AAPL en fuego

Berhune said:

I used to work for them in retail, outside the US, where it was noticeable that corporate put a lot of effort into picking and socializing employees, but what structures are in place to keep corporate from regressing to the mean?

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Disney seems to do a similar thing for their park employees, so it doesn’t seem impossible if it’s important.

But that is only one aspect. The other is actually being good. All I can imagine as an outsider is that they actually do product postmortems and apply them when designing future products. That’s the only way I can explain them reverting keyboard designs after the Butterfly, for example.

They also act as if they have ten year plans. Touch ID, Passbook/Wallet, Face ID, NFC, Apple Pay, Apple Card, Apple Cash, car keys and state IDs, and Apple Savings all got released, iterated, and integrated almost flawlessly.

Even their misses, like the HomePod and HomeKit, still get revised and iterated and updated over a decade. They don’t give up if the initial product isn’t as great as expected and course correct. I expect the same from Vision Pro, for example. If uptake is low due to price or too many app restrictions they can refocus on what works.

They did that with Apple Watch by focusing on fitness and releasing the SE models, for example. They did that with Apple TV, switching from an Intel based MacOS console to an ARM based iOS console, and made it part of their HomeKit initiative. They did that with the HomePod, releasing a cheaper simpler product and later re-releasing the original thought slightly modified design to complement the now HomeKit established ecosystem.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they had a HomePod soundbar in the works, essentially stereo version of the HomePod or HomePod mini.

OrangeCream said:

They also act as if they have ten year plans.

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I think 10 years is selling short the time horizon that Apple works on. They have essentially “forever” plans. Your digital devices are your wallet isn’t just a 10 year idea, it’s how payments are going to work in perpetuity. Apple Watch isn’t on a 10 year plan, it’s a “what kind of health computer should be on your wrist” plan with essentially no end date. It’s pretty straightforward to imagine incrementally more advanced health sensors on the wrist for the next 20-30 years or until under-the skin sensors really take off in the mass market. Apple isn’t into home automation because it thinks it’s a 10 year cyclical fad, home automation is going to be an increasing part of everyday life from here on out.

Really radically long term thinking allows Apple to just constantly crank on iterative design which is the key to performance.

I think Apple works because its willing to release products that have limited initial feature sets, but with interesting directions that the community can take, then they lean into the ones that work well. Take Apple Watch, for example - they didn't know exactly where they'd find PMF for it, and they offered a bunch of directions, but when it was clear that it was going to be a better Fitbit, they leaned hard into fitness and health, and we see the most improvements in that direction.

Horatio said:

I think Apple works because its willing to release products that have limited initial feature sets, but with interesting directions that the community can take, then they lean into the ones that work well. Take Apple Watch, for example - they didn't know exactly where they'd find PMF for it, and they offered a bunch of directions, but when it was clear that it was going to be a better Fitbit, they leaned hard into fitness and health, and we see the most improvements in that direction.

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I don’t think that’s an entirely correct reading of the timeline. Tim Cook has always talked about exercise and health in his personal life even before the Apple Watch was released. And from day one they were talking about the health angle. I think they did pivot away from the fashion angle pretty quickly but I also think it was a necessary stepping stone towards mass market acceptance of a computer on your wrist.

wrylachlan said:

I don’t think that’s an entirely correct reading of the timeline. Tim Cook has always talked about exercise and health in his personal life even before the Apple Watch was released. And from day one they were talking about the health angle. I think they did pivot away from the fashion angle pretty quickly but I also think it was a necessary stepping stone towards mass market acceptance of a computer on your wrist.

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I imagine had the fashion angle been a strong market they would have kept that up more too.

wrylachlan said:

I think 10 years is selling short the time horizon that Apple works on. They have essentially “forever” plans. Your digital devices are your wallet isn’t just a 10 year idea, it’s how payments are going to work in perpetuity. Apple Watch isn’t on a 10 year plan, it’s a “what kind of health computer should be on your wrist” plan with essentially no end date. It’s pretty straightforward to imagine incrementally more advanced health sensors on the wrist for the next 20-30 years or until under-the skin sensors really take off in the mass market. Apple isn’t into home automation because it thinks it’s a 10 year cyclical fad, home automation is going to be an increasing part of everyday life from here on out.

