That's a bit spun too, though. Revenue is up just .93%. Net income is down 12.7%. And they beat the estimates because the estimates were expecting bad news, as the overall trend has been stagnant for about two years.
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.
When are we going to stop expecting exponential growth though? Or should the exponential growth just continue indefinitely? Is there no value in having a nice S-curve, ending up as one of the most profitable companies in history, and then just staying insanely profitable for a long time in a sustainable way?
We have stopped expecting exponential growth, that's what the linked article is about. "Slowing Growth" is literally in the title!
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.
I was commenting on the idea that "for Apple, [these numbers] are sort of a disaster". I agree that Apple changing from a growth company to a static company is interesting to investors.
Disaster is certainly hyperbole. It would imply their business is in jeopardy or something. All this means is a lower P/E ratio in the future. Apple has an absurd amount of cash on hand, and are still earning huge profit.
Thats the reason Buffet has now invested in Apple as he prefers a stable earnings. His investment indicated to me that Apple will be a stable investment going forward and won't have the upward and downwards swings of fast growing company where there can be large swings up or down with each quarter earnings
The fact that AAPL goes on regular stock buy back sprees with its warchest instead of risking innovation helps with the stability of what should be a declining stock price.
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.
A stock buy-back increases the stock price, by definition (by creating demand for it where there was none). Absent buy-backs, the stock price would be lower. That statement doesn't require a "should".
Apple’s P/E has been pretty stable since 2008. Moreover, the average P/E of the S&P has been higher than Apple’s over this period as well. Apple hasn’t been a growth company (in Wall St’s eyes at least) for a long time.
A company's stock price is based in part on the expectation of future results, not future growth.
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).
>We have stopped expecting exponential growth, that's what the linked article is about. "Slowing Growth" is literally in the title!
If we have "stopped expecting exponential growth" then the title should have been "Duh!", not "Slowing Growth" (which implies we still expected growth).
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.
> Is there no value in having a nice S-curve, ending up as one of the most profitable companies in history, and then just staying insanely profitable for a long time in a sustainable way?
Not to investors that want a quick ROI quarter-over-quarter on that share price.
They can still have the quarter-over-quarter growth in share price. That's why they're buying stock back.
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.
I wonder if the future entails large S-Curve companies using their expertise to start and support new companies that would get their own listing. Maybe these companies could reward shareholders by preferential future investments in these companies that they get off the ground with their consulting and expertise.
Eh, you are equating slow growth with "running out of steam". Even if they don't grow from here on out, they will stay one of the world's most profitable companies for decades. Apple is turning into a stable, mature company. This is a completely normal and expected stage in the business lifecycle.
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.
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.
Given how slow the rest of the world economy is, and that they still managed to eek out 1% revenue growth on an absolutely gargantuan $50+ billion base for the quarter, despite earning the majority of their revenue abroad on a luxury product, I'd say these numbers are pretty amazing.
Phone market is consolidating for sure but Apple seems to be doing better than Samsung. This is opposite of what one might assume namely that less excitement around mobile phones would cause people to buy cheaper and just good enough phones.
To (hopefully) noone's surprise. The innovation mostly hit a brick wall and Cook just seems intent on squeezing every last dollar out of incremental improvements to the iPhone until he sails into the sunset
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...
Their reporting on technology is often intentionally misleading and sensationalist, but it isn't surprising considering they directly compete with the likes of Facebook for attention and also rely on Google, Apple, and Twitter for visibility.
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.
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.
Generally the New York Times fact-checks and corrects itself—but all newspapers spin stories for more clicks or interest. “Everything’s going okay at Apple” isn’t going to move advertisement dollars, the metric by which all news media ultimately value stories. Having worked at a newspaper or two myself, it’s inescapable. That said it’s also worth pointing out the New York Times has endorsed Republicans before... just not recently. I suppose it’s also worth noting the Republican Party wasn’t always this way, either. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidential_electio...
I'm an Apple shareholder...biggest concern with driving "services" is that the 30% commission on in-app purchases is borderline obscene and I don't think longterm sustainable e.g. if the tech regulation hammer is pointed at Apple, regulation around the App Store, including limits on Apple's commission, would make the most sense.
The App Store is awash with stuff, I don't think the 30% charge is hurting them at all. In fact I expect they are wondering why they didn't start higher.
The EU is already investigating Apple management of the App Store. Regulation is coming and one has to wonder much walled and profitable the garden will stay.
Just like German car makers bought the EU, in exchange for protectionist measures and to get away with emissions that have destroyed a continent's climate? How come the EU is not looking more inwards, or into Chinese company practices, but instead it focuses on American tech giants? Politics perhaps?
Apple has had a 13 billion Euro tax bill out of it. Google is adding browser and search selection in Android in a pro-active move. I would say this is certainly a show of teeth.
Uhhh I'm not so sure tech is so innocent here. The honeymoon period with big tech ended after 2016, when society finally realized exactly how much influence big tech has over our minds, and how they absolutely show no responsibility towards the power they wield to alter people's realities, instead hiding behind silly excuses about just being platforms.
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.
Not just newspapers. Warren (and now many others) are interested in breaking up large companies because their power threatens the governments power. Articles like these help test the waters since NYT supports the left more than the right.
And the stock increased over 4% in after-hours trading, as increases in non-iPhone hardware sales and services overcame the decrease in iPhone sales. Earnings per share slightly beat the consensus forecast.
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"
AAPL is still undervalued compared to stocks like AMZN. Apple's P/E of 17 is amazing compared to Amazons 78. I'm not really sure why their stock isn't traded with the same enthusiasm that other tech companies see.
Stock values aren't only about earnings. Amazon continues to be a growth bet, and their low earnings are because their income has historically been reinvested productively to access new markets. A quick google shows their 2018 revenue was up 31% over 2017, which was up 31% over 2016, which was up 27% over 2015. You don't buy Amazon for a share of the amount they're making today, you buy them for a share of the much bigger company they'll be tomorrow.
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%.
It’s a commoditized market and Apple’s success blueprint is out for everyone to see, yet no one else can adapt mid century design principles and “high fashion” style marketing to technology. This sounds like shilling (and I do own Apple stock) but I’m serious.
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.
I hear that constantly, but it's my favorite remote. I did, however, buy a sub 10 dollar silicone case for it, with a strap. It's easy to grip, comfortable, doesn't slide, and it is always obvious which way is up/forward both visually and tactilely. I think the shortcomings are well addressed with such a simple fix. But, I also use a case on my phone to fix it's same shortcomings, so perhaps that's why it doesn't feel like such a leap to me.
