Ng: Apple slowing down

A LOT of things have been happening in the last two weeks in technology. The period saw Apple landing from its high-flying performance. Its sales have been below expectations and the company has lost a lot of ground.

Although the devices that they sell – the iPad and the Iphone – are still going strong and their growth is still double-digit, it is showing its age. After all, since the iPhone was introduced over four years ago, and the iPad over two years ago, there has been scarcely any major change – the design and the software look almost the same.

Maybe investors are starting to think that maybe there is not that much to excite users and its hyper growth will slow down.

Apple used to be the highest capitalized company in the world for the last year or so but it now has ceded that crown to Exxon Mobile as it lost over $200 billion in market capital. They joined a list of about six companies that some analysts called the curse of the $500-billion company. There are only a few of these companies that reached such heights – notable of these are Microsoft, GE, Cisco, Apple, Exxon Mobile and Intel, and what normally happened is that it reached such stratospheric heights that it also earned the distinction of losing more than $200 billion from its peak. Obviously, the dream of Apple being a trillion-dollar company is much further than they anticipated.

On the other hand, there has been a lot of developments in other fronts. Microsoft is rumored to be interested in Dell while Lenovo is said to be interested in RIM (Research in Motion), which was renamed yesterday to BlackBerry.

By the way, another research group, Carphone Warehouse Geek Group has released a study that shows most people find tech terms more confusing than a foreign language.

According to the study the following tech terms were deemed confusing. How many of them do you actually know?
Algorithm
Beta
Cache
Phablet
Vlogging
Phishing
ISP
Trojan
Geo-tagging
Back-end

(www.twitter.com/wilsonng)