Really radically long term thinking allows Apple to just constantly crank on iterative design which is the key to performance.

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Yeah long term thinking alone already separates them from a lot of companies, but on their indefinite timescales and execution over those periods seems especially rare. Particularly that they can stick to it for god knows how long behind curtains, and not publicly rushing to react to potentially short lived trends all the time.

Horatio said:

I think Apple works because it's willing to release products that have limited initial feature sets, but with interesting directions that the community can take, then they lean into the ones that work well. Take Apple Watch, for example - they didn't know exactly where they'd find PMF for it, and they offered a bunch of directions, but when it was clear that it was going to be a better Fitbit, they leaned hard into fitness and health, and we see the most improvements in that direction.

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I actually think v1 of the Watch was kinda out of character for them. Direction might've been a bit all over the place but some of the surviving core ideals were there at least...but in practice the resulting execution was rough. Luckily it worked enough at just a few things, and perhaps that aligned with the watch format being kinda inherently limited.

OrangeCream said:

I imagine had the fashion angle been a strong market they would have kept that up more too.

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They do still have regular strap updates, and there's the whole Hermès thing, so offloading the (high) fashion angle more to them I guess while staying in their own lane.

OrangeCream said:

I imagine had the fashion angle been a strong market they would have kept that up more too.

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The fashion angle also helped position the brand at the high-end of the consumer market at launch, which is where Apple is comfortable and is what provides them with the profitability required to make long bets and stick with them.

OrangeCream said:

I imagine had the fashion angle been a strong market they would have kept that up more too.

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Sure, but that was only the shell really. Would keeping producing a gold or ceramic version annually have meaningfully changed the trajectory of the investment in other features? Would we not have gotten ECG if we still had a gold Apple Watch? Doubtful. Maybe some of the marketing would look different but in an alternative universe where the gold watch sold well I think the guts of the Apple Watch Series 8 would likely be exactly the same.

That said, fast forward 10 years to where they’ve really nailed glucose monitoring and every other sensor you can think of. And graphene based batteries have finally made it to prime time giving you “don’t have to think about it” battery life. At that point I definitely see the Apple Watch circling back to the fashion focus.

eas said:

The fashion angle also helped position the brand at the high-end of the consumer market at launch, which is where Apple is comfortable and is what provides them with the profitability required to make long bets and stick with them.

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That’s an important point. It’s very much that staying in a high margin lane is what lets them be patient. When you’re living paycheck to paycheck it’s hard to take the long view.

But what’s Microsoft’s excuse or Google’s? They’re not raiding the sofa cushions for spare change for their initiatives. They have all the cash they need to make long term bets. They just don’t have the stick-to-it-iveness.

Like why didn’t HoloLens see annual meaningful updates? The Vision Pro would be a very different launch if MS had applied Apples consistent incremental improvement ethos to the HoloLens from its launch.

wrylachlan said:

Like why didn’t HoloLens see annual meaningful updates?

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Because Microsoft disbanded the HoloLens team – it’s dead, Jim. The refugees are working at Apple or Meta.

Apparently MS pursued a number of very challenging accounts, including use by oil rig workers and US Army soldiers. In an outdoor setting camera tracking completely fell over, and the IMU alone could not compensate. None of the large sales landed and management decided to close shop.

Bonusround said:

Because Microsoft disbanded the HoloLens team – it’s dead, Jim. The refugees are working at Apple or Meta.

Apparently MS pursued a number of very challenging accounts, including use by oil rig workers and US Army soldiers. In an outdoor setting camera tracking completely fell over, and the IMU alone could not compensate. None of the large sales landed and management decided to close shop.

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I think you’re missing the point. That’s what happened. But why? Why did management pull the plug before the ratchet of iterative development could really start working? Why did they go into it with a ‘Version 1 must sell or we’re out’ mentality?

