Apple CEO Tim Cook Speaking Live at 2015 Goldman Sachs Technology Conference

[ctdonath]

I'm curious to see in April what mr Cook has planned for the 100+ billion sitting idle

Oh, it's not sitting idle.
It's earning interest from being loaned out to other people to help them do practical things they otherwise didn't have money for. You _do_ understand "fractional banking" right? That $100B isn't just a number on a spreadsheet or currency in a vault, sitting there doing nothing. Yeah, 's savings is described as "cash" because it can be acquired & moved quickly, but in no way is it actual coin or paper currency sitting idle.

Trust me. Having a large pile of "cash" handy is very useful for making great things happen fast when the time comes. "Retina" displays happened because, when other parts were ready, threw a billion dollars at a company and said "make it happen, and quick".

 

[Mycoolroy]

Tim cook gives me the creeps. I feel like he is a real life villain, like he has people fooled and behind the scenes he's doing harmful things...

His smile, for example, is the most disingenuous smile I have ever seen in my life. I know its just my opinion, but my people skills have rarely failed me in the past.

 

[ctdonath]

cause all scientists (and people) are money driven greedy people willing to lie just for a grant?

If the grant money only goes where certain results are assured, the truth suffers.

 

[Bruce Oksol]

Arithmetic may not be your strong point....

Considering, with 130 billion in "cash". Apple could afford to pay 2.1 Billion people $60,000 and that would only be their cash reserves. Not even their cash flow / Profitability
.

2.1 billion people x $60,000 = wow.

I hope you are not a CFO somewhere.

 

[Popeye206]

i'm not saying they should give it. I'ts called context. when you see "130Billion" it's sometimes hard to realize just how much bloody money that is.

in this case, it's enough to pay 2+ million people $60,000.

SO, for Tim Cook to say "we don't hoard", while sitting on this absolutely world changing mass amount of cash is disingenuous at best, and an outright lie at worst

Apple can easily afford to have dividend returns increased. Pay their fair share of taxes (instead of moving money off shore), or even better yet, paying their store front personnel better than minimum wage and nickle and diming their hours (forcing them to wait in line for example for 15-20 minutes for bag checks while not getting paid)

Simply put: If you're an investor of Apple its fantastic! if you're not an apple Investor, Apple's monetary policy is disastrous to everyone else. it means we're paying insane margins on things where insane margins don't have to exist. they're keeping money OUT of your local economies by keeping it overseas to avoid paying what is believed their fair share of taxes.

SO yea

They're hoarders. And the worst kind. The kind who doesn't believe they have a problem

I'm curious to see in April what mr Cook has planned for the 100+ billion sitting idle

Ahhh.... he wasn't talking about hoarding money... he was referring to hoarding customer information.

BTW... I'm dying to see what they do with it too. I'd love to see Apple give some back to investors and I'd like to see some keep some for security, and I'd like to see them spend a bunch on some new things.

However... Apple sitting on hoards of money does not make them evil. It's called success.

 

[garotemonkey]

Pfffff

This is never an acceptable position. The environmental discussion has been filled with discredited reporting. Over zealous data gathering. Cherry picking. When do you not welcome discussion?

Oh my god; who cares what you think, you conspiracy-theorist troglodyte.

I do not "welcome discussion" about whether the moon landings were faked. For similar reasons I do not "welcome discussion" about whether man is negatively affecting the climate by, for example, dumping absurd amounts of CO2 into the air. The data on this has been accumulating since before you were in diapers.

I assume next you'll claim that chlorofluorocarbons were utterly benign, DDT is a harmless weed killer, and mercury-based gold mining is "a myth".

Get off the internet.

 

[kmj2318]

"Giving back to investors" through dividends doesn't do what it sounds like it does. When you receive a dividend, that cash comes from the company you already own. The dividends reduce the assets the company has, and the stock falls by the amount of the dividend.

I always get the impression that people think dividends magically come from the sky.

 

[GfPQqmcRKUvP]

Oh, it's not sitting idle.
It's earning interest from being loaned out to other people to help them do practical things they otherwise didn't have money for.

Apple is earning less than 1% interest on its cash. You know what would make more sense? Giving the cash back to the shareholders so they can decide what to do with it since Apple doesn't know.

You _do_ understand "fractional banking" right?

Plenty of people understand it. Fewer people understand that fractional reserve banking is how the economy functioned decades ago and that the money multiplier doesn't actually have any empirical backing anymore.

Trust me. Having a large pile of "cash" handy is very useful for making great things happen fast when the time comes. "Retina" displays happened because, when other parts were ready, threw a billion dollars at a company and said "make it happen, and quick".

Yes, $1b. $150b? That's a whole lot different. The very existence of that large of a cash pile means Apple can't find a use for it.

