Apple will be the first company to hit a trillion dollar market cap.
Six Point Recap
by Jason Calacanis
1. Apple Pay will add $100B in market cap
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Tap your phone or watch to a base station and pay with one click. You sign with your fingerprint reader. There are no credit card numbers stored into the phone so the person at the counter can’t steal them.
People were doing this five years ago in Tokyo and Seoul when I was rolling with Masa Son and the Naver crew. Why the frack did this take so long to make here? Doesn’t matter. Apple gets credit for taking something ordinary in Asia and making it “extraordinary” in the U.S.
Losers: Google Wallet, PayPal (toast if they don’t get a product CEO — FAST!), Square (seriously at risk).
Winners: @jack at SQUARE, as Google and PayPal need to buy it NOW. Bidding war, goes for $4B.
2. Apple Watch will add $100B in market cap
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The Apple Watch will cost $75, maybe $100, to build. It’s got a $349 price tag — to start. Apple will make at least $250 for the base model. 20% of iPhone users will buy it in year one. 25-50M sold in year one, easily. $10B in cash money. Profit. Bank it, baby.
Oh yeah, they got one made of gold and you know they will launch partnerships with brands like Gucci, Prada & Jay Z. Those will be blinged out in diamonds and precious metals and have $1k-5k in profit. They’ll sell a couple of million of those per year as well. And you’ll be able to replace the chips on the inside (a first for Apple), so you can feel fine about your 50-year investment in a watch that you’ll give your kids.
[ “and now I give this watch to you…”]
3. iPhone 6 Plus catches Apple up
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We’ve all been dogging Apple for not getting this product out two years ago, when Samsung started taking high end users from their ecosystem with the Note. That absurdly sized phone, or phablet, is LOVED by geeks who gave up their iPhone for it.
They love to torture Apple users with it and now they’ll all come back to the iOS ecosystem with their tails between their legs — and the rest of us can’t wait to bust their chops!
Samsung’s biggest advantage over Apple was the larger screens and that just went “poof!”
Apple was religious about sizes because a) Steve Jobs and b) they didn’t want to torture iOS app developers with adapting their apps for multiple sizes.
Steve would have changed his position on sizes, and convinced us all that he supported the idea early on. Man, do I miss Steve. I mean, not personally — we weren’t taking long walks around Palo Alto like Walt did — but professionally.
He’s smiling right now knowing that he built a kick-ass team that is “doing it their way,” not his way. They’re crushing it on their terms with swagger. Not worrying that someone leapfrogged them, but rather that they hit their internal standard.
Apple is not over.
Apple is as strong as ever. Today proves it.
4. U2’s free album is Beats By Dre teaser — more to come
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Tim Cook is our charming uncle who we can’t wait to spend time with, and Bono fawned over him as such. Tim was so proud of U2 and excited to help them get their album to the rest of the world and capture the record for the largest distributed album of all time.
How?
I’m guessing Apple paid $10-30M to get the exclusive rights to give every iTunes user a copy of U2’s new album. I mean, U2 sold 1.1M copies of their album “No Line on the Horizon” from 2009, so at $8 net (not retail) price that’s $8.8M.
Why not reach 727x your audience and get one check from Apple?
Oh wait, that’s a new f-ing business model. Apple could simply buy the exclusive rights to the top five albums every month for $20M each. That’s $1.2B a year for 60 albums — or the cost of selling 4.8M watches with a $250 profit margin.
So, why not do that? That’s probably what the Beats by Dre model is all about: Apple as a label. Just buy the albums and promote the fuck out of them. Everyone wins: free music for us, another selling point for Apple & artists get absurd exposure through sampling.
Ticket sales will certainly pop, as folks don’t want to go to the concert without knowing the lyrics right?
Apple saved the album today!
5. Startups Killed: Pebble, FitBit, Voxer & …
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Pebble and Fitbit I love you. I love all founders who innovate and create amazing products, but when Apple comes into your market like they did today, well, even Nike gets out of the way!
[ Nike shut down their health band last April ]
Apple or Google/Nest should buy both companies now. Get those teams and step up the fight with Apple.
6. Dave Morin of Path.com in front row? Sold!
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Dave Morin was chilling in the first row of the event two seats from Johnny Ive and — I think — next to Dr Dre. That means one thing and one thing only: Path and the team are going to Apple. You don’t get that first row seat by accident. Path would jump from an exclusive club to jumpstart Apple’s non-existing social presence, which has been well-documented from Color to Ping.
Apple’s new iMessage, which does what Voxer, Snapchat and others do, is super clever, so why not leverage Path as a better name and interface? Or at the very least a second platform.
No reason that every Apple user couldn’t automatically have a Path account and opt out in the iCloud settings. This would be a master stroke by Tim Cook, who desperately needs a social mind in his brain trust. Dave Morin, Cue, Cook, Dre, Iovine, Schiller and Ive? Boom!