I didn't think so.

Anyway, I think the market is convinced Apple can't grow earnings much any more. And the market is probably right. Law of large numbers has taken effect.

But this notion that iOS is getting crushed and is headed into oblivion is a product of the simplistic "winner take all" mentality. Just because it happened with Windows doesn't mean it happens with mobile - or anything else for that matter.

Basic extrapolation. You can take the platforms' relative market-share and see if you spot the trend.

Apple's worldwide market-share has plunged from 50% to 14% in just a couple of years [1]. Android's intake on the market has been so aggressive even Apple is having a hard time keeping up.

Now, to be fair, these numbers are for smart-phones only and not for tablets, so the numbers dont represent the full truth. Right now Apple is definitely leading in tablet-space. But that was also the story for iPhone vs Android-phones a few years back. Android-phones were considered sub-par and iPhones the best of breed.

Where are we now though? Apple is considered the laggard and have to keep up with the constant stream of new and better equipped Android phones.

I suspect we we will see the same in tablet-space: After Apple has had the lead for a few years, it will see it's market getting eaten by Android and Apple will have to start playing the game of catch-up once again. Like they've already done with the iPad Mini.

It looks like history is repeating itself. And from these trends, estimating a future sub-10% market-share doesn't seem all that crazy.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/02/idc-android-market-share-re...

The problem isn't decline. Big corporations benefit from inertia before they see real decline.

The problem is that a competitor grows and expands the pie faster and bigger than your slice.

Edit: I realize that Forward P/E is different from P/E, but various analysts use various numbers for Forward P/E, so it is not a definitive metric in the first place.

EDIT: Companies also manipulate E in various ways so even though P/E is supposedly not as fictitious as forward P/E you also have to be careful with that number.

Nobody can compete with them because they are choosing, through their pricing strategy, to make almost no money (relatively speaking). Buying Amazon stock at these valuations is a bet that in the future they will eventually decide to turn some valves to begin diverting floods of profit into their pockets (i.e., your pocket, as a shareholder), or that the stock price itself will be higher in the future for other reasons (i.e., speculation). The big question is whether the mix of "fields they enter" can support profit margins in the future that will be sufficiently large to justify your investment at current prices (low-margin retail vs. cloud services, for example).

Apple, on the other hand, already has those valves wide open, and is gobbling up historic amounts of cash. The mix of fields Apple has entered is well understood; notably, the market wants Apple to define, enter, and dominate new fields, and Apple's opacity in this regard leads to much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. At the same time, would the market also prefer that Apple close those valves a bit (make less money to buy marketshare and customers)? Apple is so big and so widely held that there's a large cohort ready to believe any particular strategy is the wrong one.

It looks to investors that Apple has run out of ideas, or don't have the design instincts Jobs did and their well has run dry. Sure they've introduced smaller versions of existing products, but where is the next Apple product which is going to make waves and disrupt industries like their other products?? The investors haven't heard anything, and I think Wall Street is getting itchy about the long term prospects of a company whose product ideas seem to have evaporated when Jobs passed away in October of 2011.