Blackberry. Ford. Chrysler. Texaco. Enron. General Motors. IBM. Lehman Bros. Marvel Entertainment. Need I go on?
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Apple Highlights Mac Apps Updated With Support for MacBook Pro Touch Bar
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Blackberry. Ford. Chrysler. Texaco. Enron. General Motors. IBM. Lehman Bros. Marvel Entertainment. Need I go on?
Apple is nothing like any of the companies above. They actually have cash. The companies above didn't and never really operated with huge amounts of cash in the bank. Furthermore, there is not one public company on earth that has ever had as much cash as apple has. I repeat it could shut down tomorrow and never make another product and survive on investment and interest payments alone. Apple has over $215 billion dollars in cash and assets... just let that sink in. I dont think there's a company on earth that could actually pull that out of their pockets. Only governments and even then they'd have to borrow it.
No disrespect, but what are you even talking about?
What do you mean Apple could shut down tomorrow and survive on interest? You know that Apple is a company, right? Apple isn't a person that can just retire and "survive" on its investments on a beach somewhere. It's a company...if it shuts down, it's shut down. The concept of a company "surviving" after shutting down is an oxymoron.
But, I'll humor you anyway....do you know what the term "insolvent" means? If Apple stopped making products, it would quickly lose investors and customers...in fact, it would lose all forms of income. However, it will still have to pay out employee and executive salaries (executives make about $25 million per year each), creditors, and shareholders. It will still have operating costs (e.g. property taxes and operating costs for those huge Apple campuses they've built). It will still have to protect its patents and defend lawsuits. It will still have to pay out the lawsuits it loses. It will still have to pay its lawyers. It will still have to pay out licensing fees. You get the point. When Apple can no longer pay for all of those things (yes, eventually it will get to that point), it will legally be insolvent and would likely declare for bankruptcy protection. That doesn't meant it has $0.00 in the bank; Apple could technically have billions of dollars in the bank and still declare insolvency. It just means it has lost its ability to pay all its debts in the regular course of business or, in other words, it's not making enough income to pay off its debts.
Unless you're suggesting that Apple would sell off its assets and layoff its employees in order to pay off its debts. But then again, what would be the point of trying to keep operations going if it's not intending to make any more products Again, we run into the problem of your hypothetical "survival" scenario not making any sense.
Lastly, you say Apple has cash like none of the other companies I listed, but do you personally know how much cash any of those other companies had? Do you even know how much cash Apple has? You pulled the figure of $215 billion out of *somewhere*, but you said that was for cash AND assets. Do you know how much of that is actually cash? Not that it matters, but if you're going to be so adamant about your "facts" I'd like to know your sources.
I'm not here to argue semantics. But look it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_port.
The key part "A legacy port is a computer port or connector that is considered by some to be fully or partially superseded.[1] The replacement ports usually provide most of the functionality of the legacy ports with higher speeds, more compact design, or plug and play and hot swap capabilities for greater ease of use".
Legacy doesn't mean USB-A is dead (which is what I imagine you think it means).
Didn't happen doesn't equal won't happen. As far as I can remember they didn't put a timescale on it.
All I can point to is the past when it comes to Apple and their decisions. 4K Blu-Ray is neither here nor there in this conversation.
So let's talk about changing ports. Docks, cables, car systems, speakers etc. etc. there was a whole ecosystem around the old 30-pin dock connector. Apple ditched it for a "new reversible, smaller connector". Lightning. People complained for a while, then things became normal.
We can all agree the MPB has a wider variety of USB-A peripherals than the iPhone had 30-pin dock connector accessories. But that doesn't mean things won't turn eventually. This is one of the reasons I'm glad Apple have gone "all in" on USB-C. Adding just 1 legacy USB-A port would have meant people had no reason to change and given accessory/peripheral manufacturers an excuse to continue building things with USB-A. Change would've been slower.
Depending on your age you'll remember the uproar when Steve Jobs released the iMac with only USB ports back in '98.
I hope so too. The quicker the better. 1 connector for data, video, audio, power. Awesome.
If they weren't useful people wouldn't be able to use them. They're plenty useful, there will just be a transition period where to plug in older USB-A equipment an adaptor will be required.
