As the adage goes, an Apple a day keeps the doctor at bay. But this doesn’t apply to £650 iPhones. And with good reason – they cost £650. If apples cost £650, you wouldn’t buy them all that often either. Heck, if Apple shares cost £650….

It’s an oft made observation that share prices will overshoot areas of support and resistance after a strong move, before settling back following a short bout of either panic or mania (depending on the direction of the move). We don’t ever consider technology to be in a downtrend, just to be clear on that. It’s innovation, progress, yet when you’re at the sharp end of technology as Apple is, it’s inevitable that areas of resistance will be encountered – even overshot – at which point a ‘correction’ or outright reversal might take place.

This is significant for Apple in that it would appear to be stagnating at the top of the smartphone market and may even have gone a little too far with the Apple Watch. The problem, we’re certain, is to do with cost. iPhones are not cheap to make. They cost more every time a new one is released because consumers demand that each new model incorporates increasingly fancy features, storage and battery life.

As the price rises, so then do the durations of mobile phone contracts designed in part to be manageable repayment plans for expensive handsets. On the whole, people don’t like being tied into such things, and anyway, like Chinese-style economic growth this is surely unsustainable. What are we to expect in future? 10-year mobile phone contracts and a booming ‘used phone’ market? Perhaps, but we’d argue the phones themselves aren’t designed to last more than a couple of years (it’s no coincidence that phones, laptops, etc become so slow over time) while Moore’s law and the rate at which Apple churns out new models makes them virtually obsolete after just 12 months.

It’s no surprise to see iPhone sales coming off their highs, without even considering the competition element. They’re too expensive and they do too much.

The problem we have with Apple right now is that it looks like a consumer electronics company rolled in glitter. Really? Black-clad ex-hippie CEOs strolling about on a stage in their jeans and trainers talking about just how much you can do with a single lump of aluminium? Oh, it’s made of Aluminium is it? And real glass on the screen? £650? I’ll take one!

This is not exactly an intelligent computer like Google’s DeepMind or a self-driving car like….Google’s self-driving car, is it?  Apple is cool but it only makes smartphones and computers. OK, it does watches too, but this can hardly be considered a major success. It’s also not cool because not everyone is a fan of U2. A good number of those who are either indifferent or outright non-fans have expressed annoyance at discovering the new U2 album once again wasting space on their hard drive. They didn’t ask for it.

Google, on the other hand, is cool. It’s heavily engaged in studying the philosophy of the mind AND it’s leading the world towards the fabled ‘technological singularity,’ which makes it even cooler. Jobs might have done Acid and liked his early employees to have had psychedelic experiences, but Kurzweil is talking about machines taking over. Which direction is cooler is subjective, but the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is surely more important.

Apple has demonstrated recently that it doesn’t really know what people want any more. It releases a big iPhone, a small one, an XL iPad, a useless thing you can wear on your wrist with a battery life of ½ an hour. It then proceeds to deliver incremental bug-riddled tweaks that everyone just complains about. The newer models are on track to cost not just the Earth, but the solar system.

The iPod had a wow factor. So did the iPhone. The iPad has done well. The jury is out on the watch. So where’s the next blockbuster? Maybe the product development team just aren’t doing enough acid these days. Then again, maybe the fact we are complaining about innovation stagnation is a sign in itself, and the next amazing product could be just round the corner. Whether Apple will be the one to deliver it is the burning question.

Augustin Eden and Mike van Dulken, Research Team at Accendo Markets (29 April)