Does anybody else feel the wind of change when it comes to Apple? Sure they have lots of exciting stuff like the rumored Apple Tablet set to launch in either September or more likely next January and the iPhone is flying off the shelves along with nearly a billion and a half apps for good measure but for the first time in years there seems to be some ill wind blowing through the normally unruffled Apple sails.

There are still millions of people out there who worship their Apple products and you will get no more passionate devotee than an Apple devotee but in the last couple of months a couple of cracks have appeared in the normally shiny aluminum covered brand Apple. First we had highly influential blogger and Techcrunch founder Michael Arrington announce that he was ditching his iPhone in favor of something more practical. That was closely followed by an excellent and upfront atricle by Jason Calcanis about how he has spent 20,000 over the last 6 years on Apple products but is looking for an alternative as he thought Apple were turning in a direction he didn’t like with this quote of his summing it up nicely

Years and years after Microsoft’s antitrust headlines, Apple is now the anti-competitive monster that Jobs rallied us against in the infamous 1984 commercial. Steve Jobs is the oppressive man on the jumbotron and the Olympian carrying the hammer is the open-source movement

This was closely followed by the news of an investigation by the US government into Anti Trust issues surronding Apple rejecting the Google Voice app from the App store and indeed the approval process around the app store seems to be an ongoing issue with stories constantly popping up around Apple rejecting apps on unfair grounds.

The latest piece of bad news for Apple was a fairly stark picture painted by The Sunday Times yesterday profiling Steve Jobs and the whole culture of secrecy at Apple. Although this piece generally agreed (like most people do) that Apple make great products it just added to the tiny wave of people (all highly influential) who are starting to take a little gloss off the Apple star that has been shining so bright.

You don’t need to be an expert of any sort to see that Apple sells tons of products because they are “cool” and gets away with charging a hefty 30-50% mark up on other similar products because they market their products like no other.

The best way I can sum up where we are at now with Apple is to tell a little story about shares. I buy shares not based on some complicated mathematical equation but based on companies that I think sell a lot of their products and will sell even more in the future. Just over 4 years ago I bought Apple shares because I thought their iPods were cool, would get better and they would develop more cool products, they did. If I used my own juvenile stock trading methodology now to look at Apple I would sell my shares (I already have) because I can just see the gloss coming off their winning streak and I think they have reached their peak (sure the Tablet will probably spike the price to closer to $200 but most of that is already built in to the current price) and they will see years of stagnation (at least in their share price) just as Microsoft did when they hit trouble.

Long story short the tide is turning on Apple and it is time to get the hell out of there if you hav any money invested. The signs are all there

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