Also as I mentioned earlier all the people I work with have a bag/case to put their laptop in when they travel. Throwing a few of these in my bag won't kill me whilst the transition happens. Although I may just pickup a compact USB-C dock with a variety of legacy ports that can just live in my bag.
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That's not what I meant. You say USB-C superseds USB-A. I say it's a different port altogether, even if they're both called USB-something.
Again, USB-A is not legacy. It's the de-facto standard for peripherals.
I didn't say they did, but there were lots of conversations on the forums similar to the one we're having right now. True Believers like yourself were stating that pretty soon we'll all move to USB-C, and the blind fools such as myself were saying it won't happen that quickly, and putting only USB-C ports on a laptop is a bad design decision. It was true then, it's true now.
You dismissed out of hand my 4k BluRay analogy, which I think it's quite precise to describe why USB-C adoption is so poor, but chose one that truly has no bearing on this conversation. Apple replaced a proprietary iPhone/iPad connector with another proprietary iPhone/iPad connector, and people had to change their iPhone/iPad peripherals. Great. It has nothing to do with the computer industry as a whole adopting USB-C at any speed. The Macbook line is a small fish in a big sea. It won't force the adoption of USB-C or anything like that.
I very much doubt it. The fact that Apple made the stupid decision to ship USB-C only computers will have no impact on the industry. It will simply inconvenience its users, who are going to be in dongle hell for the lifespan of these computers.
There's port change and port change. USB solved a real problem. It replaced a variety of ports with one that was small, hot-pluggable, had device classes (standardised programming interfaces) so people moved away from installing drivers for everything. It was great, and I personally embraced it at the time, along with most of the industry.
For most intents and purposes, USB-C is just a smaller, nicer connector. It brings no advantage when you plug in a mouse, a keyboard, a printer, a scanner, a webcam, your mobile phone, etc etc. Most users just wouldn't see any difference.
Yeah so it has display data. So what? Virtually everybody needs an adapter to connect an external monitor to it, just like they needed an adapter before. And no, we're not moving to USB-C monitors. As things stand today, even state-of-the-art graphics cards don't output on TB3 via USB-C, and there's no sign they're moving in that direction. The signs point to DP1.4, that's about it.
A lot of the time people will be there with their shiny new laptop with only USB-C ports, realizing that they don't have the dongle, or they forgot the dongle, or that the dongle doesn't work, or that the dongle just did a kernel panic (watch the dongle thread), or that the dongle fried something. Not very useful.
Nobody except for the dongle sellers are getting anything good out of this.
I'm lucky I'm a light port user at the moment. If I were regularly plugging in stuff, I wouldn't dream of buying this new MBP at half the price.
Not my words, it's a definition of Legacy Ports from Wikipedia. Again I'm not here to argue semantics.
I'm just in agreement with Apple on this one. USB-C is the future standard, the quicker USB-A is history the better IMO. I hope in the future everything I buy with be USB-C from monitors, flash drives, storage arrays, data transfer from other hardware (DSLRs) etc.
I went through it with PS/2. FireWire. Parallel. VGA. DVI. DisplayPort. HDMI. Bring on one connection for everything, less cable types and yes... reversible.
The old stuff works just fine for those that want to carry on using it. Might cost a few bucks to clip an adaptor onto the end of a device. Hardly life changing.
4K Blu-Ray adoption is slow because the future is streaming - it has nothing at all to do with the accessories/ports/cables conversation.
I'm glad we now have USB-C only machines from Apple, Google and HP. Hopefully more follow suit to speed the transition.
I'm the opposite. I use my ports. But I can manage the transition without it being "dongle hell" (I mean really, so much drama). It's not rocket science. I'm looking forward to grabbing one of these machines next year.
It's simple maths. How much does Apple spend on employees and infrastructure? How much cash do they have or could release by selling off assets. How much income from previous products is left to come in? How much staff do they need to support the previous products?
Then take the value of assets and cash maybe make a bond to represent it and sell the bond on the market. Or pay Goldman to invest it (or do it themselves which I'm sure they already do!)
With margins of 33% for the last 10-15 yrs they have been saving so much more than they spend to the point they could easily survive making no more new products for a very long time.
If companies worked as you suggest companies like Sony would be dead since they have been losing money for over a decade. But the money and assets they have from their good years in the 70s and 80s pay for their business now. In fact sonys pension fund is the biggest money maker in the Sony business by a long shot!
