Apple Analysts
It's amazing the discongruity between the "professional" analysts of Apple's financials, and the "amateurs" like Horace Dediu of Asymco.
I put "professional" and "amateur" in quotes because it seems like in this case, the results you get from these two groups are opposite from what you'd expect. The financial market, and professional analysts, have been underestimating Apple for years now.
This story at Market Watch, "Time to Sell Apple", is a perfect example. Here's a few points from this article.
If a business fails to take care of its customers, its customers will go elsewhere … In the case of Apple, this is happening in front of our eyes, and the risks are therefore very high. Apple has stopped serving their customers well, and unless they start to serve their customers better the company will begin to lose more market share and revenue and earnings projections will come down aggressively.
But this whole statement is based on this assertion:
Most people think Apple's customers are the end user, but … the real customers are third-party resellers, and Apple is not treating them right.
This is just flat out wrong. Apple has never pandered to the carriers and resellers. They're the only phone manufacturer that doesn't, and it's one of the reason their real customers, the folks using the phones, prefer their products.
iPhone users are people who want an iPhone. Android users are, mostly, people who want a phone, and went with the one the carrier suggested.
The company's high-growth phase is behind it
This is where the analysts methods fail. They can only analyze the data they have available, and they have no data about future products. But it's these future products, the ones we don't know about yet, that is where Apple's growth comes from.
I don't think the market has any model that can account for this, so they look at each new, incredibly successful, incredibly profitable thing that Apple does as if it's the last one. Because how could they do otherwise?