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.)
I'm not sure why you are getting downvoted, I just got one and it's terrible to use. Mostly I get my phone out and use that instead. The original was better than the current one.
> Because it only contains a conclusion, no premises whatsoever. Which is basically fuel for a flame-bait.
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.
What is the alternative? It’s enough like a traditional TV guide experience that people get it, its remote uses similar touch physics as iOS (I typically tap directions rather than swipe though), your phone can act as a remote (with an identical UI) or a keyboard, and you can cast any arbitrary content pretty seamlessly. I also love that the iOS remote actually controls my AV receiver’s power and volume.
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.
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.
CarPlay is getting way better in iOS 13. E.g. you can finally run different apps on the car screen and the phone! It also has a nice "home screen" with useful widgets instead of just a grid of icons.
Design UI well enough? I guess it depends on what you are used to.
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.
> 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.
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.
I don't have an opinion on how this should be done on a "typical mouse", I haven't used a "typical mouse" for about 15 years.
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.
While I completely agree, implementing pinch-to-zoom on desktop devices in the browser is next to impossible with current web apis (It _is_ viable on mobile devices). Source: I tried.
EDIT: I guess Google Chrome could go all `el.addEventListener('-webkit-pinch-zoom')` on us.
And design ? Google can design well enough. Their interfaces are easy and fun to use. Beyond that, regular people don't care.
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.
Apple has been selling computers that cost more than their competitors for over 40 years. Do you think they have been that successful just based on a “status symbol”?
The average person doesn’t even care about computers that much anymore.
Besides, computer sales are only 11% of their revenue.
The remote is horrible if you watch tv in the dark or have kids. Who makes something that kids throw shatter? Why have a totally symmetric remote design that takes your haptic sense more than 1 second to figure out its orientation. Why is the touch pad always waiting for input...
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.
Or continue to invent new products (iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Watch, Airpods ...) then iterate on those products over years and years. Also while simultaneously driving their services revenue, which continues to be a growth area for them.
These other devices are all cheaper and less popular than the iPhone. This quarter the category that includes the AirPods and Watch made one fifth what the iPhone did. To contribute 10% of company revenue growth, this category needs to double. Maybe the category has room to double once, but will it 10x over the next five years? You would need performance like that to justify a high PE ratio.
>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.
Apple will never get the same P/E love, because they only make like 4 things (Mac, iPhone, iPad, services).
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.
> whereas the hate on Amazon is really about one thing.. that ol "makes no profit" canard.
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.
People have historically been willing to pay apple more because in part of how seamlessly integrated their products are. I bought a “repairable” android and it was junk / not updated. My old iPhones have kept value far better than friends androids after 3 years. Apple is doing something that preserves phones value (ie, they may actually maintain them for longer with updates etc vs their “repairable” competitors.
And I’ve never had a problem getting my phone repaired
Yeah as an investor I still really like Apple. They have a TON of cash, billions of highly qualified users that they can easily roll new products/services to (iphone owners), and all the while they're frugal and meticulous about how they use it.
I think the stock will pop once news breaks of another breakthrough product...whether its a car or something else.
Amazon makes a very small amount of profit for its sales. If they were forced to split out AWS, they would make no profit. Also a fact. That is a pretty scary place to be.
I wonder if the distribution side of the business will ever become profitable. I know the argument is that once they dominate they can start raising prices but these types of business are inherently low margin, competitors will see their profits as an opportunity.
> AAPL is still undervalued compared to stocks like AMZN. Apple's P/E of 17 is amazing compared to Amazons 78. I'm not really sure why their stock isn't traded with the same enthusiasm that other tech companies see.
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.
Comparing a high-cost consumer electronics company with market dominance but little growth projection to an online retailer with enormous growth makes absolutely no sense. Comparing their P/E makes even less sense.
AAPL's capacity for sustainance is doubtful, when they are giving money back to investors. What is the growth path for them ? They will continue to milk successful product but no "next" strategy in sight.
No apple watch or AirPods, till there was, and guess what Steve Jobs isn't there. Wearables increased by 50% yoy. There are many different areas that Apple will move into, AR, automation, home, still plenty of room for growth
Steve Jobs was not magic, nor is he the only person with vision in the world. Expecting one company to continue to make paradigm breaking technologies every other year isn't realistic.
Because they're dependent on selling hardware, not software. It's not rocket science, hardware doesn't scale as easily as software, so it leads to a smaller multiplier.
AWS is their business and it certainly scales. Their goal in retail is market dominance through convenience and that still costs a ton of money. AWS does not cost a ton of money.
Apple has run out of people to sell iPhones to, Amazon is just getting started ("day one" as Bezos likes to say). P/E is about growth potential and the market is saying Amazon has lots more of it than Apple.
I can argue that in the last 10 years, the stock price for non-payers of dividends is no longer a function of KPIs. Take for example Pinterest. It was offloaded to the stock market when KPIs have been dropping for a very long time [1]. The company is likely doomed.
Yet the stock is above the IPO [2].
If one of these major launches is a MacBook Pro with the same (or better) specs (esp video graphics) as their latest MacBook Pro, but without a TouchBar, they will get at least $2,500 from me.
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 have an pre-touchbar macbook pro on my desk that I've been using as an in-place workstation. For some reason, I pulled it out of its place and opened it up this past week, and I was blown away by the improved typing experience.
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.
I used a 2017 at work for a year and eventually decided to move back to a 2015 -- I just couldn't do the keyboard any more.
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's bizarre to me that Apple has never understood that computers are a highly recommended product. The reason that Apple laptops are popular is that the tech crowd is highly loyal and recommends macs to all their friends, parents, grandparents, when asked. And the tech crowd provides every hardware forum in existence with lots and lots of free Apple advertising.
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.
Personally, I just remapped capslock to esc, since I never use capslock. The touchbar does seem to hang more often nowadays, though. Especially when I'm trying to adjust the volume.
Not a physical one, but the hit area on the TouchBar for Esc is actually larger than the physical key was. As much as people like to complain, in my experience the Esc key is extremely easy to hit.
And take the escape key off the TouchBar. I hit it all the time by accident. I really wanted to give the TouchBar a fair shake but after two months I still think it’s beyond useless.
I feel your pain, it's my number one problem with the Touch Bar, the second being that it's almost entirely useless in its default mode.
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.
Thanks for the tip. I got BTT and now I only have brightness and volume sliders on the Touch Bar and no escape. Much better. Will probably do some customization but it’s already a big improvement.
