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Apple chief executive Steve Jobs is officially stepping down.
It is not a joke! [Source] (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904875404576528981250892702.html)

In my opinion, Apple was a one man company. I think investors who have valued Apple at $350 billions are full idiots and we would see soon new big market crash.

nah, we may see a little selloff, but the stock wont crash. apple still has the mobile, tablet and mp3 player markets cornered; they have a moat that will be hard to cross, they are highly profitable, and they have a SHITLOAD of reserve cash.

that still says "buy" to me.

besides, investors have known about his failing health and heave expected him to step down for sometime now.

Yes but they only had the markets cornered because steve jobs was an excellent promotor of his products. he managed to get people to buy the iphone 2g, 3g, 3gs and 4 even though all of them were essentially the same phone but with features that were cut from the previous versions because "they don't need them, really".

If APPL does crash then I'd certainly think about buying.

Apple has already lost the mobile (and probably the tablet) battle to Android.

andriod owning the largest part of the mobile market share is only temporary, IMO.  since there are a lot of cheaper phones running android, they have scooped up the low-end and mid-range smartphone section of the market.  *if* the rumor is true that appl is going to be releasing a lower end iphone alongside the iphone 5, i would expect a large portion of andriods market share to dry up.  the other thing that killed apples market share this time around was an iphone launch plagued with issues and launching exclusively to at&t initially.

its still way too early to tell where the tablet market is going to go, but for now, the ipad dominates.

in any case, jobs is staying on as chairman, so he'll still be involved. personally, i dont think he's the all-knowing genius that the cult of mac portrays him to be, but if he his, he'll still be able to work his magic (albeit from a smaller role, i suppose). 

in any case, apple is an extremely healthy company with great financials and they are consistantly turning a profit...as an investor, thats all that matters to me.

Apple has made the same mistake they did against MS and they dont have any intention of chaging (and maybe its too late already for them to have any impact in the mobile world). Apple only allows its OS to operate in their hardware (Jobs himself said that Apple was a hardware company that just happens to make software for that hardware). So they are always one company against the rest. Its a battle they can not and will not win.

When the PC OS battle was starting Apple had the best OS, way better than MS, but Apple's OS only ran on Apple hardware, and MS offered a "cheap" solution to the rest of the hardware vendors, so they all adopted MS. So MS got most of the OS market share and the programs started being developed only for DOS and then Windows. That sent Apple to nowhere because they were all alone against the rest of the industry. They went almost bankrupt with MS, the company that had initially a worse product than them, buying a big part of their stocks.

Its the same story with Android. Android is Open Source and almost free to implement for the rest of the mobile hardware vendors. So its gaining traction (not only in the mid and low level sector). Also, I can tell you programmers are very pissed off with the Apple shop acceptance policy and they are deserting Apple and the development of Android apps is outgrowing the iOs.

Its sad that a great company like Apple is making the same mistakes again. They have already lost the mobile battle, its a matter of time only.

Steve Jobs made an inspiring speech when he was fighting his first round with cancer. 

http://www.ted.com/talks/steve_jobs_how_to_live_before_you_die.html

Worth 10 minutes of your time.

well,  aapl stayed strong, and there was no crash. (the chart below is current)

http://chart.finance.yahoo.com/z?s=AAPL&t=1d&q=l&l=on&z=l&c=%5EGSPC,%5EDJI&a=v&p=s&lang=en-US&region=US

Speaking about high end smartphones, there is the Samsung Galaxy S II with Android that is better than the "iphone"

Really?  They make more profit then all of the other smartphone makers combined.  The Iphone 4 was the top seller in 2010 and is looking like it will be for 2011 too.  How are they loosing?

Some of the hardware is better but most what is sold is not.  The OS is clunkier but has more features and options.  The quality of the app store for Android is worse then the iPhone. 

Because Android had more growth than iOS for example? Apple is the only company that sells phones with iOS. It does not matter that it has the most sold phone. The majority of the rest of the companies are choosing Android and in aggregate Android is growing more than iOS. As I said above, Apple alone could not compete against all the vendors together in the PC area and that is why it lost to MS, and the same is happening now in the mobile area and that is why it has already lost to Android.

Apple iPhone and iOS is a thing of the past and the present, but not the future. Because of the way Apple operates it has already lost.

EDIT: I have never owned a iPhone or an Android phone. Im still using a Sony Erikson. I dont own stocks either at Google or Apple neither.

Looks like the poor guy is going through hell: http://www.tmz.com/2011/08/26/steve-jobs-apple-photo-resignation-ceo-sick

Of course Android has had more growth.  Android is a race to the bottom in terms of pricing.  But Apple has had pretty much uninterrupted growth as well.  And when you are selling very few (as Android as doing in the beginning), growing is easy. The fact that Apple grows at rates like 30% AT IT'S CURRENT SIZE is simply amazing.   

The satisfaction rate with Android is much lower then with iPhones. 
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Apples-iOS-tops-the-customer-satisfaction-charts-Android-holds-third-place_id20512
There are many Android owners who switch up to the iPhone, where there are fewer who go the other way. 

I think there is a place for both products, but to say that IOS is a thing of the past and has lost is  just plain wrong. 

Largest company in US and soon the world.. a toymaker

Seems bout right

well let them eat iPads

Android is already selling more than iPhone. Its not that Android is growing because it was selling very few and now is selling more than very few. Android is already growing more than iPhone. And yes, the iPhone is a more diverse platform and that can produce some uneven results about customer satisfaction. They will polish that. Again, my argument was not going that way, Apple can not compit against everybody. The iPhone has already lost the race for biggest mobile platform. Anyway, no point in discussing further, you tell me in some years.

Phone software is not the same thing as a phone model. As a phone model the iphone has done well.

I suppose that Apple has done so well under Steve Jobs tenure also because the board was smart enough to give him full control of the company.
In contrast, Apple's competitors seem to be run by apparatchiks. Office politics is killing innovation in those companies.

But the Samsung Galaxy II S is better. For example, it has a OLED display. And has better CPU and RAM

Better?  Most reviewers do not think so.  Different yes.  The sammy has a bigger screen, and if you want that over display quality then it wins, if you want display quality over size, then the retina display is hard to beat. 

http://www.gizmodigit.com/showdown-samsung-galaxy-s2-vs-apple-iphone-4/

http://www.knowyourmobile.com/blog/921534/samsung_galaxy_s2_woe_as_screen_defect_persists.html

Also the manufacturing quality has had problems.  In the beginning a few iphones had temporarily yellowing which went a way on its own, but nothing like the current failure rate of the 2s with its persistent yellowing.