PEAK APPLE: 'iPhone sales STALL' at first sniff of fresh droid competition

Would price have to do anything with it ?

Here in Europe, a 32 GB iPhone is over 1000 USD (799 Euro) w/o a contract. Possibly the not so spiffy economic climes have some bearing on slowing sales ?

Plastic iPhone to the rescue?

So, will Apple deploy the low cost "plastic" iPhone in the US and EU, or just in developing countries that may (or perhaps may not) agree to their carrier deals? The three biggest cell providers in Russia won't be among those deploying any iPhone, much less low cost iPhone, and China Mobile continues to be resistant to Apple's attempts to get them on board. Carriers are going to start resisting Apple's contract negotiating tactics more and more, so they will have to rethink their strategy going forward. Apple no longer has the clout to demand what they want and get it, as demand for the iPhone has apparently stalled.

Market distortion

The real problem seems to be the workings of the US stock market.

Hyped by "analysts", shares of "technology" companies often seem to be priced based on the current rate of growth, even though it can be seen that the growth is not sustainable (short of having a wormhole suddenly open up to a planet with a huge population stuck in the technology level of the 1960s on Earth).

Even though a sane person with a few population statistics and sales graphs can easily work out roughly when a growth curve has to start to bend because of market saturation and the arrival of competition, companies like Apple get valued at amounts of money based on the assumption of infinite market capacity.

When the inevitable happens and it is obvious that the valuation was wildly inflated, the "market" marks down the company and generates reports which announce with great excitement that the Pope has Catholic leanings. And people get paid for it.

This short sightedness seems to be commonplace. All these supposedly brilliant intellects in the hedge funds didn't seem to notice that hedge funds can only work if the amount of capital employed in them is a small fraction of the total market - because otherwise you are in effect trying to ensure the entire market against itself, like Lloyds trying to underwrite the entire economy against a depression. As they controlled more and more capital, their ability to hedge was increasingly restricted.

In the same way a technology company can only continue to record rapid growth while it does not dominate the industry - because the expansion capability of any industry taken as a whole is limited.