At the minimum I’d like to be able to disable the touch bar. I only ever activate it accidentally and there is zero feedback. I never look at my keys. I really like the fingerprint scanner but it’s not worth the disruption in productivity.
At least that, and the idea of making the touchbar an actual tray is a great idea, would like this to be natively done and keep the screen as free as possible for the actual apps.
As long as it's optional, I could see people not liking this.
There will always be other potential physical keys that aren't on your laptop keyboard. You could just as easily say that you shouldn't have to use modifier keys to trigger Page Down on a Macbook Pro keyboard. Where's my Print Screen SysRq key?
Because those keys are not used nearly as often as escape. And because osx has a different keyboard shortcut for screenshots so the print screen key is largely irrelevant.
That kind of highlights an issue for me though. If Apple were really on the ball with macOS they would have a better remap utility built in.
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.
Escape is in a relatively terrible location as well, the default ctrl location is just as bad, hence remapping escape there isn't really worse than escape in the top left.
That's not an escape key. Please don't apologize for this.
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.
What's wrong with touch id? I never used face id, but fingerprint sensor on iPhone 8 is good. It unlocks at the same time I'm pressing on button, so most of the time I don't notice it at all. And I almost never getting false negatives. I can't imagine how face id might be better, but I can imagine how it can be worse.
In my experience, Face ID is much faster and more seamless. Basically it's like my phone isn't locked because before I'd even have a chance to think about it, it's unlocked. I was VERY resistant to losing the home button, but I find that the new gestures are much more natural for me. Obviously this is a personal preference thing, but for quite a while I had a touch ID iPad and a Face ID iPhone, and it was really night and day how much nicer Face ID felt to me, and how nice it is to not have a home button wasting space on the phone. If they found a way to suppport Touch ID in addition to Face ID, without stealing space from the screen, I'm all for it, but I can't imagine going back to the old style of phone with no Face ID and a home button.
I really disagree. With TouchID my phone was unlocked before it even got to my face. With my iPhone X (which I've had since launch) I get lots of false positives. It also means I have to raise it, swipe as I raise it, phone gets in front of my face, small pause, faceid success, phone unlocks and displays home screen. This takes probably 1/4 to 1/5 of a second longer than TouchID where the device is already unlocked and at the home by the time I get it in my field of view.
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.
I'm the same way. I was an iPhone 7 hold out for a long time because I didn't see the value in Face ID or any of the other stuff and now I really regret holding out as long as I did. Face ID is so seamless and it's just so much smoother to do everything. Going back to my work phone is more than a bit awkward trying to remember how many times to tap or double press to do whatever. On the iPhone XS I have the gestures really make a lot of sense to me.
There's nothing _wrong_ with touch ID. It's just that FaceID is way better. It is faster and more seamless, it can work even if you are wearing gloves.
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.
Twins I know can unlock each other’s phone. Also, little kids can unlock parents phones for some reason. Would love to see internal presentations on the math behind this reason. Did they accidentally make a genetic discovery algorithm?
It doesn't work when wearing a balaclava, motorcycle helmet or ski googles, which is slightly annoying, but in those cases you'll likely wear gloves anyway. Sunglasses work fine for me.
Reducing from the 10% because of broken keyboards etc. is still not OK. I bet wallstreet would react if Apple lost 5% of revenue.
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.
That's always the argument from the business standpoint. How much of their ecosystem is on a foundation of professional Mac users? A majority of the professionals I know won't buy the current touchbar model MacBook Pro. Does that market even matter anymore?
I would think a company with the resources Apple has would be willing to invest more in loss leaders that keep users fully in the Apple ecosystem, or in products which may contribute in small ways to their bottom line, like Macs. They can afford to make their primary metric market share, rather than profit.
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.
If they could make an iPhone X-like phone with a headphone jack, then I'll buy it. I have zero interest in airpods or other wireless earphones though, so its a hard pass from me as long as that's the route they're going.
Have you considered that your question is a non-sequitur? Short of quitting my job and becoming a subsistence farmer, my company is going to supply me with a computer and a phone for the foreseeable future. The exact nature of those devices isn't really important. They're going to exist and they're going to cost the same order of magnitude as a Macbook Pro and an iPhone.
Yes, I thought about possible reasons why it might be meaningless to ask the question. (Maybe gonational already has billions invested in green tech, or maybe they consider Apple a more responsible GHG emitter than any of the other phone manufacturers even if he/she buys a phone for $400 and plants trees for $600.)
A false dilemma is not how you make a constructive pro-environment argument. It is unnecessary, and won't convince anyone. You could've asked what else they do for or against the environment, but that'd be off-topic in this thread I suppose.
> And the stock increased over 4% in after-hours trading
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.
>The balance of calendar 2019 will be an exciting period, with major launches on all of our platforms, new services and several new products"
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.
That iPhones were less than half their revenue, while still growing overall revenue, is a positive sign. Apple has done a good job of diversifying their revenue base over the last few years. It will be interesting to see how large wearables and services can become as revenue sources, I suspect they are still quite early in their growth.
And because the services have much higher margin, the earnings story is even better.
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.)
They're big on services, which would point towards some AI thing but the next step that seems relevant in this area for an Apple-like product is probably general, reliable, human-like AI which is too far off. So my bet is on AR. VR went nowhere but its tech might push AR into something usable. I can totally see Apple producing a Google Glass like device and getting it right, somehow.
They do have ARKit going, which sets them up with a platform to do it on.
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.
I recently read the book "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing" and it talked about how when a company adds more lines of business that long term it can have negative effects (lack of focus). Do you think Apple has over diversified?
Still, the company hasn't released an innovative hardware product since 2008. That's a long time for them. If Apple can't innovate anymore, regardless of whether they have continued financial success, are they still really Apple?
I'm not saying Apple isn't successful. In fact, that's my point: they're clearly releasing solid products. But they aren't the category-killers that the company's reputation for innovation is built on. There have been rumors of new innovations (reinventing TV, an Apple Car, augmented reality) but none have materialized.
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?
Again, I'm not saying the Watch hasn't been successful, or that it's a bad product. I'm saying it wasn't as innovative as many of Apple's other successful products were. It's much more an extension of the iPhone than a standalone innovation.
That's not relevant. Apple is one of the worlds most valuable company, and they're stagnating. They've been hitting home-runs with products before, and creating new markets.
