People are realizing they can buy a OnePlus 6T or Samsung 9 for half the price.
My wife has been fed up with our older Android phone and said - we're going back to the iphone. We looked up the prices for the latest, second latest, third latest iphone models and then she said - why don't we get another OnePlus.
13% drop in sales won't make their services popular.
They should have launched 5 years ago, they had way more advantage then.
They do still have a big consumer base, but 13% is a lot and it doesn't seem to go upwards.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/31/wall-street-analysts-worry-a...
Huawei: Revenue Growth 23.2% (half-yearly)
Apple: Revenue ~$258 billion
Huawei: Revenue ~$105 billion
Apple: R&D $14 billion[0]
Huawei: R&D $15 billion[1]
Apple: Employee Count ~132,000
Huawei: Employee Count ~188,000†
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I'm going to take an unusual step here. Please, please don't downvote this post for pointing this out! I'm just highlighting for contrast, not for criticism. Trying to start a conversation.
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[0] https://www.nasdaq.com/article/apple-aapl-earnings-after-the...
[1] http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201904/09/WS5cac0859a31048422...
† “Huawei had over 188,000 employees as of September 2018, around 76,000 of them engaged in Research & Development (R&D)” (I presume Apple has tens of thousands employed in r&d, anybody any idea roughly how many?)
edit: sigh
In Job's era that revenue was almost 0%. Now it's 21%.
* Competing brands with better hardware quality (Pixel's camera vs iPhone) * Competing brands with less opinionated design choices (headphone jacks, expandable storage, et all) * Highly specialized supply chains prevent flexibility in part choices/manufacturers (ex: designing custom screws for iMac chassis, rather than using off-the-shelf parts) * Unnecessary complexity in designs (The HDMI/lightning adapter is actually a computer that essentially runs a program in RAM) * Trade wars cooling relationships with everything from shippers * Walled garden of iMessage preventing soft user migration
iPhone
no disk drive
UNIX-based OS goes mainstream
first mainstream OS with a GUI
iMac - making PC's 'friendly'
iTunes - made it cool to pay for music again
To name a few.
Though original Mac, LaserWriter, and iPad are also big on my list.
What are you crediting Jobs with? What does this mean? It seems like your list fell apart after the first 3 concrete things you listed, the rest are just random things you like about Apple.
And iPhone is built on top of years of speculation and foundational change in material and wireless infrastructure.
But the point is that apple now no longer needs to grow like jobs era. And for all good will, I see no chance for jobs to pull out new things equally big as iPhone anyway. But some can believe that regardless.
Of course the programming and design were done by the software teams under Avie Tevanian, first at NeXT and later at Apple.
The Apple Watch is the world's most popular watch.
AirPods have exploded in popularity among youth as a status symbol.
Both are selling relatively well, even if you may think they're inferior products.
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2019/05/02/apple-watch-1q19-market...
That's a lot of nobodies.
(compared to Mac $5.8B, iPad $5.0B)
I use a smartwatch and as a result my phone stays in my pocket a lot more.
No thanks.
Regular corded earbuds are a tolerable pocket size alternative to a set of studio cans, but that’s as far as I would go. I miss the old Walkman style headsets that had decent size drivers, but still fit into a backpack or jacket pocket.
Downvoters gonna downvote, I guess.
The Butterly keyboard is the only thing I can think is genuinely, objectively, "bad", due to the reliability issues, but it's hard to say it taints the whole MacBook Pro. I use one everyday, have since they were released, and it's a great laptop for me.
Either way, I'm mostly commenting on the ever-popular and lazy comment that equates Apple's success solely to marketing. Apple's products are successful because they're good products, marketed well. Yes, they're marketed well, but that marketing is only effective because the products being marketed are genuinely "good".
It’s some of the newer models that strip off functionality for aesthetics , or at least slimness at any and all costs, that turn many of us away.
Apple beat most estimates. Revenues grew. All time high revenue from services. Forward guidance was raised.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/07/apple-reports-third-q...
Those just aren't good numbers for a company that, over the past decade, has been literally the most profitable in history. They aren't "bad" numbers, but for Apple they're sort of a disaster. The iPhone gravy train is running out of steam, basically.
I agree on Apple having been more or less stagnant for a while now. It's no surprise when you look at their products IMO. They seem to mainly be consolidating the market share that they have. As a consumer, you get immense advantages from staying inside their ecosystem, but there seem few people left who aren't yet in their ecosystem and are open to getting into it at the same time.
But calling this a "disaster" is a bit much. The "iPhone gravy train" is still going very strong, albeit a tiny bit slower. They have lots of other products that sell very well. They make a huge amount of practically free cash from their plattforms. If their services and content creation efforts are even semi-successful, they will continue to diversify away from being just a consumer electronics company.
I stopped reading NYT after their obvious crusade on Facebook followed by their embarrassing "privacy" series. Most of these companies disgust me, but NYT's reporting almost made me feel a semblance of sympathy for them due to how ridiculous it was.
I don’t think it’s limited to tech. You’re likely experiencing the Gell-Mann amnesia effect here.
They do this a lot. It is (rightfully) pointed out any time a right leaning website story is posted, with the whole "Note this is from X publication, and they are right leaning, so take that into consideration" comment. For some reason NYT seems immune to this criticism though.
Not from where I've been sitting: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+NYT+b...
You could argue NYT took a while to get called out, but not that they aren't getting called out.
