Apple Reports First Quarter Results(apple.com) |
Apple Reports First Quarter Results(apple.com) |
I’m curious to see if there’s any change to the replacement rate of Macs. It seems normal for people to use the same laptop for four or more years — a far sight longer than the two-year life expectancy of laptops twenty years ago, but about half of the replacement rate of smartphones.
There's one benefit of these DIY designs that seems under-reported: Apple can now develop stuff like the "neural engine". Chips that aren't just faster or more efficient than Intel offerings, but also do different things.
I think there's almost no chance that I'll be upgrading to an M2 Pro next year or the following, but there's every possibility that the M3 Pro won't just be a faster Apple Silicon chip. If future Macbooks are more than just "the same thing but faster," dorks like me will be retiring our computers a lot faster.
Yeah, and hold off for now. I'm the guy making sure that new onboards don't get blocked by M1 (as you can't but Intel anymore). Segfaults in docker/qemu (amd64 and arm64) are numerous: I can't build our otherwise boring (and recent) docker images locally - it has to go to a Linux ARM server. What truly bends my mind is that I am getting framerate/audio/input hitching on the desktop when one of the broken containers pegs 3 of the cores at 100% (and it's not just my machine).
It's a circus, wait for M2 or M3 unless your workload is influencing, blogging, and checking email.
I mostly do React/web dev and some dabbling with SwiftUI. I spent most of 2021 doing that on an M1 Air and it was a joy.
((The only kink I’ve run into was trying to deploy a serverless app; Docker did indeed make that a nonstarter. So I just accomplished it the old fashioned way (a dippy little VM running in a cloud server). Not a deal-breaker.))
Most of my friends are graphic designers who use Adobe apps (nearly all ported to ARM). The only reason most of them haven’t upgraded is because they want 27” iMacs.
What on earth do you think most people do with computers?
What they will do is be faster and more widely adopted. Docker (and everyone else) will do the heavy lifting to fix those, including any that are specifically Apple bugs.
Everything else has been an absolute breeze though (and so fast!).
Are people really still replacing their phones every two years? Mine always last for 4+
Not with their current demographic trends.
There are some scattered final assembly here and there, like screwing together the Mac Pro in Texas, and I think the iPhone production in India is non-trivial, but for all intents and purposes the vast, vast majority of Apple's production happens in China, performed by Chinese nationals, who are themselves subject to Chinese law, in facilities wholly inside of Chinese jurisdiction.
It doesn't matter much if Apple sells a single unit in China, from a "kowtowing to the Chinese government" perspective: China controls Apple fully as without China's consent and permission, Apple cannot produce anything for sale in significant quantity.
Keeps blowing my mind how consistently services keep growing. Highest margins too. Just printing money!
I have a windows desktop for gaming and Microsoft seems to constantly try to push their bullshit. Whether it’s opening edge at start/changing my default browser, making me use the Microsoft Store or Microsoft accounts (they do this for Minecraft now, and the install experience through downloading minecraft from the web is now hilariously broken), or even shilling something at the log in screen, Microsoft just does not give a fuck about making their UX seem cheap to push their bloat.
Edit - just to add that IBM dominated computing for a long time with this model. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Apple has become so big in what is a much bigger market.
How quickly we forget that Apple just had 2 generations of complete dogshit laptops.
I do, latest macs have terrible linux compatibility for now, with apple not doing much to help in providing support for it (M1)
They keep fixing and breaking their keyboards, the latest macs are better in this aspect but until even 2 yrs ago, they used to break quite frequently
Apple making it so hard to develop ios apps on a non apple device, definitely brings additional pain, I don’t want to use apple for my computer.
Saying it as someone who really enjoys using the iphone.
I get why people like macbooks so much, but saying “You never blame yourself for buying Apple” is untrue
For me, that would stand for thinkpads and even then primarily for the older ones.
marcan (lead dev of Asahi Linux) seems to disagree:
Looks like Apple changed the requirements for Mach-O kernel files in 12.1, breaking our existing installation process... and they *also* added a raw image mode that will never break again and doesn't require Mach-Os.
And people said they wouldn't help. This is intended for us.
Indeed. There is no evidence of them abusing streams of user information.
This means we will soon enough have a situation where a corporation controls the primary medium of communication of the citizens. At this point a smart society would consider how to regulate this situation to safely prevent domination abuse, but I doubt it will happen.
Remember all the “Apple is doomed, Tim is a bean counter” comments when Jobs handed over the reigns?
Yea. Ok.
I just want a phone that works well, works with everything (virtually nobody builds serious apps just for Android and not iOS), and allows me to go about the rest of my day with ease.