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 exactly what category of electronics do you propose that Apple can enter that has a larger worldwide penetration than the smart phone market - there are 2.72 billion smart phone users worldwide (https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-phones-are-in-the-w...)?
It's a market that they largely created, and that was their super-power. And now it's up to them to figure out next big thing, if they want to keep their lead and valuation.
They can still be very successful company without that. But not necessarily as one of the world most valuable companies.
They did not create the smart phone market. By 2004-2005 the average middle class American had cell phones. Cheap prepaid phones could be bought for less than $100 with minutes. The Nokia candy bar phone was already selling well in developing countries. The BlackBerry, Windows Phones, and Palm phones were already selling. It was already clear when Apple was entering the market that the cell phone was gaining ubiquity.
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?
How does that dovetail with Apple’s strengths as a vertically integrated consumer electronics company? What would they bring to the table that would help them compete with the other cloud players? Amazon had first mover advantage and Microsoft had a large enterprise base to draw from and an inside and outside enterprise sales force. Apple has none of that. Google is struggling in the cloud with large companies partially because of no enterprise sales experience and no reputation in the enterprise. Apple would be even less competitive.
I can see that this is the obvious reason why Apple is not doing this. It is a short-sighted view though. Is the Mac Pro (MacBook Pro, etc) a consumer electronics product? Not really. So why do they provide it? Yeah. Same reason they should provide a cloud based on Metal.
I'm not suggesting those were good ideas, only that they were rumors about innovative products that got a lot of attention, in part because everyone thought Apple must be up to something, because they hadn't made a big splash in a long time. Maybe the problem isn't that Apple's isn't innovating anymore, but that so many others now are as well, so innovation gets lost in the crowd. Companies like Tesla, Amazon, and Google share a space now that Apple had to itself for a long time.
What does any of this have to do with innovation, the topic of the thread? There are lots of very successful companies that don't release innovative consumer products. My point isn't that Apple is a bad company, it's not that other companies are 'better' companies. It's simply that the kind of 'home run' innovation for which Apple is famous has been missing for the last decade. The Apple Watch is a great product, it's very successful. I just don't think it was innovative the same way other Apple products have been.
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?
I’m asking the same question. What possible home run could any electronic company create that could be a larger market than the phone market? There are 2.75 billion phones in use worldwide. Anything is going to pale in comparison to that market.
I'm not even looking for a financial home run. I'd settle for a Newton. If Apple had released Google Glass, at least it would show creativity and risk-taking. In fairness, it was easier at the time for Google to fail with Glass, though, because no one expects them to be great at consumer hardware (though they're in the process of raising that expectation). Apple has more reputation at stake, and maybe that's made them more conservative design-wise.
So you’re criticizing Apple for not releasing a product in a category that was a spectacular failure, but they don’t get credit for products - the Apple Watch and even AirPods - that are successful and profitable?
They don't get credit for innovating unless the product is innovative, no. Innovation is not synonymous with success, despite what appears in this thread as an overwhelming urge to conflate the two ideas. I'm observing that they haven't really innovated in 11 years. My original question, still unanswered, is if they stop really innovating but continue to be financially successful, will they still be the Apple we love? Can we love them just for releasing solid, evolutionary products (and now software services), or is the anticipation of some big new innovation an intrinsic part of the real Apple's identity?
I guess it depends on how you define innovative. The iPad was unveiled in January 2010, and while there were other tablets before it, and it was similar to the iPhone, it has now started to replace a regular computer for many people.
True, but the Microsoft Surface came three years before the Pro. And even if the iPad Pro were dominant, the iPhone and iPad are so closely related as products that counting the iPad 'innovation' is double-dipping a bit.
No, I'm not suggesting they're the same thing. But size alone is not innovation, in swimming pools or iPads. There just isn't enough distinction to say that the iPad is innovative compared to the iPhone. Internally, in fact, the iPad came before the iPhone, and inspired it.
Fair, but the Apple Watch has largely been an iPhone accessory rather than a standalone product. You could also point to AirPods. They sold a lot of them because a lot of people had iPhones. But neither is anything like the iPhone or the Mac in terms of defining a product category. Eventually, the Apple Watch is just going to be an iPhone on your wrist. More of a derivative, like the iPad.
The iPhone is a product that completely transformed the world and defines what a smartphone is. There are 3 billion of them so almost half the world owns a smartphone.
If your bar for "innovative" is seriously that incredibly high, prepare to be disappointed..
Agreed. But what are the contenders since 2008? The iPad and the Apple Watch. The iPad was really co-developed with the iPhone for all practical purposes, as the original iPad prototype inspired the phone. You can definitely make a case for the watch, but it's an extension of the phone in so many ways.
You need an iPhone to set up a cellular Apple Watch Series 4. After that, you can leave the phone at home and:
- 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.
The phone started as an extension of the computer (iTunes was required for backup, app purchases, and syncing). The Watch is following that progression, iterating toward a stand-alone device.
I don't deny the Watch is a good product. And those who point out that you needed a Mac to use an iPod or an iPhone are correct. But the functionality of the devices themselves didn't overlap to the extent they do with the iPhone and the Watch. It's like Apple came out with the iPhone, then for an encore said "Hey, here's a bigger iPhone you can watch movies on! And here's one you can wear on your wrist!" I just don't see the Watch being on the same level as the Mac, iPod, or iPhone in terms of innovation (regardless of market success). I understand reasonable minds can differ.
There aren’t any thats my point. Its like they made the first ever car 10 years ago after lifetimes of horse carriages and you’re disappointed theres nothing else of that magnitude yet.
But it's not like nothing innovative has been released by others. There's the Echo, there's Google Glass, even the Pebble watch, which I would argue was more innovative (as watches go) than the Apple Watch two years later. Are any of them as financially successful as the iPhone? No, but I'm not saying Apple hasn't been financially successful, only that it has not been as innovative as it was in the past.
The iphone went from being a bit of a computer accessory to a standalone platform. The next watch OS release is likewise transitioning to not needing a phone in order to be set up.
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 iPod started off as a Mac accessory and ended up transforming multiple industries.
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
True. But the iPod and iPhone were functionally very distinct from the Mac. The Apple Watch seems more like a convenient extension that eliminates the need to pull your phone out, but not much more than that, at least in its first few years of existence. Apple is clearly gearing it up to replace the iPhone, but that trajectory has been evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Apple has sold as many AirPods as the echo. The AirPod is more functional and revolutionary then the echo. Are you kidding me? Echo is selling at a loss and that's what you claim as being revolutionary? The skill gap between alexa and siri is not high. https://loupventures.com/annual-digital-assistant-iq-test-si...
