Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

good news everybody

.⁦@realDonaldTrump⁩ says there was a “glitch” in stock markets last month, but they will go up again as trade deals are made and have a long way (up) to go pic.twitter.com/GKgYEy5oDq

— Jeff Mason (@jeffmason1) January 2, 2019

he's taking the SPX private at $420

Apple lowering guidance https://t.co/VBDek4GWD9

— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) January 2, 2019

Kinda curious what 'net-cash neutral' exactly means in this context.

Our profitability and cash flow generation are strong, and we expect to exit the quarter with approximately $130 billion in net cash. As we have stated before, we plan to become net-cash neutral over time.

They’re going to continue spending their cash board on buybacks is presumably what that means.

Would that mean no increase or decrease in cash on the balance sheet?

*hoard

weakness in china. is that good or not. i forget?

Net cash neutral suggests they plan on matching stock buybacks and cap ex to cash flow. Ie, if net cash neutral in 2019, they'd have $130B on the books in 2020.

feel like this is all karma for getting rid of the headphone jack

fuck u apple

They have a business model predicated on phone users updating on an annual or biannual basis. I'm perfectly content with a $40 pre-paid plan (ie, no subsidy for phone purchases), and buying whatever iPhone is available at the $150 mark on gazelle.com should I break the screen. 5S forever.

As Apple goes, so goes the Nasdaq. pic.twitter.com/OxGyEWGKeG

— Rene Nielson (@nielson_rene) January 3, 2019

airpods look atrocious. Stock should tank purely for that reason.

Have the last 3-4 generations of iPhones had any important innovations at all? Like there's no reason for me to get a new one, especially knowing that it doesn't even have the headphone jack. All the "new" stuff feels gimmicky and unessential. Perhaps not Apple's fault - I'm not sure what there is left to do in the smartphone space - but relying on customers dumping a grand for tiny incremental upgrades is pretty dumb

the upgrades are getting more and more incremental yeah, unless they can convince the mass populace that they need to play fortnite on their phones there's not a lot of reason to upgrade more than once every 4 or 5 years anymore

I think the price is up in part bc carrier subsidized upgrades are kinda going away and people are replacing their phones every 3-4 years instead of every year or two like clockwork.

my kids were happily playing fortnite on my old 5s for days until i caught them at it

hell i upgraded from a 2014 phone to a 2019 phone and sure everything loads a bit faster but the only major difference to me is the battery life is like 10x longer

trust trump. the chinese will come around soon!

I gave up my iphone and went to a cheap unlocked motoG 3-4 years ago. Completely fine.

We’re No Longer in Smartphone Plateau. We’re in the Smartphone Decline.

If you bought a new iPhone 3G in 2008, and then a new iPhone 4 in 2010, you were buying markedly different machines, with the iPhone 4 sporting a Retina display, a much better battery, a faster processor, and a sleek, sharp-edged design. If you bought an iPhone 6 in 2014 and then an iPhone 7 in 2016, that expected improvement was much harder to mark (except, perhaps for that fact the the iPhone 7 didn’t have a 3.5mm headphone jack).

> only major difference to me is the battery life is like 10x longer

Less a matter of technology improvements than charge cycles taking their toll on the battery. The iPhone is notoriously ill designed for battery replacement (My old iPhone 4 had to be pretty completely disassembled), but for $29 from iFixit I'd do it again.

xp resolution on those cameras sure didn't decline

The next apple product i will buy will be whenever they have a swank med alert bracelet.

oh wait, looks like the apple watch may do this.

xps wow, going from 305 million to 1.46 billion phones shipped globally in only seven years might have had something to do with the market saturation...

hell i upgraded from a 2014 phone to a 2019 phone and sure everything loads a bit faster but the only major difference to me is the battery life is like 10x longer

― ciderpress, Thursday, January 3, 2019 11:28 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the only reason i got a new phone, and it was totally worth it tbh

just walked past the apple store and there was a tv reporter doing a remote: 'apple's stock is down 30% since early november . . . '

This still doesn't look to me like we've reached capitulation, yet. It looks like there are still money managers trying to ride the big swings.

the only new Apple product I would buy would be a new ipod lol

ditto

I have a 160 classic with a battery on the wane, not sure what to do

Buy a couple-year-old iPhone and use it without a SIM?

Then you can use Spotify/Apple Music/SoundCloud and Zing/ILX while you're at it.

might do that but they only go to 128 GB and I don't wanna delete a bunch of stuff off it

think I'm just gonna subscribe to Apple Music some day so I can have everything on the cloud at least, but I don't wanna pay $9.99 a month for a service I'm not really gonna use

I have a 160 classic with a battery on the wane, not sure what to do

I just got rid of my 160GB Classic that I'd had since 2011. Replaced it with the Sony NW-A45 Walkman, which has a 16GB internal hard drive but also takes a MicroSD card. I'm using a 200GB card at the moment.

You should look for a better price, thoug - when I bought it last month it was $178.

yea I'd love something like that but I have so many playlists and junk built into iTunes that I don't yet wanna move away from that. Apple got me there.

xpost aimless, i don't think we are anywhere near capitulation. I posted somewhere else that I was waiting for the second trading day of the new year to see if I wanted to go long anything. I am picking up tiny, tiny amounts of a couple of equities but I think this entire month will be really volatile.

wework is an interestingly weird company (strange funding rounds with softbank, weird real estate financing gymnastics), but this is also not a good sign in general

WeWork has flown its entire global team to LA for 3 days, rented Universal Studios and hired the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Let’s remember this when the down rounds come.

— Dave Thomson (@theboydigital) January 10, 2019

I remember when Limewire had its office in NYC and they had this really great rooftop hangout, catered lunch, yearly team vacations to Costa Rica.

I remember when the generic Irish middleware company my friends worked for had 'end of JavaOne' party and hired Spinal Tap.

Yeah that kind of thing still goes on. I am going to Scottsdale Arizona next week for example lucky me. But that WeWork trip is kind of out there for a company that loses money and leases more real estate in Manhattan than any other entity.

We went to Vegas last year and there were so many complaints from engineers about how much it cost and how awful Vegas is that this year they’re sending half of us to Scottsdale and half to Seattle.

In 2018 is it still super-expensive to get the Red Hot Chili Peppers?

caek I can't believe you're not coming to Seattle, rude

in the neighborhood of $1,000,000 xp

haha, i didn't get any say, but truly i am all about the 0% humidity and golf courses and rotting from the inside so scottsdale is perfect

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-08/wework-gets-a-visit-from-financial-reality

this is not a company that should be flying a global workforce to one of the most expensive conference cities on earth

This is a firm whose valuation only really makes sense if it grows at double-digit rates for years to come, while managing to maintain its rental prices even if the era of cheap financing comes to a halt.

lol

i had a desk at the wework in DTLA for november. i needed it for a specific project, but gave some thought to keeping it. in the end, the sheer amount of sponsored content events that they were clearly getting a cut of was too much. the final straw was someone who'd paid wework to have the opportunity to sell her custom kimonos in the coffee area. a company that needs to shill custom kimonos getting softbank money and signing 99 year leases seems like a top of the market signal as much as the apple letter about china.