Apple's new products

Apple started their annual World Wide Developers Conference in San Jose with a bang yesterday - Apple Special Event. June 5, 2017. A whole host of new products. The opening is hilarious. It takes place in a world without the luxuries of the apps and the iPhone. A world too wild to remember, yet that was a little over ten years ago. The first three minutes intro of the opening note is what I am talking about.

No music on your iPhone, no maps, no ability to share anything, nobody to tell that you just ate a whole pizza by yourself (many people do not care too much about that). It is quite cool that Tim Cook introduces a 10 year old developer from Australia, who started coding when he was only six. He had made the effort to be at the WWDC. Five apps on the App store already, Cook met him the day before! Another app developer clocked in at 82 years of age, she hails from Japan and has published an app already on the app store.

Tim Cook announced a whole host of products, tvOS (TV operating system, Amazon coming to the TV app, Amazon Prime Video), a new iPad Pro, a new operating system across their devices, iOS 11, a new iMac, a new MacBook pro and MacBook (and a new macOS), an iMac Pro (for business and gamers), watchOS 4 (more relevant information shown to you, a dynamically changing during the day watch as well as big changes to the activity segment), an upgrade to the App store and most importantly (it seems to be attracting the most attention) the HomePod. The HomePod is a device that sits in your home and enables you to use Siri a whole lot better. This is a speaker system with Siri, not too dissimilar to the Amazon Echo. Amazon have sold around 11 million units of Echo (with Alexa), they are very popular for shouting and asking questions. Siri, for reference point, is used by 375 million devices.

The HomePod is double the price of the Amazon Echo, starting around 349 Dollars per unit. The WSJ goes with - Apple Unveils Smart Speaker Called HomePod. Barron's goes with Apple's 'HomePod' a Winner, Says Loup's Munster; Major Siri Update Later This Year?

Gene of course worked at Piper Jaffray for years and years and covered Apple. He had the following to say about the Augmented Reality - "That was a huge deal; I think the demo was better than any AR demo I've ever seen. I think it just shows they are putting the hammer down around AR." Recall that we suggested that Apple would get to Augmented Reality in a big way. Apple is a perfection of existing products.

CNet had some cool reviews - Apple already controls your life, now HomePod wants your home

Ironically this release of all these new products and software updates was on the same day that the stock received a downgrade from Pacific Crest, an analyst there, Andy Hargreaves downgraded the stock to a sector-weight holding and lowered his share price to 145 Dollars. There is, as you may expect, an analyst rating website, TipRanks. You can check Andy Hargreaves's Stock Coverage.

Andy has been really good and very accurate. So what do you do as an owner of the business? Nothing. We plan to own this business for a long, long time. Tim Cook is right, when he left off at the end of the presentation, he said "all is good at Apple". He is right. We continue to own what is a dynamic business, there are going to be tons of products in the future, without a doubt. Very pleased with these software and hardware updates, as well as the "new product(s)". Remember that the iPhone is still there king of sales here, the much anticipated new release must hit the mark for the users.