Information asymmetry. It's what makes markets interesting and how people make lots of money.

In the future there is now some uncertainty: was Scott Forstall the key to iOS? Is Jony Ive a good UI designer? Will Bob Mansfield retire again next year? If you don't like that uncertainty, it's a good time to sell.

I agree there is definitely information asymmetry going on. However, usually a movement in a stocks price is lead by institutional money. This is for the most part what every hedge fund competes on, a competitive advantage.

If you think that your observation has escaped institutional investors eyes then I'd disagree with you. I'm completely biased as I'm in the industry but I think most people would be very surprised by just how much the average hedge funder knows about the companies they have positions in.

There were rumors circulating a couple days before the announcement that this was coming.

EDIT: this was sarcasm.

That's not to say Apple is disappearing anytime soon, but I think they have lost their touch. I believe it will be a slow but steady decline in value, down to a more Google-like share price.

That's been a tough six weeks for them.

Re. OS X Mountain Lion - you should upgrade. Lion was as close to a dog as Apple have release, Mountain Lion is absolutely an improvement. I can understand someone on Snow Leopard not wanting to move to Lion but your Air presumably shipped with Lion. Frankly that's the version you get away from, not hunker down on.

Yet you're refusing to upgrade to the version that may fix some of the issues you have?

I skipped Lion because I'd heard so much bad, I like ML though, it's pretty solid.

As others have said, ML is solid. All consumer features can be safely ignored: don't like iCloud documents? Turn it off and use your Mac as you always have. Under the hood, ML is as good as the Mac has ever been.

1) Comparing share prices between companies doesn't make sense (the share price is total value / total number of shares, the latter can change). That said, GOOG's current share price (~670) is higher than AAPL's current price, and near its all time high (~700).

2) If you meant to compare total values, that Apple should be worth as much as Google... Apple is over twice Google's total value (550B to 220B) so that'd be an enormous decline in value.

3) If you meant to compare relative value (price/performance), Apple is actually a better "deal" for investors in that its P/E is around 14, the market average, while Google's is 21. 14 dollars in Apple will create $1 in earnings, but 21 dollars in Google is required to do the same.

Apple very well could depreciate in value if their earnings slip. That would put its P/E in the bottom half of the S&P 500 (historically Apple's P/E has been around 15, it's around ~14 now).

On the same scale as the growth that Apple has seen over the last 2 years.

If iPhone/iPad sales decline precipitously (to ~2010 levels) then their share price should fall to roughly that amount [probably more, since it indicates something is terribly wrong and likely to decline further].

If so, that experience might have something to do with:

"I refuse to upgrade to their latest OS."

Mountain Lion also adds some cool features like iCloud and iMessage integration, and my personal favorite, Power Nap:

"When your Mac goes to sleep, it still gets things done with Power Nap. It periodically updates Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Reminders, Notes, Photo Stream, Find My Mac, and Documents in the Cloud. When your Mac is connected to a power source, it downloads software updates and makes backups with Time Machine. While all that updating is going on, the system sounds are silent and no lights or fans come on, so nothing disturbs you. And when your Mac wakes up, it’s good to go."

http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/

I don't know if you think that everyone urging you to upgrade is lying to you or if you're just being obstinate. It's OK if you don't want to upgrade to Mountain Lion but stop complaining about problems that have been solved.

However, Power Nap only works on recent Apple notebooks with flash storage and cool microprocessors (like your MacBook Air).

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/07/os-x-10-8/18/#power-man...

http://www.macworld.com/article/1167970/up_close_with_mounta...

I actually moved to Android with the introduction of the iPhone 5/iOS 6. The maps thing had somewhat of an impact, but it was more looking at how much Android has progressed with Jelly Bean (also considered WP8 which looks very impressive) vs how much iOS appears to have stagnated.

As for the hardware, I love my 2k12 11" MBA but I can't say for certain I'll remain in the Apple ecosystem on my next purchase. As a Rails dev I just need a *nix of some sort.

In Apple's case that peak coincided with the my hyped iPhone 5 launch which might explain some of the exaggeration.

There are many many people who understand the market better than I do but to me at least this is a complete non-story.

Over the last year, Apple's share price has swung widely from $363.32 to $705.07.

Surely a more accurate statement would be that the share price has increased dramatically. Swung widely implies ups and downs.

The current dip is similar to one seen in April and its share price is still markedly up YoY.

AAPL currently has an implied volatility of 28.93%. The odds, quick-and-dirty Gaussian [1], of today's return happening by chance is less than 1%.

>"Apple's movement over the past three months has been an exaggerated version of the NASDAQ or the Dow"

Over the past three months (60 trading days) the historic ß has been 1.26. This would make the systemic portion of today's return -0.33%. Curiously, the historic ß for the past year (250 trading days) has been 0.94.

[1] Using a non-Gaussian alpha-stable or asymmetric generalised hyperbolic distro still implies this being a significant event not attributable to market noise (though there is some shadiness happening in the markets today with system's coming online after a non-standard detachment, e.g. KNX declaring self-help)

(I suppose Apple is not yet that big but it could happen someday. Maybe a popular stock having much more trades than others could have such impact?)

http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/stocks/movers/dow/

If it dropped 20% in a day I think it'd be safe to say there was a loss of investor confidence.

It's the market being the market and fluctuating in the way things do when you give a bunch of people a load of money and tell them to buy and sell things they don't understand.

Some of the people selling might be thinking about the Nexus (though I think very few), some might be thinking about the execs, some might have just hit the wrong key but most of it is just stuff that we'll never understand and in the long term almost certainly means nothing.

Looking at the market over short periods is a route to madness.