Once you've got loads of money it's kind of hard to lose it because everywhere you can put it tends to make if appreciate anyway. (Think Brewsters millions!).
In fact making products for Apple is far riskier compared to investing the existing cash and assets.
I'm not sure you actually know what your talking about at all...
I'm pretty sure you're just trolling now...that comment is just too dumb to be anything but trolling.
But who knows, maybe you got it right and mega-companies like Apple, Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, etc. should just shut it all down and stop making new products like threesixty360 says. Trying to make even more money by selling new products is just too damn risky. Move over Tim Cook...
I'm pretty sure you're just trolling now...that comment is just too dumb to be anything but trolling.
But who knows, maybe you got it right and mega-companies like Apple, Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Microsoft, etc. should just shut it all down and stop making new products like threesixty360 says. Trying to make even more money by selling new products is just too damn risky. Move over Tim Cook...
I'm not trolling. Who's got time for that? The original comment came because people keep talking rubbish about how Apple have lost it and they could go bankrupt like RIM etc.. And I flippantly made the point that they have more money on hand than any other company has ever had to my knowledge. So the idea that they will disappear because they aren't making the best computer for "pro's" or that they've lost their way is ludicrous. They literally have too much money to disappear.
There are many shell companies that just make money off patents and do not even have staff or make products at all and you think it's not feasible for Apple with its record hoard to do the same? Of course they could!
It's not likely obviously because for a start, they are doing very well and over the last 5yrs all I've heard is doom and gloom from commentators yet they make more money now than they ever did under jobs.
The point wasn't that they SHOULD stop making products but that it was entirely feasible to operate as a shell company for decades with the type of cash they've made. But if you can't understand the basic maths and financial principles then what can I say. If they stop peddling the bike they won't just fall over an die.
The list of successful companies that went bankrupt or came close that I posted should serve as a reminder that nothing is forever in business. No, Apple won't "disappear", but who's to say they'll never have a huge decline? And, like I said previously, it doesn't take losing all your money to qualify as "insolvent". Please look up the meaning of "insolvency".
No, Apple cannot do that. Because it is a huge, publicly-traded (i.e. owned by public shareholders) company. It cannot do what privately-held "shell" companies can do. It wouldn't be possible for them to stop making products and operate as a shell company, unless the shareholders agreed to do so. But no shareholder would want to invest in a company who just wants to stop making steady income so that it can become the biggest patent-troll out there. Shareholders would pull out and the value of Apple's stocks would quickly become worthless.
Again, it is not feasible at all. It's next to impossible. I suggest you learn about corporate law and what it means to be a public company. It's not about your "basic maths". It's about the differences in how a public company operates compared to a privately-held one.
P.S. - if your maths are so simple, please share what your numbers are and the source of your numbers. I asked you to before, but you seemed to have ignored that part. You seem to be assuming that Apple is not spending any of the money it is earning.
I spent about an hour at an Apple Store this afternoon testing a 15" MBPtb out.
I cannot see myself ever using it lots (the Touch Bar), TBH. I found myself actually going out of my way to try to find areas where I could use it, and that (for me) takes away from what I suspect Apple expected the experience to be.
Also, one thing I found a little odd ... kind of like they neglected to focus on the finer details with the implementation ... were things like when (for example) you have Safari up. The TB changes to a Safari-type bar, with forward/back buttons, and an input field, etc., which is a duplicate of that same area in the actual Safari window. It would help a lot with nudging people to use the TB if Apple made that area in the Safari window disappear on the TB units, or have it hidden by default, with a toggle to re-enable its appearance in system preferences somewhere. Myself, I found I ignored the TB in cases like that more often than I used it.
Kinda redundant having those types of things appear both in the app window and the TB, IMO. Makes it seem like a waste of the TB to me.
I cannot see myself ever using it lots (the Touch Bar), TBH. I found myself actually going out of my way to try to find areas where I could use it, and that (for me) takes away from what I suspect Apple expected the experience to be.