It’s not for lack of cash to support a more patient approach.

wrylachlan said:

I think you’re missing the point. That’s what happened. But why? Why did management pull the plug before the ratchet of iterative development could really start working? Why did they go into it with a ‘Version 1 must sell or we’re out’ mentality?

It’s not for lack of cash to support a more patient approach.

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Thanks for sharing what you think. There's both a what and why in what I shared, but the question you're asking above is almost rhetorical.

FYI: they were on Hololens version 2. The software had seen numerous iterations.

Bonusround said:

Because Microsoft disbanded the HoloLens team – it’s dead, Jim. The refugees are working at Apple or Meta.

Apparently MS pursued a number of very challenging accounts, including use by oil rig workers and US Army soldiers. In an outdoor setting camera tracking completely fell over, and the IMU alone could not compensate. None of the large sales landed and management decided to close shop.

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I think related to this is the end buyer for each of these three companies. Microsoft and Google work on a much larger scale than does Apple. So their buyers are interested in buying lots of licenses. Microsoft Ellington an Office 365 license to a Fortune 500 corp for example. Apple works at the single sales level. Each iPhone sale every 4 years, each Mac sale every 5-8 years, etc. Apple never was interested in the enterprise - sure, ice if you can get it,but not the focus. But if Microsoft can’t sign up ~20% of the Fortune 500 companies in their first or second try, they cut their losses and move on.

Bonusround said:

the question you're asking above is almost rhetorical.

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No it’s not. It’s just at a different level. What’s most interesting is why upper management made the choice to pull the plug? Or to put it a different way, why did Tim Cook NOT decide to pull the plug on Apple TV? Why did he NOT disband the HomePod team when sales weren’t what they wanted for version 1 but instead pulled it temporarily off the market and gave the team the space to reinvent the product engineering?

Whats interesting is why Apple has the stones to keep at a product category (even in the face of lackluster starts) when others do not? Upthread there was their suggestion that simple cash is the answer. But other companies with equally deep pockets are much quicker to pull the plug.

japtor said:

I actually think v1 of the Watch was kinda out of character for them. Direction might've been a bit all over the place but some of the surviving core ideals were there at least...but in practice the resulting execution was rough. Luckily it worked enough at just a few things, and perhaps that aligned with the watch format being kinda inherently limited.

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Yeah, I had one and it wasn't great - but it was like a million times better than a Fitbit. I remember people in the BF leaning hard into the fashion angle too, saying that finance people would give up their Patek Phillipes (or whatever), because the Apple Watch Edition was just better, and that didn't pan out. Apple pushed phone companion apps as well, but those haven't gotten nearly the same uptake or investment as fitness (except fitness apps, of course). Apple is good at figuring what works and running with it. The only times they stumble is when none of the directions find PMF, since they are also loath to cut a product category.

Horatio said:

Apple pushed phone companion apps as well

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At the time the only thing that let it have even the execrable battery life it had was the fact that it was using low power Bluetooth for everything possible and offloading the heavy lifting to the phone. Now that the platform is more mature and the chips more performant the need for that approach melts away.

wrylachlan said:

At the time the only thing that let it have even the execrable battery life it had was the fact that it was using low power Bluetooth for everything possible and offloading the heavy lifting to the phone. Now that the platform is more mature and the chips more performant the need for that approach melts away.

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What’s crazy to me is that they’re still using 7nm parts. It might not be worth it to use lower performance but higher efficiency layout only for the Watch but in theory they could see a 30% to 50% reduction in power with N4P.

Two thoughts:

1) Apple Watch was initially marketed via the high-end fashion accessory aspect, which got it a LOT of visibility (partly through ridicule).
This is still a MAJOR part of its appeal — the Hermes collection is still around, and I’m absolutely certain that Watch bands make up a substantial part of AW revenue, perhaps even actually eclipsing the Watch itself in terms of profit. The margins on the yearly Pride bands must be insane.

