They don't need to be known, but they need to maintain the positive values associated with their brand.
The Apple brand is their most valuable asset, they probably destroyed billions in brand value with the shitstorm around this horribly distasteful ad.
Waiting for something like that for Apple. Let me get my popcorn...
And if the company fails to know its own history well enough that even they are missing the point that speaks volumes about how they value institutional knowledge.
So go short AAPL, Jim Cramer. My bold prediction is this ad does diddly to their bottom line. You really think people are going to boycott Apple over it?
Stock is short-sighted, and I don't expect any boycott.
The consequences of the slow degradation of a brand are measured in decades.
If you take a look at the Vision Pro, they didn't expect selling them like hot cakes, given the price, but from what I've heard they still missed their projections, by a long shot.
This pattern will repeat, one failed or tepid product launch at a time, eroding confidence, and ultimately, yes, the stock will plunge.
stock is not short sighted. It does react quickly to information (which means it was too late to short a while ago) but to think that you can make money by not buying stock now, but waiting to buy it at another time is really terrible advice, and it's been refuted.
To believe that stock is short-sighted is to believe that investers as a group are dumber than you are because they've put their money into the market but you know better.
There is a saying you may not be familiar with, "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."
the market doesn't know the future, it just incorporates current knowledge and opinion. Is AI a bubble right now? the vast riches afforded those who make the right call when AI is ready is justification enough for current enthusiasm, no irrationality needs to be hypothesized. And like people who lost their bet on the 49ers to win the Superbowl, there's no reason to posit irrationality if a bet doesn't pay.
It is incredibly good at doing that. But it is short sighted. It is able to integrate risks to some extent, on a short time scale, but it is very bad at processing second or third order effects, and can't do strategy.
In other words, the famous invisible hand is completely unable to predict the future.
Humans are also notoriously bad at that, but still better. This is why we have states and CEOs.
Therefore, your money should always be "in the market", not out of the market. Therefore, it's very difficult to make the case that the market is short sighted. I think what you are trying to say is that immediate risks are better understood than longer term, so the more distant future has higher volatility.
Maybe the strongest sense is that the iPad comes from the island of broken toys?
Slightly less emphatic but more sinister is that an iPad cannot help but involve itself in the destruction of the arts.
I do agree that the ad does not have any observable moral upside, and it was a mistake to run it.
But then again, if Apple did have a YouTube collection of ads that they chose not to run and discussion of why, it might be easier to trust them. They are so opaque at the moment that trust is a very big ask.
Apple is the default choice for grandparents again, but they don't even have the schools anymore (Google conquered edu with Chromebooks).
Parent is talking about brand goodwill.
You're talking about revenue.
The two are different, but not unrelated. One reason Apple can run the margins and move the product that it does is because it's Apple. If it were "random company" and didn't benefit from its RDF, those numbers wouldn't be sustainable.
Which, in a nutshell, is the Tim Cook problem -- you can make all the sales numbers go in the right direction, but that's not the product magic that Apple has historically benefited from (and been valued at).
But I think they have a leadership problem. Tim Cook is a glorified bean counter, not a creator, not a visionary, and it shows.
I know that most people are looking at the stock and will say that everything is fine. Sure. I am looking at the products, and except for M series of SoC, this is all boring.
All empires fall, but today is not that day for Apple.
GE's valuation was up ~4500% during Jack Welch's tenure as CEO.
Consider that when talking about something measured in decades the examples that come to mind are things people said in the last few weeks. But what were people talking about a decade ago? Which of those things actually reflected the long term trajectory of the company?