It's also a contrarian position because most people love their tech, and contrarian positions and outrage drive clicks.
An interesting quote from Cook in the press release: "The balance of calendar 2019 will be an exciting period, with major launches on all of our platforms, new services and several new products"
EPS: $2.18 vs. $2.10 estimated by Refinitiv consensus estimates.
Revenue: $53.8 billion vs. $53.39B estimated by Refinitiv consensus estimates.
Q4 Revenue guidance: $61 billion to $64 billion versus $60.98 billion estimate by Refinitiv consensus estimates.
iPhone revenue: $25.99 billion vs. $26.31 billion estimated by FactSet.
Services revenue: $11.46 billion vs. $11.61 billion estimated by FactSet.
If I had money play with I would buy after this earnings report dropped; but it looks like the stock price isn't getting beat up.
I don't know if I'm just missing the point or something...
If you’re sitting at home playing armchair quarterback with this stuff, all I can say is I hope you’re not responsible for managing any actual money.
Also Touch ID over Face ID or offer both or I’m not interested along with millions of others!
Also no Touch ID..pick phone up without looking at it and boom phone is open. Face ID forces user to do more work..swipe up and look. Two more steps I didn’t have to do previously. Those to me as a UX professional who strives to make things easiest as possible equals bad UX. Forcing the user to exert more effort they didn’t have to before.
Apple has always been about ease of use..yet the person in charge of UX (Johnny Ive) thought making things an inch harder would be no big deal, yet look at the amount of phones they aren’t selling these days.
I typically get the latest phone every year (but it starts to feel unnecessary) - iPad's and Mac's, however, last a lot longer (several years) for me these days.
I wonder where the real innovation is going to come from? AI, AR?
If you are looking for something as big as the iPhone, I think you might be disappointed. But, it is a pretty poorly kept secret that they are working on self-driving cars and some kind of "TV".
And Apple has been pretty clear about focusing on growth in services now that they have this massive base of deployed devices.
An approach I'd like for iMessage is to make it free for anyone, but only functional if at least one member of a conversation has an iPhone or paid iCloud subscription.
I just recently switched from Android to iOS and there's a lot I miss about Android that will never come to iOS. I'd love to have that flexibility but cross-platform compatibility too.
I like the recent wave of acquisitions. Smart cars? Smart homes? Iterations of Apple Watch - deeper connection to the body itself?
What's next for them?
Apple Arcade looks surprisingly interesting given they will support PS4/XBox controllers and the trend moves towards streaming gaming. AppleTV+ will do well if they can intelligently bundle it with Apple Music and you never know could have a breakout hit.
AR Glasses and the Apple Car are clearly being worked on given acquisitions but both are many years out.
While Apple Watch "edition" was a bust, the concept of designer straps and iPhone accessories is still strong.
Apple is like the IKEA of tech + fashion.
Also they messed up really hard when they introduced the new MBP keyboards which now all have to be replaced.
The iPad started to be useful much too slow and in the meanwhile less and less people would even consider it when comparing with a surface.
There is one more thing: The ecosystem seemed to be cool some day. Now it's nothing special anymore and it's not really magical how many things don't work together (because software, bugs, whatever...).
I buy the nice devices as used parts because they had times when they produced some cool stuff that I still like to use. Maybe not with their OS but this will probably change when less money gives them more pressure to be innovative again.
They've been coasting since then. Difference sizes of the same product. The watch was about as far as they've wandered out of their comfort zone.
Wealth creation is not zero sum, 100 years ago we had far less wealth than we had today and in 100 years we’ll have a lot more.
Sure, an individual company can stop growing but everything must continue to grow in aggregate to push humanity forward.
Apple, on the other hand, sells boutique products into a rapidly commoditizing market, and is having a terrible time with growth right now (the numbers today show less than 1% revenue growth). So profit is the only reason to buy AAPL right now. And the profits? Down almost 13%.
Everyone loves to hate on Apple on multiple fronts (elitist, expensive, over the hill), whereas the hate on Amazon is really about one thing.. that ol "makes no profit" canard.
CLARIFICATION: I’m talking perception, not my beliefs. Uber’s a scam, as far as I can tell, but they will either pull off a miracle or be the biggest Groupon of all time. And Snap isn’t very good at being a public company.
I'm not so sure it's useful to compare stock valuations in this way. An assessment of "undervalued" should be based solely on the facts of that specific company, IMO.
1. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=p...
If one of these major launches is an iPhone X-like phone with a thumbprint reader (home button or otherwise), they will get at least another $1,000 from me.
I think that I'll be upgrading back to the old one going forward.
And I promise that the next laptop I buy (or my company buys for me) won't have a touch bar or a butterfly keyboard.
If they make a one-handed iPhone again, they will also get money from me.
For now, I'm sticking with the 2015 MBP and the SE.
Based on everything else they've done, I figure it will be $3500+ build though and push into the $5k range.
Because the shift to services is exactly what everyone has been clamoring for. Looks like a pretty great quarter for Apple. I think it is the biggest June quarter revenue wise ever.
A nitpick, but I wish people in business would diversify their vocabulary and learn to use words other than "exciting" to describe everything. Calling something exciting does not make it so. Show why it's exciting, don't just claim that it is.
Products are 42.4 - 29.5 = 13 ish Services are 11.5 - 4.1 = 7ish
If the iphone has the same margins as the other products, and about half the product sales are iphones, the services are producing more earnings than the iphone!