2) HoloLens was “on version 2” — it struck me again that Vision Pro Must be Version 10 or 15 of Apple’s product. The difference, as always, is that they never shipped all the previous versions.
The reason Apple’s products are viable, and the others’ products are often not, is that Apple doesn’t even show them to us unless/until they are.

analogika said:

2) HoloLens was “on version 2” — it struck me again that Vision Pro Must be Version 10 or 15 of Apple’s product. The difference, as always, is that they never shipped all the previous versions.
The reason Apple’s products are viable, and the others’ products are often not, is that Apple doesn’t even show them to us unless/until they are.

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Microsoft demonstrated a lot of chutzpah developing and shipping a first-of-its kind product like that. It surely influenced Apple’s path, as HoloLens was far more focussed on ‘spatial computing’ than anything Oculus were doing at that time.

Bonusround said:

Microsoft demonstrated a lot of chutzpah developing and shipping a first-of-its kind product like that. It surely influenced Apple’s path, as HoloLens was far more focussed on ‘spatial computing’ than anything Oculus were doing at that time.

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Was it a finished product, though? Was it viable? (I'm not really familiar with it, so I'm asking.)

Big tech layoffs have probably killed many ultimately viable products, but was the Hololens release really "chutzpah" — or just premature?

analogika said:

Was it a finished product, though? Was it viable? (I'm not really familiar with it, so I'm asking.)

Big tech layoffs have probably killed many ultimately viable products, but was the Hololens release really "chutzpah" — or just premature?

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Yes, they built and sold headsets that cost many dollars. You can still buy one today.

Apple would probably say they were premature, and Microsoft appears to have determined it wasn’t viable enough.

Bonusround said:

Yes, they built and sold headsets that cost many dollars. You can still buy one today.

Apple would probably say they were premature, and Microsoft appears to have determined it wasn’t viable enough.

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My question wasn't whether it was for sale. I was musing at the thought that Apple tends to avoid shipping banana products ("ripens in customers' hands"), waiting instead until they have something people are sure to want to use.

analogika said:

My question wasn't whether it was for sale. I was musing at the thought that Apple tends to avoid shipping banana products ("ripens in customers' hands"), waiting instead until they have something people are sure to want to use.

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I would argue they definitely shipped the Watch, iPhone, and iPad as banana products though. The difference is that they shipped them when they were over half yellow while something like HoloLens was nearly all green and rock hard.

Your can see Apple’s products turning yellow before the warranty period is up.

OrangeCream said:

I would argue they definitely shipped the Watch, iPhone, and iPad as banana products though. The difference is that they shipped them when they were over half yellow while something like HoloLens was nearly all green and rock hard.

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Really? I think you might be misunderstanding what I'm trying to say:

I am NOT saying that Apple products don't evolve over time. I'm saying that they're not released until they are so developed and so polished that enough people will immediately want one to make development worthwhile.

My Series 0 worked fine and did all it was supposed to until I replaced it with a Series 6. It had an immediate sustainable market and went from there.

I didn't have an original iPad, but the iPad 2 I got worked admirably and convinced me immediately. It did what it did SO well that I've been using iPads on the job since then.

The original iPhone, I'll give ya — to an extent. It was missing some basic functionality, but what it did was so brilliantly executed and so far beyond any competitor that it made it worthwhile and sold rather better than initially proposed. So the market even for that initial version was actually considerably larger than what Steve Jobs had publicly set as the goal.

wrylachlan said:

I think you’re missing the point. That’s what happened. But why? Why did management pull the plug before the ratchet of iterative development could really start working? Why did they go into it with a ‘Version 1 must sell or we’re out’ mentality?

It’s not for lack of cash to support a more patient approach.

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I suspect it's because Microsoft wasn't ready for the kind of lift needed to really make it succeed and it wasn't until version 1 was coming together that they realized just how big that lift would be.