----------

"Giving back to investors" through dividends doesn't do what it sounds like it does. When you receive a dividend, that cash comes from the company you already own. The dividends reduce the assets the company has, and the stock falls by the amount of the dividend.

I always get the impression that people think dividends magically come from the sky.

You're right for the most part. My argument would be that there's a large discount applied to Apple's cash assets. Returning cash to shareholders would also allow the shareholders to invest in other securities returning more than the 1% interest Apple is earning on that cash while still leaving those Apple investors with what they want - exposure to a hugely profitable tech company.

Holding cash you can never use (at least at an acceptable return) on the balance sheet is a value destructive action.

 

[IbisDoc]

Do you know how many times I've seen someone say "Epic fail" about a new Apple product and the product ends up being a massive success?

No, I don't. Nor do I care.

 

[Bruce Oksol]

New solar farm...

Al Gore is on the Apple board of directors, I believe. Explains everything.

 

[ksuyen]

It's a good feature. But it could just aswell be done with an iphone app with the iphone in your pocket.

Ah... the never-used-AppleWatch typical responds. Do you know a basic difference between physical skin tapping and vibration on your pocket? or the difference between subtlety glance and physically remove your phone from pocket? or...

I can go on, but the best way to explain this is for you to use Apple Watch yourself eventually, a different experience of the same ordinary day-to-day world activities.

 

[ChrisA]

Apple's languages:
Obj-C
AppleScript
Swift

IBM's languages:
Fortran
Jython

Did you forget about PL/1?

Programming languages come from all kinds of places. They are so easy to implement that doing so is a common assignment for computer science students. So we see them coming from many places. Some of them are the work of a single person, Pascal and Perl come to mind.

 

[ChrisA]

If the grant money only goes where certain results are assured, the truth suffers.

No it does not work that way. The earn a nobel price you have to come up with the ideas that no one else did. Following a hear never got anyone to the top.

But really, the debate is over. It's obvious that dumping megatons of CO2 into the air does bad things.

BTW I was amused by the anti-scientist who claimed the all the temperature measurements taken over the last 1`00 years were "fake". All of them? Really. Thousands of weather stations all over the world, satellites and all were all tempered with by a centuries old secret conspiracy.

What is so hard to understand, CO2 traps heat?

 

[Dargoth]

This is never an acceptable position. The environmental discussion has been filled with discredited reporting. Over zealous data gathering. Cherry picking. When do you not welcome discussion? When do you think you have all the facts and further debate in the light of new discovery is something that gets no attention anymore because "the time for talk is past". It is never past for anyone who seeks the truth and not an agenda.

A big story breaking this week is that temperate data has been falsified and adjusted for the past 60 years of data. It's being referred to as the biggest science scandal ever. Data has been adjusted to support the global warming narrative.

We also see a government that seeks to FURTHER consolidate power in its hands through the use of environmental regulations to seize land and to over regulate citizens. The environment and the whole global warming issue is a governmental abuse of power and is being used as a tool. It's a backdoor manipulation tool. Who needs laws when you can just grant the EPA regulatory authority and then point them in the direction of your enemies for some shakedown. No need to make things illegal when you can just regulate it of existence. Thats the government we want right? Where you don't have a set of rules but just a bunch of thugs with power who pick and choose.

No Mr. Cook, the time for talk is not over.

Shouldn't you be over at Fox News?

What a witty and well-thought-out response! It's unscientific to declare anything as 100% true without even leaving the slightest bit of room for discussion. Is global warming a reality? If you ask the tons of environmental groups out there, it is, but the scientific answer is "definitely maybe". There is some evidence (based on the reports that weren't falsified) that global warming may be something that exists, but as anyone who has followed science for the past century knows, there have been more theories (sometimes considered facts at the time) discredited than there have been theories proven. At one time it was considered scientific fact that leeches were the best treatment for a number of medical conditions. I take it you are still a believer, right? If not, then you surely must see my point. I don't believe that there is "nothing" going on in the environment, but it has yet to be proven with solid evidence that there can't be anything else going on either. Only a fool would claim otherwise, and only a fool would shut himself out to any plausible possibilities. Many such fools exist in the world today.

 

[Millah]

This is never an acceptable position. The environmental discussion has been filled with discredited reporting. Over zealous data gathering. Cherry picking. When do you not welcome discussion? When do you think you have all the facts and further debate in the light of new discovery is something that gets no attention anymore because "the time for talk is past". It is never past for anyone who seeks the truth and not an agenda.

A big story breaking this week is that temperate data has been falsified and adjusted for the past 60 years of data. It's being referred to as the biggest science scandal ever. Data has been adjusted to support the global warming narrative.