(To be clear: the services are delivered through the iphone, so its not like the iphone is not a key part of the services.)
Source https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/Q3%20FY19%20Consolidated...
They also have the H1 chip in the AirPods, which could potentially be a stepping stone to streaming video from your phone to your headset via an H2 chip.
I don’t see them doing a stand-alone device, or a device with a cable, for awkwardness/dorkiness reasons.
Glasses that are indistinguishable from normal glasses but just pair with your iPhone is the play.
They will make a fortune on premium frames.
Seems like battery size is the limiting factor, but who better than Apple to squeeze a crazy amount of battery into a tiny space. Then there’s heat though. That’s a tough one.
Doesn’t feel like a “this year” thing to me. Feels like a “we’ll release it when the battery/chip tech hits a sweet spot” thing.
Except for iCloud services, which are an embarrassment to technology.
Their contacts management has a 10 year old bug with syncing images and God only knows how they wrote their web app interfaces.
But to your point, since 2008:
- Mac revenue has grown
- iPad was introduced and by itself its revenue and more than likely profit is something that any company would kill for.
- the Apple Watch was introduced and all indications it’s bigger than the iPod ever was.
They then spent $17 BILLION on share buybacks in the last quarter.
It's not a tech company anymore it's just a financial engineering scheme for large shareholders. If you're a shareholder, good for you!
Even the next Pixel4 is moving to using FaceID, going back to a home button or fingerprint scanner would be a step backwards.
In other words, about a hundred times a day my train of thought is interrupted for a second or two while I stare at my phone and wonder if FaceID is going to work. This is a pretty terrible pattern of disruption. Technology should disappear into the background instead of inserting itself into the foreground of my attention every time I use it. The fingerprint home button was more reliable, and it was much easier to anticipate when it was going to fail because of a wet or dirty thumb.
I resisted the button-less form until my buttoned iPhone broke, and I got a hand-me-down X.
Now when I use my iPad, which has a button, there's a brief moment of indignation, "What!? I have to touch a button to unlock this thing!?" every time I use it. It's funny how quickly we get used to things.
That said, I wish the phone wouldn't unlock when I'm just looking at the screen sometimes.
I really like(d) the ability to unlock my phone as it laid flat on my desk using touchid, but my FaceID experience has been virtually flawless.
I really couldn't go back to the huge black bar across the bottom.
The unlock time seems to be less than half a second, so as I look at the phone, it is already unlocked.
And the detection is really good too. After I shaved my long beard and went fully clean-faced, FaceID had zero issues unlocking the phone with zero hiccups for me.
It will let a sibling in too, or at least at a point in the past.
- let me hold the phone without blocking the screen
- act as a buffer for cracks: a smaller crack in the corner (the most common kind in my experience) won’t affect your experience.
- mean I don’t have to deal with notches or curved displays
Privilege check: I have large hands, I can single-handedly operate my iPhone 8 Plus with little difficulty. I could see bezel-less allowing greater ease of use for people not like me. If that overcomes the points above... so be it. I’m keeping my 8 Plus for now though.
One feature I'd upgrade for is if Apple completely sealed off their phone and made it waterproof.
You can turn this off in Settings.
But I get what you mean. Even without getting into my inherent distrust of facial recognition systems and the security/privacy implications of creating the infrastructure for it to work reliably, biometrics are usernames. They shouldn't be used as passwords.
It's a quick and easy shortcut to enable the passcode requirement.
Apple did make price adjustment in China, including cutting wholesale price and promotion. I am wondering if those eats into Profits.
Having said that, in the Conference Call:
-Active iPhone installed base grew to a new all-time high in every operating segment ( Including China )
-Install base growing, people are holding onto devices longer, but staying inside the ecosystem
And interesting bit on 5G. Tim Cook says Apple doesn't comment on future products, but says it is "extremely early innings" for 5G, especially on a global basis.
May be we wont even see a 5G iPhone in 2020.
- Apple Music
- iCloud
- App Store / iTunes / Apple Books
- Apple Pay
- Apple Care
- Licensing (i.e. default Google search)
- Apple News+
- Apple Arcade
- Apple TV+
- Apple Card
There is roughly $10 per user paid to Apple ( iPhone, iPad, Mac ) for using Google as default search engine. Last estimate were $9B. Before you ask the Active User and $9B don't align, Keep in mind this is users excluding China, where Google is not available.
And App Store purchase, that is the 30% cut Apple received.
These three item likely combined to be 80%+ of Apple Services Revenue. The rest are iCloud, Apple TV, Apple Music, Apple Card etc..
Seriously, there's just no good reason for a general consumer to purchase an iPhone today. Build quality on the Android devices even in the $200 realm are damn near what the iPhone offers.
For the record: I've used iPhones since 2010. I've never had an Android until this year. It came time to upgrade, and I did my research. Simply put, there's nothing on the flagship iPhone that most vastly cheaper Android phones can do. I'm not a fanboy, I vote with my dollar.
* iOS (I prefer it over android)
* customers already tied into the apple ecosystem
* more of a focus on privacy (admittedly, this one is probably debatable)
In the Android world, I don't think I would recommend anything but a Pixel device just because they get all the security updates and get them faster than Samsung and all the rest.
For the record, my phone is a Pixel 2.
The bigger differentiator though is the app stores. If there's an iOS app or Android app that you need, then the decision is made for you.
