for such a long post, this is poorly researched.
How has a company so engrained in American culture taken ~40% (check) hit to their stock in a single quarter
So did you also forget about all the tech companies that took a dive down with them? Amazon? facebook?
The stock market is trying to bounce from the huge losses throughout the last iii months, and its hurting everyone, not just AAPL investors.
It all started when apple made the move to lightning cables and copying their most successful apps. That was the warning shot that apple was locking down on proprietary hardware and software.
so, what about firewire? The made for. iPod program?
End of 2017 and 2018 apple increased the margin on their phones considerably to offset sales reductions but that only works for one or two years
Nope, because their margins have actually been going down in the past 5 years from their peak in 2011. Their CFO even said margins on the iPhone X were likely to be lower than any other phone because of the expense, which leads us to your other point…
You realize that they are still seeing expansion in foreign markets like Latin America and Europe, right? This goes specially to their less significant products. Stores won't be closing any time soon, and they won't add the headphone jack either.
Wiping a major competitor off the map in a year entirely beats having them trail on with their share for another 10 years. Given its competitors reside largely overseas there no notion of loyalty or protection being afforded. What this means is by mid year you’ll see competitor phones with similar or better hardware being offered 30-50% below what current apple products sell for. The magical $1000 barrier won’t be broken and handset values will continue to fall. Remember, iPhones cost $150-200 to produce. Apples current markup is 5-8x that. This will have to drop to 3-5 to stay competitive against $500-$800 handsets. That’s around a 50% loss sustained
This was said about the PC market years ago, and still apple is selling computers at a higher cost than everyone else. How can you explain that? You can get cheeper hardware that's much better, after all.