But I’ve never had a Dell or HP laptop come without a bezel scratch or something like that. So in my books, Apple are still a league ahead on quality, even.
Many Apple products in particular OSX was pretty bad during Jobs era.
Woah I had no idea this was a thing! Since Google is forcing the old free workspace users into paid accounts this year, this will be a great replacement. Thanks, I'll have to look into this.
In the US.
And while I agree that anything nearing a de facto monopoly should be strictly regulated, I think any effort should be directed at any messaging app with a large user base, e.g. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger.
So long as there is a near substitute for Apple smartphones, I fail to see what that is sufficient grounds for anti-trust action.
The messaging apps are not a good example of monopoly violations. They are all market options which have many many solutions. WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Signal, iOS Messages, SMS, Discord, Slack, Google Hangouts, MS Teams, Zoom, Skype, and a thousand web forums have similar capabilities. The comms market is remarkably healthy. What most people complain about is the contract they agree to which has lots of restrictive clauses (some which are very vague). Those general contract terms in SaaS services is what I would aim to regulate, rather than the biggest incumbents in the disparate comms apps.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
Apple has not (in my recollection) sought to exert control over content of what is being said or shared among users. In fact, they seem to keep quite a distance from wanting to know or be responsible for that.
And you're claiming that iMessage is the "primary medium of communication of the citizens"? That is just a little overblown, don't you think?
I would argue, if you have that position, maybe you should spend your energy or concern on cable TV news and other media outlets, who do far worse, with far less share of their markets.
You may want to search for Telegram and Apple.
They also block apps that involve politically controversial content, or content that they disagree with (e.g. pornography).
How is that not a bigger monopoly?
Doesn't this imply that parents are the one purchasing it for them? Would be interesting to see how many stick with iPhone when they start earning for themselves.
And it's not Google.
Also please, that should probably be done by a company that is not Google.
Future concerns about what Apple might do in future are nothing by comparison.
But 90% of them will still be doing all of this on an Apple device. Yet you think Facebook is the company to worry about, not Apple?
They control what messaging apps you are allowed to install on your iPhone.
Wow. Crazy! This has literally never happened before.
But objectively: monopoly is a bad thing. We’re still recovering from Microsoft’s dominance of desktop computing.
Once you have a near monopoly it’s practically impregnable to disintegrate. As you have a wealthy company which is actively harming those efforts.
And every cycle of quarterly results there’s surprise on HN.
This is what makes me nervous. They struck absolute gold with the iPhone, what happens if they don't catch the next wave?
Depending on your viewpoint these can be highly disruptive plays - smart phones were going no place for many demographics until the iPhone came out. Android was going to be a cheaper blackberry clone until they saw what iPhone was doing.
But another view of the iPad famously was the Slashdot single-line review, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
Phones were a bit of a blind spot in the market. There should have been a lot more investment going on.
Phones are expensive devices that people update often (with "often" really being a function of the demographic), where the price was disguised in many markets via carrier subsidies and cellular contracts. The carriers were often trying to figure out how to get more customers and get them to pay for more services, so charging for data tiers on top of minutes and messaging was attractive.
Nokia had teams that understood this and obviously the company in general was capitalizing on how much money was going into phones, but they were highly dysfunctional in terms of massive amounts of duplicated work (e.g. little commonalities between hardware or OS on dozens of phones released every year). An example of Nokia trying to leverage cellphones to go into a new market would be the N-Gage.
In terms of markets they tend to go after, VR would be the one where I might worry they missed the wave. Some of that is not knowing if VR actually has broad demographic appeal though - there are technology leaps still needed for many people to tolerate longer headset usage, and most computer applications aren't really VR as much as they are 'large virtual monitor' - you don't see N-dimensional word processing as much as games and experiences. Their money is obviously on AR having much broader appeal.
There are certainly cases where market disruption attempts have failed, such as the HomeKit ecosystem. The more open (and cheaper) ecosystems that Google and Amazon have had managed to get significantly more adoption by manufacturers. For that reason they now seem to be aligning much more with and driving new industry standards instead, such as Matter.
All the rumors about them investing toward a full self-driving car product is really odd, because it goes against so much of their formula for incremental evolution of product lines - seems about as likely as them releasing a television or refrigerator.
What happens if they don’t catch the next wave? In that case, they will still be wildly successful. They’ve already had the iPad, which is the clear winner in the tablet market. They’ve already had the Apple Watch, which is the clear winner in the smartwatch market. They’ve already had the AirPods, which is the clear winner in the earphone market. None of these are the one-in-a-generation products that the iPhone is, yet they are all massive successes that bring in tonnes of money.