For me, being able to iMessage / AirDrop / Facetime people is worth the money just from a people standpoint. Apple has a lot of vendor lock-in, and they still have the most polished product by far.
More so that someone with a 6S or better has little reason to upgrade; the improvements have been incremental.
Good grief. The quote in context was "These aren't "bad" numbers, but for Apple they're sort of a disaster." You really insist on skipping not one but three qualifiers? I specifically stated they weren't bad, that the analysis was relative to Apple's historical performance, and I even put a "sort of" in front!
And I stand by that. If you have a company whose stock is priced at a level defined by a decade of profitability the like of which the modern world literally has not seen, these numbers represent a pretty radical correction even if there are lots of Fortune 500 companies that would love to have a balance sheet like this. They aren't Apple.
I like that sentence a lot.
So, how they always did it -- from the iMac (1997) to the iPod, iPhone, and iPad?
Apple never did "revolutionary" improvements. They put out a great product, and did incremental updates for it -- in older times the updates where even smaller.
Back in the day people went to WWDC and cheered for minor design changes or a new "now in color" screen on iPods...
Apple proved them all wrong and will likely do so again with the glasses. You just need the right killer applications and great design.
In my anecdotal experience it seems like every suburban mom curates several boards near-obsessively.
What did it say when you linked it?
It is close to Apples all-time high now.
This isn't just about contrarian views. This is the fact that, thanks to big tech, any nut job can have the same real-estate and influence as a more established journalistic organization that has many people that internally also argue about how to convey messaging to the public.
I say all this as someone who frequently criticizes the mainstream media for also drumming up drama where it doesn't exist, and misinforming the public. So I'm hardly a cheerleader for them. But at least there is some sort of self-policing going on, and a realization of the responsibility they carry in society. There isn't much of that the big tech companies like Facebook.
So many people's first instinct to respond by buying more shares of that company, thereby driving its price and market cap higher. That's a reaction that implies that we think that the general trend is toward Buy-n-Large. If we expected regression to the mean to be the driving phenomenon, then we'd be more likely to respond by selling.
(Disclaimer: I'm not suggesting that's actually how things work, just that a lot of us behave as if we think that's how it works, or should work.)
After googling for a bit, I think I found what you have been referencing. Turns out, FaceID learns as it goes, even from non-successful attempts. So if every time your non-identical-twin sister tries to unlock your phone using FaceID, fails, and then you immediately unlock it for her with your face or password, then the system will slowly over time learn to recognize her face as well. This makes sense to me.
Most likely result is Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook buy them off for some trivial (for them anyway) amount of money.
I would actively price in this going away in Europe, never mind being a risk.
>AAPL seems to have hit its peak in the device market, and can only grow revenues at this point by effectively raising prices on existing customers (that’s what the services category amounts to). This strategy can only take them so far.
Which is inaccurate. They have continued to add new products, like the Watch and AirPods. So when do you think they hit "peak device" ? You mean peak iPhone? No argument from me, they might have. But there are ways to grow revenue without just increasing prices, as those other products have demonstrated. They have also proven that the can grow revenue with their services, which is now a bigger revenue generator than iPhone.
I also recently purchased a refurbished 2015 with top tier specs as a personal laptop.
Apple has definitely lost out on thousands of dollars of revenue from just me due to the touchbar/butterfly keyboard feel/butterfly keyboard reliability/usb-c only decisions. And don't even get me started on my inability to replace my iPhone SE with a decent, small phone.
It was never about Apple having better marketing. It was about Apple owning tech loyalty.
When the macbook is no longer the favored dev machine, Apple is going to lose a lot of market share.
Not sure what point you're trying to make with this low-effort falsehood. Buy backs are purchased with operating profits, if most of their profits were derived from their massive cash hoard you could label them as an Investment arm or something, but it's coming from their successful business operations and Apple's goal with its Buy Backs and Dividends is to move to a net zero-cash balance, so they have no interest in transitioning into becoming an Investment company.
Do you think there is any downside to just transferring wealth to the (already rich) shareholders over and over and over again? Seems to be their top priority nowadays.
I can spend a trillion dollars and hire a million engineers but that won’t build me a time machine or a perpetual motion device.
Also who do you think the top shareholders of Apple are? Apple making a profit doesn't necessarily hurt the Vanguard ETFs my government-employeed middle class American family members sock retirement saving into...?
1) increase the share price (as you mentioned) 2) signal to investors that the company is bullish on it's future (they wouldn't buyback shares if they thought the shares would be lower in the future) 3) Give the company the option to sell the shares in the future in case the extra capital can be used for a prudent use.
It's really mystifying why people are so against share buybacks while no one talks about dividends. They share a lot of similarity, but buybacks provide more options and greater tax efficiency so they should be preferred over dividends in most cases.
> Do you think there is any downside to just transferring wealth to the (already rich) shareholders over and over and over again? Seems to be their top priority nowadays.
That's not what's really going on (see above). Also, I would hazard to guess that most people who have exposure to the stock market have direct market exposure to Apple. Moreover, about half of households have direct (non-pension) exposure to the stock market. So I don't think your claim about it only benefiting the "already rich" shareholders hold much water. Hell, I would bet that 90% of HN users have direct exposure to equity markets.
Also, I bet you do as well.
> Build quality on the Android devices even in the $200 realm are damn near what the iPhone offers.