We also see a government that seeks to FURTHER consolidate power in its hands through the use of environmental regulations to seize land and to over regulate citizens. The environment and the whole global warming issue is a governmental abuse of power and is being used as a tool. It's a backdoor manipulation tool. Who needs laws when you can just grant the EPA regulatory authority and then point them in the direction of your enemies for some shakedown. No need to make things illegal when you can just regulate it of existence. Thats the government we want right? Where you don't have a set of rules but just a bunch of thugs with power who pick and choose.

No Mr. Cook, the time for talk is not over.

Ugh.

Here's the thing I can't understand about people with a point of view like yours. Let's just say for discussion the climate change debate is all real. It's a time critical issue. Needless debate wastes that precious time.

So let's examine potential outcomes for both sides. If the issue is real, what do we get out of acting now? We save potentially world changing disaster, and we get much cleaner energy that is sustainable into the future. If the issue is false, what do we get out of acting? We still get much cleaner energy that is sustainable into the future. If we DON'T act now and the issue is real, what do we get? Potential global disaster, and a continued reliance on finite fossil fuels that will eventually be depleted within a century. If we don't act now and the issue is false, what do we get? We still have a continued reliance on a finite resource that will eventually need to be replaced in the future anyway.

So it's a win/win regardless of whether the climate change debate is correct or not, if you have any kind of vision that extends beyond 5 years. If we don't act now it's still a lose/lose regardless of the debate. Time is a precious resource that can't be wasted, regardless if the issue is real. Hence Tim Cooks remark that the time for talk is over.

But I guess doubters would rather dig their heads deeper in the sand and continue to babble their lips and waste time arguing such trivial nonsense. Revamping our dependency on a finite resource is something we need to do regardless of any debate. It's simply a matter of time.

 

[JoeG4]

They sure will. People will live their lives a few hundred to a few thousand bucks poorer. LOL.

 

[BvizioN]

It's a good feature. But it could just aswell be done with an iphone app with the iphone in your pocket.

I still miss vibrations in my pocket. The only time I can clearly hear (or feel as some others may want to call it) the vibrations is when the phone is on a desk/table etc.

 

[eac25]

I still miss vibrations in my pocket. The only time I can clearly hear the vibrations is when the phone is on a desk/table etc.

Pretty sure the point of the vibrations is to feel them, not hear them...

 

[BvizioN]

Pretty sure the point of the vibrations is to feel them, not hear them...

Yeah, OK.

Just so you understand what I meant, I have corrected my comment.

Even though I was talking about when it is on the desk and unless you have some supernatural feelings, vibration can not be felt but heart when coming from a desk.

 

[DonnieMarco]

This is never an acceptable position. The environmental discussion has been filled with discredited reporting. Over zealous data gathering. Cherry picking. When do you not welcome discussion? When do you think you have all the facts and further debate in the light of new discovery is something that gets no attention anymore because "the time for talk is past". It is never past for anyone who seeks the truth and not an agenda.

A big story breaking this week is that temperate data has been falsified and adjusted for the past 60 years of data. It's being referred to as the biggest science scandal ever. Data has been adjusted to support the global warming narrative.

We also see a government that seeks to FURTHER consolidate power in its hands through the use of environmental regulations to seize land and to over regulate citizens. The environment and the whole global warming issue is a governmental abuse of power and is being used as a tool. It's a backdoor manipulation tool. Who needs laws when you can just grant the EPA regulatory authority and then point them in the direction of your enemies for some shakedown. No need to make things illegal when you can just regulate it of existence. Thats the government we want right? Where you don't have a set of rules but just a bunch of thugs with power who pick and choose.

No Mr. Cook, the time for talk is not over.

This may come as bit of a surprise to you but Global Warming is well Global and not a US political issue. I can't find anything regarding this issue in anything other than right wing politically biased websites and our national shame the Daily Mail.

In terms of cherry picking data etc do you not realise the irony? You are doing exactly that. The evidence for climate change is absolutely overwhelming. Simple.

I don't get it anyway surely if you a conservative you would prefer your country to be free from the whims and dictats of foreign oil on purely national security grounds and national pride of your countries energy infrastructure. Not to mention the jobs it would provide.

I will not reply to anything further as I have neither the time or the energy. And I've heard it all before.

----------

What a witty and well-thought-out response! It's unscientific to declare anything as 100% true without even leaving the slightest bit of room for discussion. Is global warming a reality? If you ask the tons of environmental groups out there, it is, but the scientific answer is "definitely maybe". There is some evidence (based on the reports that weren't falsified) that global warming may be something that exists, but as anyone who has followed science for the past century knows, there have been more theories (sometimes considered facts at the time) discredited than there have been theories proven. At one time it was considered scientific fact that leeches were the best treatment for a number of medical conditions. I take it you are still a believer, right? If not, then you surely must see my point. I don't believe that there is "nothing" going on in the environment, but it has yet to be proven with solid evidence that there can't be anything else going on either. Only a fool would claim otherwise, and only a fool would shut himself out to any plausible possibilities. Many such fools exist in the world today.

