Looks liek Appe turned the corner.
Notice the increase in spending in R&D to look for the next big thing.
Apple's new reality
Tim Cook, chief executive of Apple, at the recent meeting of technology chiefs in Sun Valley, Idaho. Bloomberg
by Tim Bradshaw
Robot soldiers are patrolling the streets of a rainy east London. In a video filmed on a handheld iPhone, the armed machines march past graffiti-strewn walls and stand guard outside unmarked doors in Shoreditch, as pedestrians hurry past, huddled under their umbrellas.
As a vision of the distant future, the video is faintly dystopian, but as a preview of Apple's new product offering, it is more uplifting. The images use the new "augmented reality" effects that will launch next month with the latest version of Apple's iOS operating system for iPhones and iPads.
While the pedestrians in the video are genuine, the robots are not - an example of the way AR blends digital graphics with the real world.
Apple's new 'ARKit' technology takes the complex combination of computer vision, tracking sensors and mapping software found in Pokémon Go or Snapchat and turns it into something that can be incorporated into any app.
"I wouldn't have been able to make that a couple of years ago," says Duncan Walker, a London-based independent developer behind Trashgames, who made the clip. The video was put together in a weekend - instead of the months it might take a Hollywood film-maker. "There are opportunities for [ARKit] to be massively disruptive."
For a company that is so secretive about its future plans, Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, has found it hard to contain his enthusiasm about augmented reality. AR's impact will be "big and profound", he said this week on a conference call with analysts, as Apple released its quarterly results. "This is one of those things that we'll look back at and marvel on the start of it."
There has been a lot of marvelling recently about Apple after the strong sales figures it announced. But as the company navigates the 10-year anniversary of the launch of the first iPhone, Apple also faces another bout of speculation about where it goes from here.
In the immediate future, the issue is whether iPhone sales can continue to grow indefinitely. Beyond that, Apple's efforts in AR are being closely scrutinised because it is a test of the company's ability to keep producing a sense of wonder among its customers. Can Apple escape the fate of most Silicon Valley companies that become trapped by their size and bureaucracy, the disrupters eventually themselves disrupted?
These deeper questions are being asked of Apple at a time when some analysts believe the world's most valuable public company is poised to reach an even bigger milestone: becoming the first American business to be valued above $1 trillion.
"I fully understand a trillion seems like a big number," says Amit Daryanani, analyst at RBC Capital Markets, one of the first on Wall Street to suggest its shares might rise that high. "But it's not that unreasonable to think there's another 20 per cent upside in Apple's stock."
Brian White, analyst at Drexel Hamilton, whose $202 target price implies a $1trillion valuation, is betting that the next iPhone will prove more durable in its sales, after last year's declines. "I don't expect the boom-bust cycle that we saw in fiscal 2015, which really hurt Apple," he said. "It's still so cheap, for a company that generates this much cash."
Apple added almost $30 billion in market capitalisation in a single day on Wednesday - about as much as HP is worth and more than Dell's price tag when it was taken private a few years ago. Its shares jumped 5 per cent, briefly hitting a new all-time high of $159.75 and a valuation above $810 billion, after Tuesday night's forecast of accelerating sales growth.
To maintain this growth, some new innovations are already in the works. At least one model of the next iPhone is expected to include wireless charging, and 3D camera sensors that will allow owners to unlock the device simply by looking at it. Some features were apparently confirmed this week when Apple accidentally posted source code online.
Commodity products
Some in Silicon Valley, however, believe these represent merely incremental improvements and that the leading smartphone makers have become constrained by having to produce more than 200m devices a year.
"As Apple and Samsung have optimised for profitability, consumer choice has gone down and innovation has gone down," says Niccolo De Masi, president and chief operating officer of Essential, a new consumer electronics start-up co-founded by Android creator Andy Rubin.
"When the grandparents have the same phone as the grandkids, the phone is a commoditised utility."
With Apple's vast scale, though, comes vast resources. As the iPhone matures, Apple has begun to place bets on a wider range of markets, from wireless headphones and speakers to the automotive and robotics technology.