If we take Vision Pro as where HoloLens needed to reach technologically, they needed better displays, better sensors, and much more compute power. Those aren't core areas where Microsoft invests, and all three of those are very expensive, require a lot of people, and only the compute has a pretty reliable ability to predict when you'll hit a given goal (assuming you know how much compute you'll need - if you don't, that too is indeterminate).

And because Microsoft is an enterprise focused company, and HoloLens an enterprise focused product, Microsoft had to do a lot of the lift to sell the use case. In Apple's case, they can turn Vision Pro over to a huge army of developers to find those use cases. Consumer products are more supply-driven because the developers are often solving their own personal wants, and they'll sell your product for you saying 'hey, did you know the iPhone will help you get a ride home from the bar'. In enterprise the customer needs to see the use case and then they hire developers to build that.

Apple started working on Vision Pro in 2015. They were more than an order of magnitude off on compute than where they needed to be (probably wasn't sure exactly where they needed to be), the technology for the display hadn't been invented yet, and LIDAR for the gesture detection still looked like this.



I saw a talk by Raffaello D'Andrea back in about 2012 (can't seem to find it online) where he talked about how quadcopters came to be, and why so suddenly. Turns out small quadcopters are a threshold technology. Until tech crosses a specific threshold, they're impossible, and once they cross that threshold, they rapidly move from feasible to astounding. Quadcopters needed 4 things: powerful, compact motors requiring rare earth magnets and a few other details, very small sensors which were only arriving due to smartphones (well, the military was driving that a bit faster, but civilians weren't beneficiaries), batteries with high energy to weight ratios which were also being enabled due to phones, and enough compute power in a small enough package to close the control loop (sensor, analysis, compute, motor control) fast enough - about 60hz. Any slower than that and it's unstable and falls out of the air. And all of those things came together in the aughts.

And with some incremental gains in the first three, and Moores law driving the last one, going from something that can hover in a lab to something that can to aerobatics and catch things in the air takes a couple of years and basically every problem from there out is a software constraint - can programmers figure out how to get it to recognize an object and catch it, because the platform could easily do that almost immediately. We don't need to make meaningful gains in compute, battery, motor, or sensors because every quadcopter problem is really a problem of 'are programmers clever enough to maximize the use of what is already being built' with the answer being 'no, not really' - so human programmers are what more advanced quads are gated behind.

Vision Pro is very much the same thing. HoloLens has limited application because some of those techs just hadn't gotten over the line yet, and Microsoft was in no position to do the kind of fundamental research needed to get them there. Existing VR headsets have limited markets for the same reasons. Vision Pro gets everything just over the line enough to turn most problems into software problems - either on their end in terms of OS and APIs and what they will expose to developers (they're holding a lot back for user privacy reasons, and some I suspect because they don't have the compute available to do so) or on the end of developers themselves to come up with ideas for this. My guess is that from here out the software will reliably fail to maximize the utility of the hardware, and that gap will grow rather than shrink - Apple will be able to make incremental hardware gains faster than developers can write code. I don't mean that there are no further breakthroughs needed - things like object recognition are lacking in the product and may take ages to arrive - rather than in terms of what the product can in theory do, the gap between that and what users can actually do will expand rather than contract, which is a pretty good metric for any general compute platform vs a specialized compute platform that tends to get any new capability utilized immediately.

Apple didn't invent the displays (these are Sony displays), but they're close - they have their own microLED effort going - though with a different goal - 400ppi displays for Watch/iPhone rather than 4000ppi - we'll likely never know if Apple shot for this and failed, saw Sony was there and shifted their effort, etc. They didn't invent the lidar, but they were the first to bring it to the consumer market and design around it - there's a lot of software around the gesture detection. And they did invent the compute - nobody else can put that much compute in that power budget right now, nobody can composite 23 megapixels of pass through video at 12ms off of a battery.

