Apple: 'From a tech titan into a dinosaur' -- but not for a year

"As we have stated before on many occasions, Apple's time to turn from a tech titan into a dinosaur will come, but we still think that we are at least a year away..." -- Berenberg Bank's Adnaan Ahmad.

The occasion for his note -- issued the day after Apple's Q4 2012 report -- was the company's gross margin guidance for Q1 2013: A surprisingly low 36%. Like most analysts, Ahmad is pretty sure that number will trend up over the next 12 months as the company's production "learning curve" improves. A bigger issue, he writes, are the margins on the iPad mini, which Apple has priced lower than it might otherwise if it weren't trying to squeeze competitors like Amazon and Google who can't seem to sell their 7-inch tablets for less than $199 without losing money on each sale. But he believes the biggest worry for Apple -- and the one that led to that remark about dinosaurs -- is that day in the future when the company's iPhone business begins to slow down