in a couple of generations.
People are expecting now that if Apple is going to climb back on its horse, they have to have some sort of significant advantage.
personal artificial intelligence software application on these or no one’s going to buy.
Yeah, it has to be a real blockbuster new element like that.
And they’re behind in that as it is.
And since they’ve decided not to build electric cars and yeah, they would need some new blockbuster app for the phone that perhaps somebody else doesn’t have.
Now, there’s been a conversation in the press about the fact that Alphabet, which is also sort of behind in AI, and Apple might put together an alliance where you’ve got basically Google’s AI team providing the necessary software, most of it, to Apple.
Now, to me, that’s a marriage made in heaven.
Google has Android, which it doesn’t make any money on.
For it to be able to get on devices like iPhones gives it a broad distribution.
Apple now has 2.2 billion active devices around the world.
And Apple needs somebody like Google.
So am I right?
Is that a very good marriage?
Well, it seems like it.
And if consumers had the ability to swap between iOS and and Android in any sort of function for either gaming, because the younger people, especially that are avid gamers, that’s why they prefer Samsung, because it all is just works better for them.
So if you could have any sort of meeting of the minds between Alphabet and Apple, that could be big, very big.
There’s another problem of substance, and that is that Apple has the government’s the US coming after it, I would think, and obviously I’m not a lawyer, but if Apple said, okay, look, we’re going to allow Androids, the OS, to run on all of our hardware, that the government may not go away, but the case against Apple would become much less severe.
Yeah, I mean, I think the government would be tempted to tap the brakes a little bit on that.
And Apple could always go the easy route and split out the Mac business or split out watches or something of that nature where they can say, hey, look, we’re not trying to tie all this stuff together and you can use both formats and there you go.
And that may be what it takes for the government to back off.
One of the things I don’t like about Apple right now is that Tim Cook, the CEO, and a bunch of people sort of mouthing the same thing, said, oh, our services business is going to save everything.
You know, we’ve got all these devices.
We’re going to provide services for them.
I mean, they’ve got Apple Pay and some other nonsense.
You know, they’ve launched a competitor to Netflix, Apple TV+.
you know, how, how you’re you’re launching something into a market that’s already got six or seven major streaming competitors.
And you think that somehow you’re going to be in one of the top two or three.
I don’t see that happening.
No, I think TV was kind of cool when it first came up because there, there wasn’t, you know, so many over the top streaming providers that could compete.
But I mean, now, I mean, you have so many and they’re competing on price and,
And I agree.
I don’t think their service is business.
I mean, it’ll be consistent, but it certainly won’t take them over the top.
Right.
It’s not going to ride to the rescue.
That’s not going to happen.
No.
Well, since there’s news about Apple almost every day and certainly important news.
two or three times a month.
We will revisit this very, very soon.
Thank you for your observations on Apple.
I’m sure the management at Apple also appreciates it.
I’m sure they do.
I’ll talk to you soon.
Thanks a lot, Doug.
See you later.