It's not just the software. I'm guessing you haven't used any of the new + cheap Android phones? They might surprise you.
Ahem [1], and while we're at it, [2]
My criticism to Apple isn't that they're being expensive; it is related to right to repair and their constant efforts to hamper that. Amazon just undercuts everyone, and Turk globalizes cheap workforce. For ridiculous low payment. These are just 2 examples you did not mention. You can read more in the sources below.
And I’ve never had a problem getting my phone repaired
I wish they weren’t targeting the masses so completely. iPhones shouldn’t have the absolute worst charging tech in the box.
I think the stock will pop once news breaks of another breakthrough product...whether its a car or something else.
Regardless of whether you agree they haven't been innovating, my question stands: if they stop innovating, but remain financially successful, will they still be Apple?
In fact Apple Watch’s revenue is projected to surpass that of the entire Swiss watch industry this year.
Even if it doesn’t “kill” the existing category, I’ll say they did a fantastic job carving out the smartwatch category.
Besides, people are spending less screen time on televisions every year and more on portable devices.
FaceID fails when your face is not fully visible.
That would be nice and simple if it were true, but it's not. Sometimes it fails when my face is fully visible. Sometimes it works when my face is not fully visible. It can work or not work with the same pair of sunglasses depending on... who knows? Maybe I'm just not smart enough to figure out the exact meaning of "fully visible."
Also when it fails with sunglasses, and ask for password the first time, immediately logging in with passport will make subsequent unlocks with sunglasses work better (presumably it marks that face adaptation as "correct").
Alternatively, maybe Macs would increase from 10% to 15% if the product wasn't broken and over-priced. Maybe it would be 20% or 25% if Apple could cross-sell/convert those iPhone sales to Mac sales.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/07/apple-third-quarter-2019-...
There is no world where any computer manufacturing is seeing a large growth in PCs in the last 5 years.
iOS can't replace Mac OS (yet) for serious work. So instead of letting Macs atrophy, they should invest in making Macs the best possible desktop and laptop computers for serious work. Own whatever amount of that market they can. Keep those users in the Apple ecosystem.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/07/apple-third-quarter-2019-...
Personally I would like to see an iPhone X with TouchID under the display WITH FaceID. So if I have gloves on or my finger is wet, no problem, FaceID takes over. If I'm laying in bed and holding my phone to close to my face, no problem, TouchID authenticates. It also means I can unlock my phone without picking it up off my desk with my finger.
You would get the best of both worlds and none of the drawbacks.
Plus, it lets the phone not display sensitive notification details until you are the one looking at the screen(with attention detection on, the default, you have to be really looking at it), only then it will display the details(including actual messages, depending on how it's configured). This is great in many scenarios.
I like to be able to unlock my phone when it's flat on my desk without picking it up.
Compare the Apple remote (with the iOS “emulator”), Apple TV, and Airplay to Chromecast’s UX, for instance. Apple does have special sauce. They make tools that work together and are understood at a surface level. Everything, including the new keyboards, fits a hardware market driven agenda (quiet, “appy”, small like a phone). Google and Amazon work backwards from services, and Samsung and co just aren’t even playing the same ballgame. They are much more like traditional prebuilt computer companies. MS is kind of coming close with just computers but they are not nearly as sticky as an everything tech company.
On the other hand, it might just be that I can get used to anything. (Err, I also think the Apple TV UI is fine, too. But, perhaps I lack the imagination to envision a better UI.)
The music app can get too deeply nested, but in general it is above all a consistent tabbed master-view experience in every app. The apis exposed to developers all lend to a very good, consistent experience for everything I’ve tried except YouTube TV, which doesn’t utilize the standard media transport API.
In general I like the idea that casting, while still as deeply integrated as Google Cast, is supplemental to the hardware remote. It’s not an afterthought, and neither is the remote. Both are good IMO.
Truly my only complaint is that the app switching dialogue uses reversed/“physical” swiping direction (like switching desktops with a trackpad). This makes no sense to me, as nothing else does this, including swiping between album covers in now playing. I get it, but it’s inconsistent with the whole rest of the UI.
Second is their customer lock-in.
Those can carry lots of value. And even strength, maybe. But growth ?
And design ? Google can design well enough. Their interfaces are easy and fun to use. Beyond that, regular people don't care.
For me, Google will always be the company that high-jacked scrolling to use for zoom. That still trips me up every time I have to use Google Maps or any other mapping service that copied them on a laptop with a trackpad.
They could keep that default (misguided as I personally think it is) if they just provided an option to let scroll be scroll but they don't.
I'd much rather pay a premium for Apple's UI. I think they do a better job and it's worth paying for.
I'm coming to the conclusion that some people are more sensitive to design issues than others. If you are then there isn't much choice, Google certainly isn't an option.
In the US, the number of people who can’t buy an iPhone on a carrier payment plan is small.
Google makes money by targeting users, not by selling their data.
I don't like ads in general, but privacy is not lost because of Google.
Cambridge Analytica run on FB for a reason.
Not even sure why this is considered debatable. Even if it's just "perception" (which I doubt) it's a real reason to buy.
- Very subjective. Further, from a feature set perspective, you're not missing out on much (anything?) with Android. It used to be that you could only get certain Apps on iOS. That's simply not the case anymore. So it comes down to a raw, subjective preference... Like what color do you prefer - green or blue?