I don't think you can plausibly argue that the Echo is not a success for Amazon, I'm sorry. Apple would've loved to be in that market first, they just missed it.
You think Apple would have loved to sell a low margin $50-$150 product? Have you been following Apple for the last 40 years?
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.
But Apple wouldn't have needed to sell them at $50-150. They're Apple. They could've sold them for $399. They couldn't make the Echo because they lacked either the market insight to see the opportunity, or the technology to pull it off.
You mean like the HomePod? How is that working out? People will buy a $600-$1000 phone for two reasons - it’s highly subsidized/payment plans and the phone is considered a necessity. The number of people who would pay $400 for a smart speaker is minuscule. Heck iPads only started seeing an uptick when Apple started selling good low end models at $329.
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.
The HomePod isn't working out because:
a) it was way late to the market, and
b) Siri's technology lags behind Alexa.
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.
People will buy a $1300 laptop because a computer is a necessity to get things done. Paying more for something you will use everyday. People will not pay $400 for a smart speaker. People just aren’t that into it b
Maybe so. But I still think if Apple had released an AppleTV with Alexa-quality voice control before the Echo came out, it would've been huge.
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.
But in both cases, the overwhelming majority of people that get them have iPhones, because there is additional and important functionality that comes with the connection.
> 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!
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.
Why not? They can spend their money however they want, but Wall Street demands endless share buybacks over everything else.
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.
Camera tech seems to be an obvious choice. But, they could go as far out there as doing drug research. Apple is a giant multinational corporation, they could get into any market.
Drug research? Really? There is no part of Apple that is optimized for drug research. Even with the iPhone, they already had an OS that was the basis for it.
As I said, cameras or something similar would be working to their strengths. Hell, build a game console, Microsoft eventually pulled that off and Apple has a huge leg up.
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.
Game consoles are also not hugely profitable. In fact they are sold at a loss for the most part for the first few years. Microsoft loss billions selling game consoles on the first two or three generations. Even now, the mobile app market is larger and more profitable than the console market for Apple with them taking a 30% cut.
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.
The point of this exercise was to find areas they could have spent that 17 billion on R&D. A few billion losses for a few years for a net long term gain is the point of investing in R&D.
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.
Yes and every area you posted is about them getting into declining markets - most of which are declining because of the smart phone.
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.
Smartphones also largely killed off the watch industry but they where happy to jump into that market. It’s just a question of positive ROI not the ultra long term.
Yes and the Apple Watch is a wearable computer that does a lot more than just tell time. What do you propose they bring to the standalone console, TV, or camera market that will make a declining market make money?
Do you know what apple did in the 80s? Overextend by following foolish ideas like yours, focus is what led to them reaching their success, and focus is what will extend them to the next product that, guys like you will complain about not being innovative.
It's impossible to evaluate the marginal return to Apple on increasing R&D by $1 versus increasing $1 in spending buying back stock in light of a tax windfall. They are both sources a potential value, neither is obviously correct, and the value of each dollar spent is highly non-linear.
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...?
What is exactly wrong with share buybacks? Clearly they have more capital than they can deploy effectively right now, so they plan for the future by putting some powder in their gun. Share buybacks serve three main purposes:
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.
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:
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+.
> Are we taking AOC seriously on anything related to economics?
AOC has at least studied economics at Boston University and has made it a goal to go after corruption and corporate greed. Just because the source isn't coming from Wall St or Corporate America doesn't make it invalid.
It's not clear how much of the research behind her reasoning and arguments come from her or her team, either way if you have a counter argument that contradicts her points make them, you've added nothing of value with your prejudices in trying to disparage the source.
Parent was asking what's wrong with Buy Backs, to which she's presented a negative side-effect of them that you wouldn't hear from Wall St who stands to benefit from them.
> Another presidential candidate said he would “clear the swamp”. How did that work out?
She's never been a presidential candidate, but what do the words of a pathological liar have to do with anything? That no-one can be trusted and everyone will always do the opposite of what they say they'll do?
If you've followed the House meetings AOC has participated in you would've noticed that she's been committed to exposing corruption and corporate greed that she's brought to light. She's also taken a public pledge to refuse any corporate PAC money that she's highlighted (in another House Meeting) was a common cause of corruption.
So I'll take her word over a serial liar who's been favorable towards companies, lobbyists and foreign nationals that frequents his hotels and earned him more than $80M in revenues.
Regardless this thread has become unnecessarily political. Her point was about the negative consequences of Buy Backs.
Okay. Let’s make it a little less political. When good intentions meet reality where each house of representative member spends more time fundraising than working (https://www.termlimits.com/congress-fundraising-priority/) and since more states are Republican than Democrat - meaning that the Senate doesn’t represent the people in proportion to the population (every state has two Senators regardless of population), what are the chances that a Democratic President will get anything done?
Obama’s administration had almost no personal legal issues, was much more popular than the current administration and still couldn’t get much done after the first two years.
> Okay. Let’s make it a little less political... What are the chances that a Democratic President will get anything done?
This has instead segued into predicting the hypothetical effectiveness of a unknown future Democratic President...
I'm Australian so it's not going to affect me, but from the outside it looks like the U.S. has, with the assistance of a foreign adversary, unknowingly elected a corrupt, cheating, racist, inept pathological lying demagogue as its head of government. If he's elected again after showing his true colors, the rest of the world's going to think the majority of the US population is complicit and in-support of his views. Personally I'd say give a Democratic President a chance at restoring decorum to US politics.
In terms of effectiveness, IMO U.S. major problems with cost of Health Insurance, Gun Laws and frequent Massacres wont be resolved within my lifetime. They might have a chance with Health Insurance as Obama was able to implement ACA and it looks like its one of Sanders and Warren's major campaign promises to implement Medicare for all, but they should be able to make progress on their other campaign promise of reducing Wealth Inequality. Warren is especially motivated on reining in Wall Street [1].
They might have a chance with Health Insurance as Obama was able to implement ACA
Just barely, but it was still a half measure and while better than before, they couldn’t go all in even during the first two years because to keep the Democrats on board who were just as beholden to the insurance lobby as Republicans they had to work with private insurance companies. It is still slowly being eroded by both the President and red states that are trying to get it overturned by the judiciary.