While Mr Daryanani believes Apple might reach that $1trillion valuation off the back of increased iPhone profits alone,
Mr White says it needs to look beyond the smartphone to new innovations. "There has to be something on the horizon that people can dream about," he said.
Apple's annual R&D investment has increased tenfold since 2007. At $8.6 billion in the first nine months of the 2017 financial year, it is now 5 per cent of revenues, its highest ratio since 2005. In regulatory filings this week, Apple said the rise was "driven primarily by an increase in headcount-related expenses to support expanded R&D activities".
Mr Cook teased investors this week with a hint that its work on "autonomous systems", being tested on the roads of California in its self-driving car prototype, could be used in "a variety of ways - and a vehicle is only one". Apple is making a "big investment" in autonomy, he said. "We do have a large project going."
That had analysts speculating about what the mystery new project might be, from flying drone cameras to domestic robots.
A walking, talking Siri may be hard to envisage given Apple is seen as lagging behind rivals such as Amazon and Google in the trend for "smart speakers". Nonetheless, Apple often works on many different projects - and is not afraid to experiment internally and then kill some ideas before they ever see the light of day.
Former employees liken it to a venture capital company, rather than a traditional process-driven industrial conglomerate. While some worry that its increasingly broad product range risks diluting co-founder Steve Jobs' imperative to focus on doing a few things well, others argue Apple has retained his ability to say "no" to things in order to prioritise.
A particular area of experimentation, people familiar with the matter say, is a pair of AR glasses that might move cameras, sensors and screens from the smartphone to the face. Yet despite the excitement surrounding ARKit, internally the company is still not sure what the most compelling application for such a headset might be.
As a result, there are still several different kinds of prototype being experimented with, according to people close to the company. One group of engineers is said to be advocating for a pair of glasses that have 3D cameras but no screens, leaving the iPhone as the hub and main display.
Such a device might have more in common with Snapchat's $130 video-camera Spectacles than Microsoft's bulky and expensive HoloLens AR headset, which shows digital holograms which can be manipulated using hand gestures. However, no final decision has been made on the product's final formulation. Apple declined to comment.
"What Apple has is the capability to work on a certain type of product - now much more so than 10 years ago," says Benedict Evans, partner at Silicon Valley investor Andreessen Horowitz. "Glasses fit squarely into that capability but the self-driving part of cars, somewhat less so."
Unlike the development of the iPhone, when there was a single team working in secret on its breakthrough touchscreen technology, today's Apple has a broader distribution of the "computer vision" expertise that underpins both AR and autonomous systems, insiders say.
As it pours its resources into a wider range of core technologies, Apple's designers and engineers are content to wait for the right moment to launch a new product, rather than force it out to meet Wall Street's quarterly earnings schedule - but then move quickly when the moment arrives for Apple to make what it describes as a "meaningful contribution".
The team tinkering with a miniaturised hard drive, for instance, did not realise that it would one day upend the music industry as a key component of the iPod.
"Every handful of years, there is a window of opportunity," one former employee said, recalling a lesson taught at Apple University, its internal training scheme. "Our job at Apple was to be the best prepared, not to predict ahead of time what it will be. If you are the best prepared, you can dive into it."
Research firm IDC predicted this week that spending on AR and virtual reality products and services will soar from $11.4 billion in 2017 to $215 billion in 2021.
App developers such as Mr Walker are optimistic that AR could become the next big computing platform after smartphones. "I think glasses will be a new way of interacting like touchscreens were 10 years ago," he says.
However, Geoff Blaber, analyst at CCS Insight, predicts it could take another 10 years for AR glasses to become a mass-market product like the iPhone.
"I don't think we can rely upon a 'next big thing' in the next 12 months," he says. For now, Apple's next big thing is still the iPhone. For some investors eyeing that trillion-dollar valuation, that might be enough.
Read more:
http://www.afr.com/technology/apples-new-reality-20170806-gxq863#ixzz4p1JrFgE7
In line with my thoughts from the very beginning of the thread.
@kayanation......Stock is up over 60% since this dumb thread was created. And this shit is just getting started. 
@ all the BGOL tech "Gurus". Get in line with the rest of the hacks w/ the decade long track record and counting.....
Man, who was the IDIOT that created this thread when Apple was trading around $90?