* customers already tied into the apple ecosystem
- I was in the Apple ecosystem for ~9 years. Switched over to Android this year. Took me all of a couple days to make the switch. Turns out I'm more embedded in Google's ecosystem than I thought. Apple was just a conduit for Google services, in many ways.
* more of a focus on privacy (admittedly, this one is probably debatable)
- A compelling reason for the technically aware. My post however was about the "general consumer" ... 99% of people are going to be just fine on Android v.s. iOS when it comes to privacy. For god sakes, they're likely already using Facebook/IG.
To wit: Apple knows every app you ever downloaded, and there is nothing you can do about it. Every time you click on an address link, it sends the address to Apple, and there is nothing you can do about it. Any time an app looks up your GPS location, that location is sent to Apple, and there is nothing you can do about it. If you want to write apps for your own device, you need to give card details to Apple, and there is nothing you can do about it. A phone with Google Play services doesn't suffer from any of these problems.
When you consider how a phone is the primary computing device for a lot of people, it's an even easier decision.
Enough of those differences, and things start to really add up. Enough things add up, and you realize that money could have been making you ~8% in an index fund for the last year. Suddenly, the iPhone, the multiple Starbucks, the BMW, the designer clothes... all things rationalized as "just a few bucks a day" ... end up costing way more than that.
AOC presents a good argument against Buy Backs from Big Pharma which incentives CEO's who's compensation is tied to stock price, which as a result she attributes as the cause of rising costs of health insurance:
https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1154794058272972801
Although Big Pharma doesn't operate in a natural economy where products are priced at optimal demand / supply for max Revenue. Instead their cost is hidden from the end-user, absorbed by insurance companies and amortized across all plan holders with rising cost of health insurance.
In the long-term Buy Backs shouldn't increase a companies value as it's just trading one Asset for another, i.e. it's cash reserves for shares in their own stock, they'd choose to do this if they've maxed out their R&D budget (very healthy at $14B) and if they believe their share price is undervalued, which at a 17 P/E is significantly lower than all other FANG stocks.
They could try and follow in AMZN's footsteps and try to expand into all areas outside of their core competency, but it's not their style which is to do a few things and do them well. IMO it's due to protecting and not wanting to dilute the high appeal of their Brand and Products.
The result of which they've ended up with an excessive amount of capital and no effective place to invest it, although IMO they should've invested a lot more in content like Netflix a lot sooner than they have with Apple TV+.
Having used both of them, I'd profoundly disagree with you on that statement. I consider CarPlay a much more elegant solution than Android Auto. Particularly that android auto will change settings on your head unit. The early versions of it also completely disabled your phone screen.
If your bar for "innovative" is seriously that incredibly high, prepare to be disappointed..
I assume they want the watch to become a standalone platform (or at least, similarly to the ipod, a companion device to either an iphone or android phone), ultimately replacing your need for a phone at all.
That last statement of mine sounds absurd to me, but then again who would have predicted 10 years ago that many people would have a smart phone but no laptop nor desktop?
The iPhone was a Mac derivative and computer accessory that required iTunes to even work but became the most successful product in all of human history. You could call it just a ‘mac in your pocket’ but it would still be the most successful products
The watch is on a similar trajectory.
The Apple Watch does not need an iPhone to function.
You could also point to AirPods. They sold a lot of them because a lot of people had iPhones
AirPods work with any Bluetooth device, not just iPhones.
I was responding to the parent's comment about Apple TV (the premise) with my conclusion, which is a subjective opinion. Which ironically is the exact same thing as what you're doing. Wasn't trying to flame-bait, but I really didn't feel the need to add more. In summary, compared to other devices, I really do not like Apple TV.
Watch, even if it ends up eating the whole current market, but not creating new one, is a failure by Apple standards. Unless Apple is going to branch out and become company like Samsung, that makes everything from watches, to nuclear power plants. Apple success story was never about big portfolio of products - they were always about few products, but extremely focused and creating whole new markets for them.
So you use that for vertical scrolling. How would you do horizontal scrolling on a typical mouse then?
The default of holding left click and dragging the map across to move the viewport is far more intuitive.
Unless you have some supporting evidence that clicking and dragging is more intuitive I would suggest that it's not and that you're just used to doing it because you use a mouse and not a trackpad.
Two finger scrolling is used everywhere else on laptops. It handles horizontal scrolling perfectly.
It shouldn't be hijacked by Google for zoom without even the option to restore the default behaviour.
If Google were "good" at UI they would offer the option of pinch zoom on laptops and just leave scrolling alone.
EDIT: I guess Google Chrome could go all `el.addEventListener('-webkit-pinch-zoom')` on us.
Google - the only thing they are doing profitability is selling ads.
Just look at Apple’s revenue split (second graph). How do you think that compares to Google?
https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/07/apple-third-quarter-2019-...
A “successful” product is one that you can sell for more than it costs to make. Anyone can sell dollar bills for 0.95 cents.
Amazon? Yes AWS is definitely successful and innovative, but the other half of Amazon?
IIRC, based on their latest report it's the other 30% (by revenue). Amazon is basically a cloud computing provider with a web store.
But let's say it is. Going back to my original question (which I've been roundly downvoted for having the temerity to even ask): if Apple stopped innovating, would they still be the same company we love? Would fans still be so emotionally invested that they reflexively attack anyone who publicly criticizes the company, however obliquely?
The average person doesn’t even care about computers that much anymore.