They might have a chance with Health Insurance as Obama was able to implement ACA and it looks like its one of Sanders and Warren's major campaign promises to implement Medicare for all,
And no Republican in the Senate or House will go for it and many Democrats are afraid to stand up to the insurance lobby. Even if the Democrats keep control of the house and gain control of the senate, it’s unlikely they will have the 60 vote filibuster proof majority to pass anything. Even if they do, Republican states will fight it tooth and nails in the courts.
Inequality. Warren is especially motivated on reining in Wall Street [1].
She can be “motivated” all she wants, but both parties are in the pocket of Wall Street. She probably won’t even get Democratic support for it.
I have thought long and hard about upgrading my iPhone 8 to one of the new X models, but I don't like the lack of a home button. I guess I am officially old now, but I dont want to look at my phone to unlock it. I like that I can reach in my pocket, and unlock it with my thumb as I retrieve it. It may be user error, but I see several co-workers have to really train the phone on their face to unlock with Face ID. That would drive me nuts. the swipe up gesture just seems annoying, and on my iPhone 8 is unreliable to bring up the control panel. they need to do what they did before and copy the other vendors that put the fingerprint reader on the back of the phone so that the nice bezel free design can be implemented.
I was an early adopter of iPhone X and the following year with XS Max, from my experience any unfamiliarity with FaceID is extremely short-lived, I wouldn't go back to a home button which feels archaic at this point and unnecessarily takes up valuable real-estate that should go towards a larger screen. The gestures also become fluid and second nature after a while.
Even the next Pixel4 is moving to using FaceID, going back to a home button or fingerprint scanner would be a step backwards.
I like the gestures, but the unpredictability of when FaceID is going to work is maddening. Sometimes it works with sunglasses, sometimes not. Sometimes it works in the dim light of my bedroom, sometimes not. Sometimes it works when I absolutely don't expect it (half my face hidden in my pillow, towel wrapped around my face, complete darkness with face illuminated only by my lock screen) which only fools me into half expecting it to work when I shouldn't. Sometimes everything seems right, but it still doesn't work. I'm never completely taken by surprise because I'm never sure what will happen.
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.
When I am running and my hand is sweaty, it was impossible to unlock my old phone with fingerprint reader. Face ID works great in that case. I would say the fingerprint reader was the worst thing about my old phone. Granted I don't know how much better recent iPhone readers are in comparison but I expect they still have issues with wet or dirty hands.
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."
Try retraining FaceID without glasses/headwear, when standing up and holding the phone in front of your face at similar height. Anecdotally, it adapts better to sunglasses/etc. that way.
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").
Agree, new UX sans home buttons is amazing. I was a sceptic but ended up buying XS outright as it didn’t make sense to spend so much money on a XR and not get the camera. It’s an amazing device.
I was skeptical as well coming from my iPhone 6+ to the Xs... but it turns out that it just works and works fine. I wasn't missing my home button after about a day or two. Switching between iPad and iPhone is slightly awkward now, as I am sometimes waiting for my iPad to unlock on facial recognition and it never happens.
FWIW I was similarly skeptical. As others have mentioned, swiping up becomes a very natural motion. And I have sweaty fingers that confounded the fingerprint reader, so Face ID was actually a huge improvement in recognition rates for me. Looking squarely at the phone becomes second nature (because what else are your neck and wrist muscles doing?), and the only times I need to type a passcode are when I need to unlock the phone while lying down.
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.
While I cannot comment on the rest, Face ID has proven to work surprisingly well for me, beating even the wildest expectations.
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.
Honest question, when you say "sibling", do you mean an identical twin? Because if yes, then fingerprint sensor won't save you from that either.
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.
Identical twins have different fingerprints. Though they may look superficially similar, they would definitely be different enough that it is extremely unlikely to be able to unlock each other's phones.
I’m even older than you apparently, but I just don’t see the attraction of the bezel-less design. I like bezels, they:
- 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.
Have you actually used a bezel-less device? They’ve sold hundreds of millions of them. I think it would be a scandal much like the laptop keyboards if their software for ignoring accidental input at the screen edge wasn’t essentially flawless.
Yeah, I think you are forced to re-train how you pickup and use the phone. An older non-smartphone could be easily picked up by grabbing the entire girth of the phone. With smartphones, people learned to pick it up using the side edges without triggering any touch interactions. Old-folks found this confusing as they constantly kept inadvertently dialing someone or launching random apps. At-least with the change from non-smartphones you got a bump in functionality, the face-id change seems to be entirely superficial to me. I'm still rocking my 6s, but will have to eventually upgrade when Apple slows down my phone with their updates. I held on to my 4s too till it became unbearably slow..
One feature I'd upgrade for is if Apple completely sealed off their phone and made it waterproof.
Iphones 7 and 8 already have a 'virtual' home button using haptic feedback--I assume this is what you mean. X-factor iphones use a gesture-based system instead of any kind of button.
I broke my home button and lost touch ID. For a while until I could replace the home button, I used the software home button which floats on your screen. The actual home button for navigation isn't really needed and swipe gesture is a natural evolution of that. However I would prefer fingerprint to face biometrics is what I discovered during this physical home button-less period.
There is a Face ID setting to require attention that you can disable which would then allow you to unlock the phone without looking at it. Of course, your face still has to be in front of the phone somewhere, but your gaze needn’t be on the device.
I found it took getting used to my Surface Pro unlocking when I look at it, but now I resent my work laptop which doesn't support Hello. I expect to have the same arc with iPhones once I go past an 8.
I'm fairly shocked to find that a community of seemingly technically competent people would forfeit their 4th amendment rights in order to save a few seconds keying in a passcode. This small detail feels like a microcosm of tech in general currently :/
You might unlock your phone 10,000 or 100,000 times over its lifetime. It is just a hugely convenient thing to have that work as quickly as possible, without needing to enter a passcode every time. How likely is it that you will experience an unexpected breach of your 4th amendment rights where you don't have time to disable biometric access to your phone in advance, especially as the iPhone has a 'panic button' specifically to do this quickly. Face ID requires you to look at the phone anyway so in theory it's simple to avoid giving access to a cop.
Who’s forfeiting anything? If you don’t want to unlock your device for law enforcement, just use the sleep/lock button to make your phone require the passcode (which the police can’t legally compel you to give, I believe). It takes several seconds to key in a reasonably secure passcode, and it ceases to be secure if you type it in view of any security cameras. Also, if you open your phone 50 times per day, it’s way more than just a few seconds.
The fourth amendment covers search and seizure by the government, not the willful disclosure of information to a company by a user.
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.
I wasn't clear with what I meant, sorry. I was referring to how face unlock can be compelled but passwords cannot, though I realize now this is actually 5th amendment.