Medical Research has come a long way since the Dark Ages.

The absolute overwhelming preponderance of evidence is that Climate Change is real. The absolute overwhelming majority of climate scientists are definitive in stating Climate change is real.

Even if it isn't there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by removing dependence on foreign oil producers and developing clean renewable energy sources and dare I say it modern Nuclear power generators.

 

[2499723]

MacRumors was cited in the Guardian. =) http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/11/tim-cook-apple-watch-health-benefits

 

[bbeagle]

Tim cook gives me the creeps. I feel like he is a real life villain, like he has people fooled and behind the scenes he's doing harmful things...

His smile, for example, is the most disingenuous smile I have ever seen in my life. I know its just my opinion, but my people skills have rarely failed me in the past.

You sound like you judge people like a 5 year old. Someone looks suspicious, they MUST BE. Someone looks nice, they MUST BE.

Who looks more like a villain, picture 1 or picture 2? I guess you can just TELL by the picture.

 

[2457282]

This is never an acceptable position. The environmental discussion has been filled with discredited reporting. Over zealous data gathering. Cherry picking. When do you not welcome discussion? When do you think you have all the facts and further debate in the light of new discovery is something that gets no attention anymore because "the time for talk is past". It is never past for anyone who seeks the truth and not an agenda.

A big story breaking this week is that temperate data has been falsified and adjusted for the past 60 years of data. It's being referred to as the biggest science scandal ever. Data has been adjusted to support the global warming narrative.

We also see a government that seeks to FURTHER consolidate power in its hands through the use of environmental regulations to seize land and to over regulate citizens. The environment and the whole global warming issue is a governmental abuse of power and is being used as a tool. It's a backdoor manipulation tool. Who needs laws when you can just grant the EPA regulatory authority and then point them in the direction of your enemies for some shakedown. No need to make things illegal when you can just regulate it of existence. Thats the government we want right? Where you don't have a set of rules but just a bunch of thugs with power who pick and choose.

No Mr. Cook, the time for talk is not over.

On your point that we should never close the door to dialog -- I am 100% in agreement.

As for the environmental point of view, let me say this. It makes sense that the earth has a finite amount of resources. As the population expands, the consumption of said resources increases. Because it is a closed eco-system (at the highest level), one can argue that through death and decay the resources are regenerated. However, when we consume at higher rates and create products that decay significantly slower, then the regeneration may not keep up with consumption. All this is to say that I strongly believe that we need to manage our resource wisely and that we should be investing in renewable energies, not just from an economic perspective (although that will come soon enough, I fear), but just because it makes sense to protect the only eco-system known to man, because currently if we kill this one, there is no alternative.

In honor of your first point, I welcome your response.

 

[villagehiker]

So his biggest selling points are: easier way to avoid paying attention in meetings, and great way to be tapped on the wrist 10 minutes before every hour.

Epic. Fail.

Even in meetings you often need to be in touch. So, yes, it is a good idea. Plus, if you are an office worker or science researcher or truck driver or airline pilot you need to get up once an hour to move around. (Except on international flights, if you are an airline passenger, getting up isn't so important because you fly less often than the pilot—and yes, I'm familiar with pilot schedules—and you can exercise enough in your seat.) So the hourly reminder, too, is a good idea. When you add in all of the other cool things the phone and watch can do, Apple may have another winner. We will see.

 

[modemthug]

Whether you believe in climate change or not

This is never an acceptable position. The environmental discussion has been filled with discredited reporting. Over zealous data gathering. Cherry picking. When do you not welcome discussion? When do you think you have all the facts and further debate in the light of new discovery is something that gets no attention anymore because "the time for talk is past". It is never past for anyone who seeks the truth and not an agenda.

A big story breaking this week is that temperate data has been falsified and adjusted for the past 60 years of data. It's being referred to as the biggest science scandal ever. Data has been adjusted to support the global warming narrative.

We also see a government that seeks to FURTHER consolidate power in its hands through the use of environmental regulations to seize land and to over regulate citizens. The environment and the whole global warming issue is a governmental abuse of power and is being used as a tool. It's a backdoor manipulation tool. Who needs laws when you can just grant the EPA regulatory authority and then point them in the direction of your enemies for some shakedown. No need to make things illegal when you can just regulate it of existence. Thats the government we want right? Where you don't have a set of rules but just a bunch of thugs with power who pick and choose.

No Mr. Cook, the time for talk is not over.

Whether you believe in climate change or not, I'm sure everyone can agree that putting pollution into the air and water is bad for the environment and hazardous to humans. Plus, we will eventually run out of fossil fuels. So it's good that we have a company that is like "hey, we have enough money to build our data centers on completely renewable energy sources; we should do that." And I might add, they did it of their own volition without any regulatory agency telling them that they had to.