Apple will probably never have a hit as big as the iPhone ever again… but that’s perfectly fine and not at all incompatible with massive success and huge profits.
I think you are going to be out of luck there.
This experience has done nothing but prove my previously unsubstantiated beliefs. I am pushing for Linux laptops at work.
The only issue is the keyboard, which is now on its third replacement. The extended replacement program ran out last year, but they still replace keys for free.
This is a 2017 MacBook. They upgraded my 2012 model for the price of a battery swap because the 2012 parts were out of stock. In other words, I've been going for 10 years on the same laptop purchase.
They're not perfect laptops, but they're still the best ROI I've had on a laptop, and far better than any laptop I've had before.
I don't know, the 2015 MacBook Pro was well regarded.
I can see technology companies looking at the automotive industry and thinking those traditional manufacturers are struggling with the technology side and that maybe they can do a better job.
I'll be surprised if it ever sees the light of day though, the car side is hard as well.
That was said about the first iPod in 2001, not the first iPad in 2010, and it was said by (editor in chief) CmdrTaco himself.
People bought far fewer goods from the USSR than we do from China.
(I will say one thing about leopard, I iinstalled a boot disk of it on an intel machine and I was able to boot an old ppc mini. That was impressive at the time)
The decline for pro users will continue, I think. Of course a behemoth of 2 T$ won't fail tomorrow
Jobs wanted Apple to deliver the best of the technology that mankind has to offer whereas Cook wants Apple to deliver the best in the market.
Competitors could spend 10 years catching up. Cook simply needs to keep the machine going till he retires.
Tim's Apple look at which market has potential profits and tries to enter it.
It is a product based strategy vs a market based strategy.
Nokia?
Nokia is a company not a product. They’ve released a tremendous number of products, none of which came close to the iPhone.
We’re talking about a product that captured greater than 100% of the profits for the entire smartphone market one year. That brought in more revenue than most countries. How often does that happen?
>Gurman claims that Apple has developed two SoCs for the new Mac Pro, codenamed 'Jade 2C-Die' and 'Jade 4C-Die'. These SoCs would have 20 or 40 CPUs cores, which would be significantly more than anything Apple has planned for its MacBook range. Both have performance and power-saving clusters though, split 16/4 and 32/6. Gurman also expects 'Jade 2C-Die' and 'Jade 4C-Die' to feature 64 or 128 GPU cores, a huge uplift on the GPUs found in the current Mac Pro.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-is-reputedly-developing-...
If the (very likely) 2-die version is released, that'll be 64 Apple GPU cores. If the (likely) 4-die version is released, that'll be 128 Apple GPU cores. Coupled alongside that would be up to 32 Performance cores and 8 efficiency cores. That should be good competition for anything NVIDIA and Intel Xeon.
Poor Xeons with meager TBs of RAM.
Of course not! If there was dust it would immediately brick the keyboard.
- my mail will disappear. I would open a folder and see emails from 2007 at the top... wait and see he is loading them again and more are popping up.. takes few minutes to catch up with 2021.
- my contacts will not work when I start typing email. literally sometimes the do sometimes they don't
- emails that previously were formatted well, would be crashing with odd CSS issues I never seen before
- I would click email.. start reading, then it would shift to the next email.. on its own!
- I had few emails automatically disappear for good... only to find them in trash folder.
Its a disaster. A classical situation where after a system update I'm banging my head against the wall "why the heck did I do that??"
I clearly remember at the time all of the rampant speculation about the downfall of Apple and thinking it's all bullshit, that the people doing the real work are still there and still care and his absence would make little difference, which was true immediately, but gradually over the last decade? perhaps individual work ethic is not enough in a large megacorporate structure to overcome corporate pressures. Perhaps, in such a large structure you really do need someone pushy and particular enough at the top to get emotional and pissed at people when small details suck to prevent it adding up over time.
I don't think Steve Jobs would let a 'Your battery is under 10%', 'interruptive' notification stay this long on a phone.
If you took out a screenshot of system preferences from OS X tiger or something and compared it to today, see how easy it is to find things on that one. Even with simple things such as the wording of 'General' vs 'Appearance'.
Why not ? He was happy with the giant, interruptive volume overlay for all those years.
You can't expect Apple to allow apps which wilfully tolerate illegal content.
Then there's the App Store being both a point of control, a burden on developers, and highway robbery with Apple's 30% cut.
And if you think the App Store is a burden you should try implementing customer acquisition and go-to market strategies which is what the store gives you for free.
I'd try but Apple doesn't let its customers willingly install my app from me or any other open-source repository they might choose.