Any time I'm about to go through security, I long-press the volume and side buttons which immmediately activates the requirement for passcode to unlock.
It's a quick and easy shortcut to enable the passcode requirement.
Thank you. Reading the comments on HN always leaves me wondering if I'm the only one that doesn't have any interest in any kind of biometric unlock feature.
The kind of person who thinks this way used to be quite prevalent on HN but they've slowly disappeared. Unclear if they've simply aged out if reading HN and younger folks don't understand this mentality or if somehow HN is not preferring this mindset in general now. It's definitely missed though.
The number of human man hours invested into that guidance number is vast. As accurate as that number is (and for what it is), people are going to make and lose a lot of money even still. Basically I’m saying — check your amazement because it’s amazement all the way down.
Well, Apple provides guidance to investors, so it's not like they are starting from scratch. The rest is public markets doing exactly what they are supposed to do.
This is a very big company with products that have a well understood track record. You could probably be pretty accurate if you just expected it to be the same as this quarter last year.
I'm bullish on AAPL because of their planned services. Anything they roll out has a gigantic audience and will have immediate revenue impact. They have a tremendous bully-pulpit inside their users devices, incomparable email lists, and a habit of making TV commercials people like to watch. The fact that they are adding 4 lines of business (banking, ad-free gaming, news, and streaming) is going to sustain double-digit, high-margin growth for the foreseeable future.
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.
Apple beat out EPS and Revenue estimates and the stock is trading up in after-hours. This is a headline for the cap-wearing anti-Tech Company crowd, as has been typical of the New York Times over the last year or two.
I don't understand why these articles think that people will just keep buying, like in the past decade the lifespan of devices has become bigger and bigger. I'm typing this post on a 2013 Macbook and I'm sure a lot of other users are using older laptops than that, that run perfectly fine. Like does the media just expect people to be buying new stuff again and again?
I don't know if I'm just missing the point or something...
Sooner or later you will have to buy a new device due to planned obsolescence, i.e. when (security) updates are no longer released. But then you can of course install a free operating system instead.
I was purposefully leaving Macs out. My 2006 era Core Duo Mac Mini stopped being supported in 2008 (?). I was able to install Windows 7 on it, give it to my mom and it will still be supported until 2020 by Microsoft...
You do bring up a very valid point but I think that is true with anything that consumers buy like cars, or common household products when things just start to break or newer iterations of those products come out with better features.
But why throw something away which is not physically broken? I currently use a Mac Mini from 2009 with Debian and I have no complaints... well, except that software keeps getting slower.
2012 Macbook Pro here. Works like I just bought it. 5G is apparently the reason next year for your phone upgrade. I'm not sure how anyone will notice the difference, not to mention plans being throttled to death to begin with.
Macs have always been durable. Nothing has changed in that regard. If anything they've become less repairable and user-upgradable, shortening replacement cycles.
Why would you link the NYTimes for a business article? They don't have a clue. These results are excellent (particularly wearables growth) and they guided Q3 revenues well ABOVE Sell side estimates. China decline rate improved dramatically to only -4% Y/Y.
“Is Apple still capable of innovation?” must be one of the most tedious and clapped out topics in all of tech. No one can even remotely agree on a definition of what constitutes “innovation” and yet people keep showing up to dash themselves against the rocks chasing their 5 minutes.
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.
Still using multiple iPhone 6 devices in the family. The newest one is iPhone 8 and it will last hopefully another 5 years. Even iPhone 3G is used almost weekly with another number for ads. The phones are durable and get updates many years after purchase date. New original battery replacement costs 49€, not cheap, but it gives at least another 2 years of life for the phone.
It's pretty amazing the amount of money they make on services. It's almost 45% of the iPhone revenue, while I was under the impression that it was more like 3-4% of overall revenue.
iPhones have become extremely expensive so I buy a new one less often. I presume they set the price at the level that makes them the most money though.
It is worth point out this is 13% down in Revenue. Given Apple have a higher price range of iPhones this year, ( the iPhone XS Max ) and higher entry level price compare to last year with iPhone 6s. The unit shipment must have been down ~20%.
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.
- Apple Music
- iCloud
- App Store / iTunes / Apple Books
- Apple Pay
- Apple Care
- Licensing (i.e. default Google search)
- Apple News+
Coming later in the year:
- Apple Arcade
- Apple TV+
- Apple Card
I'm expecting Apple Arcade to be a huge source of revenue which I'm eagerly awaiting for myself (and my kids) to get off the cesspool of scammy Dark UX IAP land mines that currently proliferates the App Store.
Apple attribute $10 ( or $20 I can't remember ) per Unit ( iPhone, iPad and Mac ) into Services for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and Apple Map.
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..
And they will continue to decline as long as a $200 Android phone can do literally ~95% of what a $1400 iPhone can do.
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.
The focus on privacy is not at all debatable compared to Android. There’s no way to argue that any Android device sold with Google Play Services (i.e. all of them in the US) is more private than an iPhone. iOS security and privacy is flawed in more than one way, but is infinitely better than Android.
I couched it a bit, because I've had people argue with me about it in meatspace. It seems odd to me, especially when their stated alternative was predominantly google. People being people I guess.
- 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.
Unlocking the bootloader, flashing TWRP, and installing LineageOS without Google Play Services is roughly equivalent in privacy to an iPhone. I wouldn’t blame my grandma for choosing to buy an iPhone instead!
A phone with Google Play Services collects less data than an iPhone.
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.
If you disable Location Services, which is an option presented on initial setup of the device, apps can still request the GPS permission directly (the default behavior in most location libraries), not sending your location to Google. This is not possible on iOS. Every location lookup will send your location to Apple.
"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"
Veblen goods (which you good argue an iPhone is) are very sticky and very profitable. To say that veblen goods shouldn't exist is kind of missing the point.
Please show me where I said they shouldn't exist? There's definitely a market for them, so I think they should exist. It's just - if I'm being honest - you're either a fool, or very rich, to be buying some of these "veblen goods" (given the more than adequate alternatives)
When you start getting really serious about retirement savings, you'll understand why a difference of 0.50 cents per day v.s. $3.00 per day, is actually a big deal.
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.
Apple still has a better product for people concerned about privacy and security. Not perfect, but better. They also have retail stores all over the place where you can get help when you need it. Again, the experience might not be great, but at least you have that option.
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.
> there's just no good reason for a general consumer to purchase an iPhone today
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.