Besides, computer sales are only 11% of their revenue.
https://sixcolors.com/images/content/2019/financials-2019-7-...
- Send and receive phone calls and messages
- Navigate using turn by turn directions
- Use Siri
- listen to synced music playlists with bluetooth headphones
- track activity and heart rate
- look at pictures
This is not that different from an iPhone prior to iOS 5, when you needed a computer to set up and update an iPhone.
Is the Apple Watch innovative? I would argue yes, it’s an incredible piece of technology. Will it be as successful as the iPhone? I would guess, probably not.
There was nothing an iPhone could do that a Mac couldn’t do better, except for fit in your pocket.
I have two solutions for you, though: firstly, download BetterTouchTool[1] and install the GoldenChaosBTT[2] preset. It's the killer app for the Touch Bar, it turns it into a genuinely useful feature that you'll find yourself using all the time, and BTT in general is an incredibly powerful tool for customising the way you interact with your Mac.
Secondly, switching Caps Lock to the Esc key[3] has been one of the biggest productivity improvements I've made in the last decade, seriously. I wish I'd done it sooner. I've made the switch on every machine I use, even the ones without a Touch Bar.
Hope that helps!
[2] https://community.folivora.ai/t/goldenchaos-btt-a-complete-t...
[3] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/127591/using-caps-lock-a...
The TouchBar is nice on paper, actually adds to some applications, but the current implementation is a world of hurt.
As long as it's optional, I could see people not liking this.
I'm never going to retire my 2013 MBP at this rate.
I use vim and switch between a butterfly/touchbar Mac (work machine) and a Thinkpad (personal machine). Using the Mac keyboard has actually negatively impacted my typing speed when I use other systems! I remapped my vim keybindings, and now my muscle memory has atrophied.
This dumb machine has actually made me a worse typist. I am so frustrated.
And that means things, like for example the stock has to decline and/or dividends increase because it becomes more productive to put that money into companies that are growing. Investors care about news like this.
It seems like a lot (a lot) of readers here are looking at the article as if it says "Apple sucks. Their products suck. No one should buy this junk. They're going to fail."
That's not what it says. It does say that Apple, as an investment, is changing from one kind of thing (a growing tech behemoth) to another (a basically static industry giant), and that change is news.
The extent to which that expectation tilts toward wanting/demanding growth, varies from one stock to the next. Some companies do not trade with a heavy tilt toward the requirement for growth. Others do, and if a company misses on that growth expectation, the stock will plunge. Whereas other companies go without growth for years and maintain a relatively high PE ratio.
If this were not the case, any company with zero growth or a contracting business would be treated as worthless - or otherwise granted an extreme discount - by the market.
McDonald's saw contraction in its business for years, the market still saw fit to routinely grant it a 20+ PE ratio while they shrank. Coca Cola has been in a similar scenario, they've had horrible business performance for years, yet they have a 30+ multiple. Boeing is getting its corporate brains pounded in right now, in every possible regard financially, and yet the stock is very high (and their multiple is about to be astronomical). There is zero expectation for growth in the near future for Boeing.
So what's the basis of Coca Cola's valuation if it isn't growth year to year? Well, all sorts of things enter the picture depending on the stock. KO pays a dividend. KO has an extremely valuable and enduring brand. KO appeals to conservative investors who feel safe owning it (in a world in which ~$13 trillion in debt is trading at negative yields). KO gets put into all sorts of conservative investment vehicles, that helps prop up the stock. KO has a very large international business, so it gets an investor exposure outside of the US; some investors like that (even if doesn't make a lot of sense as a good investment argument in this case; investors are often not rational). KO buys back their own stock, which props things up a bit. KO has maintained fat margins even as their top line has contracted, investors surely like the overall profitability. KO has large, long-term owners, such as Buffett / Berkshire Hathaway, which lends confidence. And no doubt there is also a segment of investors that think KO may one day return to growth again (even if there hasn't been evidence to support that premise for many years), or otherwise make moves to expand the business (eg by acquiring Monster). Most of the arguments and cause for KO at a 30+ PE ratio, have nothing to do with expectations for growth, however.
Apple could go years without growth, and still maintain a surprisingly high PE ratio, a 15-20 multiple for example. You could see them go without growth for many years and the stock merely goes sideways, while the expectation for growth entirely disappears (if stocks were all heavily priced based on future expectations for growth, Apple would have already fallen off a cliff, as nobody expects much growth for AAPL going forward; investors are at best hoping they can replace falling iPhone revenue with service revenue over time). Or maybe the market sours on their performance, they fall out of favor, and they go back to having a ~10 PE ratio as they did in the not so distant past. Plenty of this stuff is emotional (a stock getting tagged in the financial & business press with a negative growth story that dogs it for years) or momentum-based, it often makes no logical sense.
Not that long ago Facebook had a 20 PE, while actually still producing healthy growth. Meanwhile over there is Coca Cola with zero growth for years, zero expectation for growth, and getting granted a higher PE ratio (KO also arguably has an even worse negative story re sugar). That's an example of comical irrationality in charge and FB getting tagged with a negative, emotion-heavy story in all the business press. Then 'magically' it fades, the extreme negative emotionalism fades from the business press, and FB's multiple expands. This is the aspect of human nature that in part led Ben Graham to his statement about the market being a voting machine short-term (emotional heavy; reactionary; did the quarterly results surprise, miss, beat, et al.), and a weighing machine long-term (what is the enduring value of the Coca Cola company, what are its assets, how much is their business really worth, will that persist for many years to come, what will their cash flow look like over the next five or ten years, etc).