If the only option is the App Store, it's not very surprising that the App Store is good for customer acquisition. You literally cannot acquire them any other way, you are artificially prevented by Apple's anti-competitive measures.
They approve apps to be sold/distributed on their platform based on rules about what those apps do or are allowed to do, and whether they comply with local laws.
You're leaning towards making it sound like they decide what messaging apps you're allowed to use based on what you plan to say (content wise) on them.
So you just demonstrated that teens have so much choice. Why are you concerned that they're doing it on an Apple device then, if an iPhone is just the hardware on which all these apps operate, and has nothing to do with what's said within the apps?
Imagine it was Amazon in this situation. Or Microsoft. Or Google. Or, gasp, Facebook. Where 90% of teens were using a hardware and software platform made by one company. Seems like a problem, right?
Imagine how much people would be freaking out if Facebook came out with a phone and OS and had 90% of teens using it. The wailing and gnashing of teeth could be heard from the Moon.
The communication is not being done using software that Apple provides.
People have a vast array of choices for communications and Apple isn’t harming that.
In addition, there is nothing preventing Google or Facebook from executing on what Apple does other than their own lack of focus.
Except they do. They can choose to use Android like many non-teens do.
Where all of those apps except for one is available.
Regardless, when my mail carrier changes their route to get to my house 30 minutes faster I don't take it as some sort of sign that the UPS cares about me more than the others. It seems more likely to me that Apple saw the logistical value in not breaking their own kernel requirements with every release, and that happens to be serendipitous with the greater development community as a whole. If Apple wanted to help the Linux community, we would know because they'd be releasing UNIX kernel blobs so people wouldn't be forced to spend years re-writing code that already exists. But of course, that's not how their industry works. If Torvalds gave Nvidia just one middle finger for their treatment of Linux, it's hard to imagine how many he'd like to give Apple these days.
The second tweet in the thread reads:
Seriously, I can't think of a single reason why they'd add that for themselves. They build real Mach-Os with their own process. They have no use for raw images.
They are saying "hey, use this, it's easier and we won't break it in the future". This is for Asahi.
China is already the worlds largest economy in terms of raw output (PPP terms).
China is already the worlds largest consumer market.
There’s a reasonable chance it exceeds USA in nominal GDP it if it grows at 5+% till 2030. This year they grew at 8.5 %
Given that they are hitting a demographic cliff in a few years, it is not so guaranteed anymore. It will be an interesting next couple of decades for China.
> This year they grew at 8.5 %
A lot of that is real estate, the same real estate that speculators are banking on will sell to poor farmers for a million dollars when they re-locate to cities (and the same farmers who aren't having that many kids anymore...).
Demographic doom is frequently cited for China but I rarely hear about the doom of Europe which has worse demographics. Demographics can be topped up using immigration. Without immigration the US would also be in demographic decline.
The US GDP grew 5.7% last year.
> China is already the worlds largest consumer market.
No it isn’t.
To be fair that's only because it bounced back from the covid impacts in the previous year.It had been hovering around the 2.5% mark for the previous decade.
On the other hand no economist believes the figures that come out of China, they are far too consistent.
Announced but not (yet) implemented.
> analyze your locally-stored photographs for child photography
Nope. Only the ones on iCloud.
> and upload questionable photos to the cloud for human review
Also a misrepresentation.
> or content that they disagree with (e.g. pornography).
True. And yes, I should have a wank to whatever I please. Legality permitting.
It is so easy to criticise Apple. So many angles to attack them on. So don't misconstrue facts. There's really no need.
> Nope. Only the ones on iCloud.
Nope. Only the ones your device intends to send to iCloud.
They’re already scanned on iCloud, this was on device scanning before upload. Likely it was a requirement for them to add encryption on the files they store and not have the unsealing keys.
Sort of a pre-emotive avoidance of certain political conversations.
From a practical perspective, for most everyone, "intending to send" and "on iCloud" is probably a 300ms delta in time.
They are not. Other file and photo hosting platforms do not encrypt the data, so they are able to scan server-side. The content is encrypted for iCloud, and the encryption keys are not known by the hosting infrastructure.
This means as an example that shared iCloud albums could be used as a distribution mechanism for child pornography, operating silently until one of the members' accounts gets subpoenaed or they confess and share the list.
Do you have kids? Daughters? Would you like better control over what they're exposed to? Being given the tools to track screen time, purchases and control where possible exposure to objectionable content for immature minds isn't a bad thing.. provided it is opt-in. Which the feature always was before the news cycle chose their own narrative.
In addition to Google scanning everything in your Google account looking for child pornography for the last decade?