Same story here. Although 6 years ago I remember catching flak for buying an iPad over an Amazon tablet. Course my iPad is still going strong, but has been relegated to backup after a new iPad purchase. Those 6 year old Amazon tablets are in a dump somewhere.
I bought my son a $200 Moto G. It was suppose to be one of the best midrange phones. It sucked in so many ways. He was glad to “upgrade” to my old iPhone 6s that was three years older. Even now, four years later, the 6s runs rings around newer midrange Android phones.
I believe that Apple’s next big thing will come in the form of AR consumer hardware and a detached Watch. Recent expansions of their chip design org and acquisition of Intel’s modem business reinforce my confidence in their execution, iPhones are still big business and services are rising. There is little reason to doubt that Apple has more than enough resources to take it through until the next breakthrough.
2019 is another year I’m stuck with my iPhone 8 from 2017. I use to upgrade every year then some genius at Apple thought bigger phones are the only way to go from here on out. Maybe that person no longer works there?
Also Touch ID over Face ID or offer both or I’m not interested along with millions of others!
I can not hold my previously owned XS in one hand and text one person then go back to text another without moving the phone’s position in my hand. Thus I took it back ..bad UX that makes me exert effort my iPhone 8 doesn’t.
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.
At these valuations Apple makes sense only when seen as an alternative to other investments. S&P 500 as a whole has P/S ratio that indicates lower return of investment for the next decade. At least Apple will be able to make profits.
I think the trouble is that the devices are getting too good and there is really only incremental improvement every year so the upgrade cycle is getting longer.
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?
Airpods and Apple Watch are both relatively new products in Apple-terms and have many years of incremental improvements ahead of them.
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.
Thats a great point. There's a precedent of them heading in that direction. Although with Apple, they're trying to make keyboards that can be activated by a light sneeze or slightly higher than usual barometric pressure.
Do you think they would ever monetize iMessage? Imagine making iMessage cross platform, but only available to paying iCloud Subscribers. So I could pay $10 / month for upgraded iCloud storage and get iMessage on my Android phone. I'd pay for that.
I'd love that. I have an Android phone and already pay for iCloud storage for Apple Photos even though using it with an Android Phone adds considerably friction to the process. I'll be getting rid of my Nest Camera in favour of one that supports HomeKit Secure Video next time my Nest Aware account comes up for renewal.
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 like that approach! Very plausible and consistent with services like Cisco WebEx and such that require one "admin license" and as many guests as possible.
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 just visited a local shop where I tested different smartphones including iPhones. Lots of similarly looking models, most with Android. Most are below 300 Euro. An average buyer cannot probably see big difference between phones priced at 1000 and 200 Euro.
Not related to article but..
I have a change request for HN, put some kind of marker next to links which require payment/signingIn/signingUp or whatever the fk stops you from consuming content right away.
Does there have to be something else? What are the implications of a company growing forever? In 500 years are there going to be only 3 companies because they acquired everything and nothing else makes products?
I suspect that that fact and our beliefs around it are being reflected in market prices, albeit with some heavy discounting for the uncertainty inherent in there still being so many companies out there.
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.)
I don’t think there has to be something else. They had $2.18 per share in profit this quarter. Presumably some of that could be used to up the dividend if they really wanted.
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.
Clearly they shouldn't have stopped producing the iPhone SE or it's successor in the same shape.
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.
Wireless headphones... and a stylus that costs $100.. They're breaking new ground there. Sounds like they have great marketing department. That's not innovation.
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.
'Apple experience' for me today is lag. Beginning from lagging volume bar on iPhone, going through iTunes, and up to UI. Everything feels slower than on a much cheaper Android phone with 3.5mm jack.
there’s something wrong with Apple lately. They ship hardware that’s worse than what they had five years ago, and their software has more and more embarrassing bugs. Seems like management problems.
Seems unwarranted to assume they are actively losing customers. I haven't bought an iPhone in years because I still use a SE, and I still use my 2015 MBP. They haven't lost me in any real sense just because I haven't contributed to a sale _recently_.
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.
† “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?)
Pretty sure airpods have been one of Apple's most successful and top reviewed product. Sure their was negative press before they were released, but everything I see now states how good they are and everyone one I talk to loves them.
Mainstreaming desktop (and laptop) UNIX was a kind of amazing achievement (and a sort of strange side-effect of Jobs returning to Apple with NeXT in tow.)
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.
Jobs founded NeXT, which created a desktop UNIX OS based on mach/BSD. Most importantly, NeXTSTEP had a nice GUI framework built on Objective-C. When Jobs returned, NeXT merged with Apple, and Apple gained ownership of NeXTSTEP/OpenStep, evolving it into Rhapsody and OS X.
Of course the programming and design were done by the software teams under Avie Tevanian, first at NeXT and later at Apple.
Anything except first two is not that impressive...
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.
nobody wants those. AirPods are expensive, ugly earbuds that you have to recharge for some reason, and the watch is just a way for your phone to distract you more frequently.
Nobody? I see AirPods everywhere. I’m not aware of the actual sales numbers but I’m sure that they’re among the best selling >100$ headphones. I think that you are underestimating the popularity and appeal of wireless headphones. I like my wired seinheiser pair at the office but while commuting, running or walking wireless is nice.
I'm also part of the nobody group, never buy the latest because I am frugal with my earnings. But I've noticed lots and lots of people with AirPods, latest Iphones, etc. I think you're underestimating the status value that Apple has managed to create for themselves. A large number of people view Apple as a status symbol.
I have a hard time thinking of a "bad" Apple product. Not "product I don't personally like" or "product that fails to meet a requirement I believe is important", but legitimately "bad".
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".
Some are good. I’m not an Apple hater. I have an older (good model) MacBook Pro, an iPad mini 2, an iPhone SE, and an iPad. (All with connectors such as headphone jacks)
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.
AirPods sound like a PITA to me. Oops,time to charge them again- no wait, I just dropped one and it bounced into the gutter/ drain. I should I charge the one I can still find, or throw it away, too?
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.
For most people it goes something like: Take off the earbuds and never worry about charging them because the case they go in does it for you and continue on your day without thinking about it or being concerned about imaginary scenarios where one of your random products fell down a gutter/drain in the middle of the office because who has the time or energy to worry about storm drains stealing from you?
So, I just imagined one side of my earbuds falling out of my ear and dangling from the wire while I’m walking around the neighborhood at home sometimes? (Which I do frequently- walking or jogging around outside)
Multiple factors I can think of, I'm sure there's more
* 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
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...