If we have "stopped expecting exponential growth" then the title should have been "Duh!", not "Slowing Growth" (which implies we still expected growth).
So there may not be an expectation of exponential growth forever, but literally declining revenue vs inflation is a different conversation.
If apple made $100 in 2018 q3 and 101 in 2019 q3, then they made less than 100 in 2019 q3 using constant 2018 dollars. It is declining revenue. That's a bit scary. For one quarter might just be a blip.
Not to investors that want a quick ROI quarter-over-quarter on that share price.
With their last quarter's profits ($10bn) they could buy back about 50m of their 5bn outstanding shares ($208/share right now); that's 1% of the company.
It may be that the S-Curve is good enough. Make a huge profit and return it to shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks. Share price doesn't have to increase based only on hyped growth.
"By enabling Location Services for your devices, you agree and consent to the transmission, collection, maintenance, processing, and use of your location data and location search queries by Apple and its partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based and road traffic-based products and services."
It will also send your location to Apple when no app is requesting your location:
"If Location Services is on, your iPhone will periodically send the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple, to be used for augmenting this crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower locations."
Unlike on Android, you cannot get your location without sending this data to Apple:
"To use features such as these, you must enable Location Services on your iPhone"
Successful: No. If you define success as “profitable”.
The only time Apple sold inexpensive electronics that I can remember were the iPod Shuffles and they were more expensive than other low end MP3 products.
They can still be very successful company without that. But not necessarily as one of the world most valuable companies.
It was so obvious that Apple should be entering the smart phone market with a combination iPod + phone that people were already coining the name iPhone 3 years before it was introduced.
What market are you seeing with the clear growth trajectories that the cell phone had by 2002 that Apple should enter within the next 5 years?
they should provide a cloud on which you can use Metal compute
But, the thing is they don’t need to be good at something. Giant companies regularly expend into new areas. Employ the right people, make some investments, and suddenly they are competitive.
I am not saying Apple should diversify like this. However, it is an option.
On top of that, Apple already announced the subscription Apple Arcade service and their games will run on iPhones, iPads, AppleTVs and Macs.
Between Microsoft and Sony, they sold a little over 100 million of the current generation consoles during their entire existence (https://www.cinemablend.com/games/2417541/ea-reveals-how-man...) - many of them at a loss. Apple sells 50-70 million iOS devices every quarter.
Heck Apple will probably sell more Watches (at a profit) than that during its first 5 years.
People are already spending more time on mobile devices than consoles.
As far as cameras, the standalone camera market has been declining for years because of the smart phone. There is only so much you can do with cameras in phones because of both physics and the cost has to be low enough to make the entire phone affordable. I’m sure no one at Apple is thinking about releasing the Apple QuickTake 2.
Apple's P/E ratio is around 17, which seems perfectly reasonable for a mature company these days. Investors aren't expecting growth.
Further, as I have listed areas they could be investing in but are not that you have had zero objections to. I think it's clear they have less focus on R&D than was possible.
Microsoft made $10 billion in revenue last year on the XBox - they don’t mention profit (https://www.geekwire.com/2018/microsofts-record-setting-10b-...). Microsoft still probably hasn’t recouped their losses in the Xbox division and the console market isn’t expected to grow.
Apple made about 24 billion on the Mac during the previous four quarters (https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/07/apple-third-quarter-2019-...). You know Apple doesn’t sell a single Mac where they don’t make a healthy profit. The Mac is nowhere near their best performing segment.
The AppleTV was a decently early set top box and those didn’t change the world. It wasn’t until Roku and Amazon started selling them at basically break even or maybe a slight loss for $50 that those took off.
Which supports my argument about lackluster innovation. I can say people won't pay $1200 bucks for a laptop with specs they could get for $800, either, but I'd be wrong because they do.
You might argue the AppleTV was innovative at the time it was released, but there were already very successful game consoles that had much the same functionality plus the games. Even if you count it as an innovation, it was announced in 2007.
Innovative products are not always successful. Now, if AppleTV had incorporated Alexa-level voice control technology back in 2013, that probably would've been innovative and successful.
You can create a rule to change caps lock to control if pressed with other keys, else escape if pressed alone.
I have no affiliation with it, just ran into this issue myself and it solved it for me.
Instead we have Karabiner Elements which has been of mixed stability in my experience.
Many times I've had it completely disable the internal keyboard on my late 2013 MBP to the point where I have to plug in a USB keyboard to recover or if on the road do a force power reset.
There are many valid criticisms of the touch bar macs, losing one key in particular is pretty low on the list.
The whole reason to remap caps lock to ctrl is that ctrl is in a terrible location.
I agree that this is stabilizing the stock price. I also think that they are still spending plenty of money on innovation, it's just that they have too much money to know how to spend it appropriately.
The stock is an incredible value (even still) because share repurchases and dividends continue to occur and they continue to make tons of money. And it will benefit from upside when they have another hit. Yes, I am long.
You would think that, but they actually purchase when it’s expensive :)
I'm wandering off-topic, but I keep imagining an alternative universe where Apple bought Nintendo and released an amazing Nintendo-AppleTV with fantastic voice control, leading to a game ecosystem today where you can seamlessly go from console-to-phone-to-watch playing the same game, with friends.