>a man [was] arrested on child pornography charges, after Google tipped off authorities about illegal images found in the Houston suspect's Gmail account
https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/why-the-gmail-scan-that-le...
In addition to Google scanning your online account looking for copyright violations?
And on the 2nd point, they like any company, have to obey the laws of the countries they operate in. Whether they should operate in countries that call for them to censor political content, that's a different question. I'm sure you would say that companies have to follow the local laws.
I think there are compelling arguments for making Apple open up which apps can access their SDKs natively, but I think most instances of its implementation will be driven by adversarial governments and bad for user freedoms.
Abuse of monopoly is a problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Mo...
IANAL, and I'm assuming USA since that's where Apple has 90% market share on the young, but this seems to imply that monopoly in and on itself is illegal.
You seem to be ignoring 130 years of law that happened since what you are quoting.
Courts quickly began struggling with the Sherman Act's broad and vague language, recognizing that interpreting it literally might make even simple business entities like partnerships illegal.[9] Federal judges began trying to develop legal principles for distinguishing between "naked" trade restraints between rivals that suppressed competition and other restraints that were only "ancillary" to other cooperation agreements that promoted competition.[9]
It also goes without saying that the law trails ethics and morality; not the inverse.
Neither of these things crush competition in any way.
Security is not illegal, nor is anyone compelled by law to write compilers.
Underlying cloud providers that Apple uses e.g. AWS may not have the key but Apple definitely does. And that key could be embedded in a CSAM detection app.
So unless you work for Apple and have definitive proof that they do not have such an app I think we should assume they do.
I'm not saying I think they'll keep going forever, but I really don't think you should hold your breath.
Why? Has there been any trend to indicate they're headed in this direction?
Sure it has been getting a whole lot of very nice features, but ios has been visibly buggy recently to the point where if I don’t reboot my phone atleast once every 5-6 weeks, bugs start appearing constantly,
From glitching of settings app to outright daily crashes of the settings app , to safari acting weirdly, to the home screen’s app drawer vanishing suddenly or the search function vanishing.
Etc, etc.
(I’m on a stable modern ios version)
I do get where the parent comment is coming from. Commodification of technology can only go so far, and Apple is walking down the same path IBM (or even Microsoft, for that matter) did to learn that lesson.
I do it all the time without having to go through the App Store.
I assure you there was no malice.
Being unable to use any other operating system on your PC was definitely seen as harming the user, and after lots of battles secureboot is optional on x86 windows PCs (but not arm)- in the same vain we managed to successfully argue that people other than Microsoft should have secureboot keys too, and thus redhat also have secureboot keys.
Not having a compiler though? That’s what put back computer science and education 10 years in the Microsoft era, the barrier to programming was a lot higher than it was prior to the late 90s and only recovered in the late 00s where we saw a resurgence of young people learning programming with the availability of WAMP and later django and rails.
You can thank Microsoft that less and less people each year understood native programming.
Microsoft hid their compiler suites behind complex systems, if they had been included or easy to access this would not be the case. But it was a choice on the side of Microsoft that only determined people really need a compiler anyway.
Apple is doing the same thing. But Apple at least ships with some interpreters of some languages like python or ruby. Windows didn’t even have those. Only vbscript (which is not a general purpose language)
It’s the motte and bailey.
If WhatsApp has the function for Facebook to read messages, then it’s not going to be a surprise when reversing the program to see that code; but if they claim that there is no capability to do that and you discover it then it’s much more damning.
Also; if functionality exists it’s easier to argue for a scope change… much easier than arguing for new functionality to exist.
The problem is that their average age moves up, and productivity decreases as people hit or near retirement. Unless China starts opening up to immigration (not impossible), they are going to be Japan without being rich yet.
> I rarely hear about the doom of Europe which has worse demographics.
Europe has immigration. China does not. If China is willing to embrace e.g. the African aspiring immigrants who have come to Guangzhou in recent years, things could change quickly, but I'm not really seeing. Japan did not, and that's why you can get a house for a reasonable price in Tokyo these days.
Is there a better website to search for these reasonably priced houses?
[0] https://housingjapan.com/buy/search/#c={%22p[h]%22:%22100000...
https://resources.realestate.co.jp/news/how-much-does-it-cos...
I only mention it because someone brought it up a few days ago when there was a debate on why real estate prices were so high in the USA.
On the left in price range you can select max 10,000万円 to see houses under 100 million. Zoom out on the map to start seeing some dots.
There is a reason people move to the US. Good luck to the CCP attempting to reproduce that.
Also machines are coming for your jobs, you wont need that many people anyway.
Highly qualified workers from Europe still come to the US too.
Doom of Southern Europe, however, is talked about quite a lot.