Apple had a lot of other utility for all of this tech than just the Vision Pro. It drove a bunch of other device features, so it wasn't R&D that would be lost if they never got there. But for Microsoft, HoloLens was carrying that entire load, and I think it's a pretty easy call to see that the product just was unlikely to be big enough to pay for it all - especially if you have this consumer giant chasing a similar goal that will have massively larger economies of scale and democratize that so much that enterprise will just build off of the consumer platform. Remember when Blackberries were the enterprise phone? There is no enterprise phone now. Everyone just buys iPhones. Microsoft maintaining their pricing premium once Apple showed up was a long shot.

analogika said:

I didn't have an original iPad, but the iPad 2 I got worked admirably and convinced me immediately.

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I had an original iPad and it was precisely a giant iPhone, which in no way was a bad thing but it was significantly slower than the iPad 2. iOS 4, which shipped with the iPad 2, had custom wallpapers, folders, and multitasking, all which made the iPad far more useful.

A rather atypical investor relation is a aspect very special to Apple: whether they're ahead of the wave (digital music) or coming in from behind (AR/VR), as a company, Apple has repeatedly demonstrated they are able to disrupt markets from the top AND create a viable business model doing so. As long as their primary revenue streams keep growing, shareholders will let them explore long-term projects while using enormous amounts of time and resources (AVP, Titan).

ham bulu said:

A rather atypical investor relation is a aspect very special to Apple: whether they're ahead of the wave (digital music) or coming in from behind (AR/VR), as a company, Apple has repeatedly demonstrated they are able to disrupt markets from the top AND create a viable business model doing so. As long as their primary revenue streams keep growing, shareholders will let them explore long-term projects while using enormous amounts of time and resources (AVP, Titan).

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I think you’ve made a mistake to think they’re coming from behind in AR/VR, though. There is no appreciable market in the first place. Their competitors are Microsoft and Magic Leap:



For sure there is overlap with Meta, but that’s like comparing a Nintendo Switch to an iPhone. Both can succeed but one is not going to replace the other. Apple doesn’t have dedicated controllers and doesn’t target gamers. They don’t have a concept of a Metaverse or Avatars. They don’t even acknowledge their headset is VR.

They only mention AR; ARKit and RealityKit on the page and AR on their site:

Apple coming in from behind in VR is kind of like how Apple approached the MP3 player market. There were plenty of other brands out there and there was even debate if Apple could even squeeze into the established sector. Of course the moment the iPod hit the scene it made all the rest look like jokes. Kind of like Vision Pro did at least with the keynote presentation. We'll have to see what happens when people get a hold of them to say for sure though.

I get that Apple‘s efforts are different and they are trying to create something different by establishing a general computing platform.

I like the iPod comparison. They outclass the competition in a way that it feels they have no competition at all. And in the case of the AVP, there are significant conceptual differences.

But it‘s still two screens on a stick slapped to your face innit?

Benedict Evans very succinctly put my thoughts into words:

Meta is trying to catalyze an ecosystem while we wait for the right hardware - Apple is trying to catalyze an ecosystem while we wait for the right price.

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The problem with Meta's approach is that developers can't entirely build their vision because the foundation is constantly moving, where Apple delivers a stable foundation from the outset. I don't see the price as being a terribly big barrier because the addressable market is so large. Apple's main problem is likely to be component supply constraints rather than people not affording the device. Apple after all has already addressed all of the issues needed for the product to have a global reach - localization brought forward from iOS, a global App Store, and so on.

The other thing Apple's price point will do though is help establish app prices. Is this a full price App Store like the Mac, or is it a high-end mobile store like the iPad?

But also as I've said before - Meta's problem isn't the hardware, it's the purpose. Meta wants Quest to be an ad delivery platform, and that's not what people are buying. So for them, it's the inability to build a compelling metaverse, not hardware or price.

ham bulu said:

But it‘s still two screens on a stick slapped to your face innit?

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No?
Three screens. It’s closer to say it’s a pair of iPhone Pro 14s and an iPhone 13 slapped to your face, i think.

stevenkan said:

All Time High?

Not yet, but really close!!!

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$3T has arrived!

stevenkan said:

$3T has arrived!