Also, one thing I found a little odd ... kind of like they neglected to focus on the finer details with the implementation ... were things like when (for example) you have Safari up. The TB changes to a Safari-type bar, with forward/back buttons, and an input field, etc., which is a duplicate of that same area in the actual Safari window. It would help a lot with nudging people to use the TB if Apple made that area in the Safari window disappear on the TB units, or have it hidden by default, with a toggle to re-enable its appearance in system preferences somewhere. Myself, I found I ignored the TB in cases like that more often than I used it.
Kinda redundant having those types of things appear both in the app window and the TB, IMO. Makes it seem like a waste of the TB to me.
Berkshire Hathaway have had an average return of 19% since they started in the 60's. The S&P 500 has average return of 10%.
Apple have $216b in cash and assets overseas represented as securities and other investments that accumulating interest as well. This money they dont want to bring back to the US for fear of getting taxed 40% of that.
Apple this year spent $10b on research (up 30% from last year).
Also for 2017:
- revenue between $76 billion and $78 billion
- gross margin between 38 percent and 38.5 percent
- operating expenses between $6.9 billion and $7 billion
- other income/(expense) of $400 million
- tax rate of 26 percent
So if they didnt release another product they could stop spending on research totally.
So thats 10b saved.
If the foreign cash was put into an investment fund similar to Berkshire Hathaway they could expect between 10-20% a year returns on $216b. That is a return of $21b at 10% for doing nothing, $42b at 20% if they were lucky.
Operating expenese to support the existing product lines an manufacturing would half , so $3b instead of $7b
Even if they lost 40% repatriating the cash it would still leave them with $10 and $20b in returns a year from their foreign invested assets. $20 - $3b expenses is $17b.
The revenue will trickle down as the product line becomes older and more obsolete. so staffing and stores could also shut down which will be saving further money. The $216b would still be growing by 10-20% but operating costs, wages, research will be going down every year. So they will actually be making MORE money not less as the business slowed down.
They could eventually settle on a company make between $10-$20b a year practically doing nothing!
Thats pretty successful dont you agree? They have TOO much money. I dont think you understand how unusual it is for any institution to have that much cash/assets and margins of 38-38.5 %. It's obscene!
And the operating expenses to make revenues of 76-78b are only $7b! it's an insane profit machine.
Read this. Also, you've completely ignored the part where Apple is a public company owned by shareholders. You keep making up hypothetical arguments that it could stop making products and still survive. It can't. It would lose its shareholders (and probably get sued by them too for breach of trust) if it decided to just close up shop and "live" off its savings. I understand what you mean, in theory, and it would work if Apple was a private company owned by Tim Cook. It is not, and Tim is not the owner. You've got to stop fantasizing and just accept reality. It can't (and won't) ever happen.
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You clearly haven't noticed that interest rates are at about 0-1 these days.
And who cares about their cash?
Many people want a new laptop and the new MacBook Pro isn't exactly the choice we had hoped for.
Not thin enough till it's a one row keyboard
[doublepost=1479938285][/doublepost]The term gate is a throw back to watergate and typically reserved for cover ups and deflecting from the truth.
This is just disgruntled people venting online
The antenna issue with the 4 was a gate because Apple got up on stage and tried to lie their way out of it
Again. I not saying it should happen. I'm not saying it wouldn't be legally and regulatory difficult. I was using the hypothetical example to illustrate that Apple are in no danger of going bust because they are making a few products that some people on Apple rumours websites disagree with. The original post I responded to was trying to give the impression that Apple was a few inches from death under the direction of Cook and Ive.
I'm tired of reading these emotional opinions of dooms day because a laptop hasn't got the ports you want. Get real! It's just silly. This is the most successful company ever as far as I am aware. And whilst nothing is ever certain, given the track record of the people running the company and their continued leadership of the market I see no reason to give credibility that they are close to any kind of death.
Furthermore, there are ways to wind down a company. It happens all the time. Apple with its cash and asset base could technically just wind itself down (forgetting regulatory/legal requirements for a moment) and still pay dividends to share holders from the investment of the assets they hold. In the process of winding down they could buy themselves back as their share price declined. In fact when they had that dip in share price a few years back it was exactly what Berkshire Hathaway suggested.
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If normal interest isn't great their are investment funds making 5-10% a year right now. I have etf's that have made between 10-25% since last year.
Yeah if I was short selling the stock. Sorry it was hard to see you sarcasm through your reply.
I'm glad you are not my broker. Apple stock price has doubled since Cook has taken over.