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I swear I wrote this same post back at $2T (which means someone here is going to dredge it up) but it bears repeating anyway. Pretty funny that here we sit at $3T and it barely gets a nod on the Mac Ach. Besides just the mind boggling number it's funny that Apple has been so successful for so long that nobody even questions it. Of course AAPL hit $3T!

Remember when the Ach was the dark back alley of the Ars Forum? When even a slight nod to Apple on the fp was something we were genuinely surprised at? Ars wasn't into Macs at all and yet here we are 20 years later and a day hardly goes by without an Apple product or news making the front page.

The amazing thing is it's not amazing. People in their 20s don't even remember an age where Apple wasn't king of the tech hill but for graybeards like myself I still find it incredible. My only gripe? I kind of miss the scrappy days of 80s and 90s Apple. Where easter eggs were written into everything and it was still very much a tinkerer's paradise playing around with ResEdit and questionable add-on cards. Apple's a slick well oiled machine with a LOT to lose so now that's all gone. Code is vetted through corporate policies, hardware is sealed up tight as a drum. It's the right way to be but it's a little sad that the underdog grew up, went to the gym and put on a suit.

Those were some dark days in the late 90s when Apple didn't seem like it was going to make it. I hope Apple never goes back there. However when the Applesphere was only occupied by the true believers, that in itself was pretty fun. And for anyone that held some AAPL from back then: it's even more fun that your loyalty, for once, paid off.

Well you have to wonder how much more upside there could be.

This past year, iPhone sales kind of stalled but Apple still beat lowered forecasts.

They're going to need growth from somewhere. A couple of months back, there were indications that Mac sales had may not have been robust. In fact, you see all these little articles about discounts.

OTOH, I heard that there are like 450 million iPhones which are more than 2 years old so there may be another big upgrade cycle coming in the next year or two.

iPilot05 said:

Where easter eggs were written into everything and it was still very much a tinkerer's paradise playing around with ResEdit and questionable add-on cards. Apple's a slick well oiled machine with a LOT to lose so now that's all gone. Code is vetted through corporate policies, hardware is sealed up tight as a drum. It's the right way to be but it's a little sad that the underdog grew up, went to the gym and put on a suit.

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While a lot of it is cause control and modern day Apple and such, there's a matter of context to it all with the world we're living in nowadays. Pretty much everything is connected online these days, and the security threats are more pervasive than ever. Apple's definitely on the overbearing side of things with how they've handled security, but just saying there's some legitimate technical reasoning too rather than just a consequence of like "Apple big now, must use iron fist!"

wco81 said:

In fact, you see all these little articles about discounts.

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I know your point is about discounts, but just want to point out most if not all of those articles use referral links that give the poster/site a kickback. There's a lot of articles cause people want to make money.

As far as discounts themselves though, it's been happening for a good while now. Yes it was rare for Apple before, but it's been a long time since they've been like that. Course Apple themselves still rarely do it, they leave it to the resellers (...and kinda feel like there was a lawsuit way back about controlling reseller pricing so might be some correlation there )

wco81 said:

OTOH, I heard that there are like 450 million iPhones which are more than 2 years old so there may be another big upgrade cycle coming in the next year or two.

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Thinking of the next big upgrade cycle is kinda short term thinking, the market is mature enough that there's always some large chunk on some appreciably old phone that'll upgrade eventually. All Apple cares is that they pick the iPhone whenever that happens.

And as far as growth, it's kinda the same situation as the Mac...Android has most of the market share still afaik so there's your growth opportunity. It's a matter of if they can reach the rest of the market given whatever limitations there are.

Yeah I don't see much of an opportunity for big market share gains because the price band they play in have fewer potential customers.

Same as with the Mac, they have market share dominance in computers over $1000 or $1500 but the volume is still low compared to computers under $1000 or $700.

Still they have a huge installed base, which is why they go for increasing Services, for more ways to harvest revenues from the same installed base, in addition to the expected periodic upgrades.

Various laws in different countries, like the right to repair and the EU law to have user-replaceable batteries may stretch out upgrade cycles and reduce revenues potential each year at the margins.

japtor said:

And as far as growth, it's kinda the same situation as the Mac...Android has most of the market share still afaik so there's your growth opportunity. It's a matter of if they can reach the rest of the market given whatever limitations there are.

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That's kind of the baffling thing in all this… because the limitations are very clear — Apple has little to no interest in growing market share into the "makes no money" segment of the market which, at this point, is all that's left, because Apple is hoovering up all the money in the profitable bit of every market in which they choose to compete. Is the stock market betting on Apple aggressively moving into low-margin, low-profit market segments? They certainly haven't been paying the slightest attention to Apple's strategy for multiple decades if that's what they think…

iPilot05 said:

I swear I wrote this same post back at $2T (which means someone here is going to dredge it up) but it bears repeating anyway. Pretty funny that here we sit at $3T and it barely gets a nod on the Mac Ach. Besides just the mind boggling number it's funny that Apple has been so successful for so long that nobody even questions it. Of course AAPL hit $3T!

Remember when the Ach was the dark back alley of the Ars Forum? When even a slight nod to Apple on the fp was something we were genuinely surprised at? Ars wasn't into Macs at all and yet here we are 20 years later and a day hardly goes by without an Apple product or news making the front page.

The amazing thing is it's not amazing. People in their 20s don't even remember an age where Apple wasn't king of the tech hill but for graybeards like myself I still find it incredible. My only gripe? I kind of miss the scrappy days of 80s and 90s Apple. Where easter eggs were written into everything and it was still very much a tinkerer's paradise playing around with ResEdit and questionable add-on cards. Apple's a slick well oiled machine with a LOT to lose so now that's all gone. Code is vetted through corporate policies, hardware is sealed up tight as a drum. It's the right way to be but it's a little sad that the underdog grew up, went to the gym and put on a suit.

Those were some dark days in the late 90s when Apple didn't seem like it was going to make it. I hope Apple never goes back there. However when the Applesphere was only occupied by the true believers, that in itself was pretty fun. And for anyone that held some AAPL from back then: it's even more fun that your loyalty, for once, paid off.

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It was the summer of 2006 that was full of rumors and concept videos of what the unicorn iPhone was supposed to be, based on supply chain reports that Apple was working on something big. I left in 2006 from my job of ~5 years. Company was moving their HQ from Houston to Indianapolis. I chose to stay in Houston because I was going to law school at night and had taken out loans to pay for it so chose to finish it rather move for the job. My first and only Apple product before then was a gen4 iPod purchased in late 2004 (still have it and it still works), and it was such a pleasant experience to use that I figured whatever Apple was working on for a cellphone would be much better then what was available on the market back then. So I liquidated the mutual funds and, rather than pay off my student loans while taking a tax penalty, I rolled over my 401k money in to an IRA and purchased all AAPL from the ~$24k proceeds, about six months before the iPhone intro, and a year before it went on sale. I was 30 at the time.

I am still making payments for my student loans, my IRA account still has those AAPL shares (plus many more from DRIP), but that retirement account is well in to the seven figures. I have other retirement accounts and 401k rollovers from other jobs since then. Been through the Great Recession, the Covid pandemic and last year’s market meltdown over interest rate hikes. AAPL is one thing I don’t worry about.

iPilot05 said:

I swear I wrote this same post back at $2T (which means someone here is going to dredge it up) but it bears repeating anyway. Pretty funny that here we sit at $3T and it barely gets a nod on the Mac Ach. Besides just the mind boggling number it's funny that Apple has been so successful for so long that nobody even questions it. Of course AAPL hit $3T!

Remember when the Ach was the dark back alley of the Ars Forum? When even a slight nod to Apple on the fp was something we were genuinely surprised at? Ars wasn't into Macs at all and yet here we are 20 years later and a day hardly goes by without an Apple product or news making the front page.

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I measure Apple's victory by the fact that the Ach has more posts than the BF, and the BF is mostly dead now. It's as if millions of BF voices suddenly cried out in recognition of Apple's success and were suddenly silenced. There's nothing left to argue over.