Apple Set to Become First $4 Trillion Company

[WarmWinterHat]

I’m not embarrassed by it. Apple shouldn’t and hopefully be embarrassed by it. This is a new frontier and apple is treading carefully.

We’ll see where it goes.

I don't think they are treading carefully, they are flailing..that's what is embarrassing. It's not their usual methodical approach, it's a drowning swimmer scared and hitting/smacking and splashing.

Obviously they aren't drowning, but the point is their approach seems reactionary and defensive, not planned and definitely not treading carefully. Panicked people (and companies) make bad decisions. Adding these other features before fixing Siri is the most obvious example. New Siri should have there on the forefront before ANYTHING else, but now it's next year, at best.

Instead we get a smattering of weird things no one cares about, like genmoji, email categories that don't work, notification previews that are wrong, a photo editing "tool" that, for me, has been absolute garbage and a flashing red screen when activating Siri that doesn't mean anything at all.

 

[surferfb]

I don't think they are treading carefully, they are flailing..that's what is embarrassing. It's not their usual methodical approach, it's a drowning swimmer scared and hitting/smacking and splashing.

Obviously they aren't drowning, but the point is their approach seems reactionary and defensive, not planned and definitely not treading carefully. Panicked people (and companies) make bad decisions. Adding these other features before fixing Siri is the most obvious example. New Siri should have there, on the forefront, before ANYTHING else, but now it's next year, at best.

I think you are correct to a certain extent, although I wouldn’t describe it as panicking. I suspect Apple Intelligence was supposed to be the headlining feature of ios 19 in 2025, but all of the “Apple is falling behind in AI” stories in the media (and even places like MacRumors Forums) led to them doing an open beta of sorts. I think it was clear that the market thought Apple needed AI to be a tentpole feature of iOS 18 so they brought it forward earlier than they normally would, so it’s less refined than we expect.

That said, I think it’s not even the first inning when it comes to this stuff, so I wouldn’t read too much into anything AI - the industry is still figuring out what works and what doesn’t, and I suspect drastic changes to OSes over the next decade.

 

[citysnaps]

Sounds like an innovative idea that is worth persuing. Could be disruptive to say the least.

You only need to follow the guidelines of “Bringing a product to market - 101”.

Spot on. Especially with Apple's privacy priority/focused implementation.

Of course there will still be the reflexive and hackneyed Apple is too late, doesn't innovate, blah blah blah from some people who delight in that. A crowd pleaser for the last 20+ years.

 

[vantelimus]

Without Stock Holder money how much does Apple really have?
How much Stock Holder money do they get to play with % wise?
If some of these companies ever lose stock moneys down the tubes they go.
P/E...lol....

You don't know how the stock market and company ownership works, do you?

 

[turbineseaplane]

Spot on. Especially with Apple's privacy priority/focused implementation.

Of course there will still be the reflexive and hackneyed Apple is too late, doesn't innovate, blah blah blah from some people who delight in that. A crowd pleaser for the last 20+ years.

Must you take a shot at folks who are more on the skeptical or critical side?

There are valid critiques to be made here of Apple

It's really frustrating when trying to have a dialogue when one is taking shots at the other side like you keep doing

It short circuits our collective efforts to have good faith dialogue

I think you bring many good points to the discussion, but it gets overshadowed by the shots at other user groups

 

[citysnaps]

Must you take a shot at folks who are more on the skeptical or critical side?

There are valid critiques to be made here of Apple

It's really frustrating when trying to have a dialogue when one is taking shots at the other side like you keep doing

It short circuits our collective efforts to have good faith dialogue

I think you bring many good points to the discussion, but it gets overshadowed by the shots at other user groups

Not taking a shot. Simply reporting what I witness, day after day. It is what it is.

Thanx, for the complement, though - I do appreciate it.

 

[01cowherd]

Pretty jaded about apple getting into services, and baking said services into their apps.

This is one of my main complaints in recent years. At least you can almost completely disable Apple Music nags and remove it from the UI, but the other apps are horrible about this. Fitness tries to get me to sign up every so often when I just want to look at my exercise history (buying an Apple Watch isn't enough money for them). News app is practically useless without News+, and the "News Spotlight" notifications is exclusively News+ stories from what I've seen. TV app always starts me in the TV+ tab even though I never use that tab. I don't use Podcasts, did they ruin that app when they added subscriptions? The Books app isn't as bad since it doesn't offer subscriptions, but the home tab still has a whole shelf for advertisements book recommendations by Apple.

I don't care too much if they offer services, so long as they don't ruin the apps in the process. Challenge: Impossible.

I include the begging to enable Siri in this category, too. I don't understand why they nag so hard on Siri; it doesn't even make them money.

 

[I7guy]

I don't think they are treading carefully, they are flailing..that's what is embarrassing. It's not their usual methodical approach, it's a drowning swimmer scared and hitting/smacking and splashing.

I like what they have done for a v1 product.

Obviously they aren't drowning, but the point is their approach seems reactionary and defensive, not planned and definitely not treading carefully. Panicked people (and companies) make bad decisions. Adding these other features before fixing Siri is the most obvious example. New Siri should have there on the forefront before ANYTHING else, but now it's next year, at best.

Instead we get a smattering of weird things no one cares about, like genmoji,

I like it and my family like is Gemoji. Yes it’s a okay thing but plaything gs are jmoortant as real work.

email categories that don't work,

They work for me.

notification previews that are wrong,

Yes they could be improved. But that’s a far cry from not working.

a photo editing "tool" that, for me, has been absolute garbage and a flashing red screen when activating Siri that doesn't mean anything at all.

Ok. I’m excited for the future.

 

[I7guy]

Must you take a shot at folks who are more on the skeptical or critical side?

There are valid critiques to be made here of Apple

The valid criticism are lost in the sea of negativity. Plus people are debating g their own sides of “valid”.

It's really frustrating when trying to have a dialogue when one is taking shots at the other side like you keep doing

Because of the presentation. Constructive criticism went out the window.

It short circuits our collective efforts to have good faith dialogue

I think you bring many good points to the discussion, but it gets overshadowed by the shots at other user groups

I do t see any of this as a good faith dialog. It’s more of who can overshadow who with most audacious word salad.

 

[Mrkevinfinnerty]

I like what they have done for a v1 product.

I like it and my family like is Gemoji. Yes it’s a okay thing but plaything gs are jmoortant as real work.

They work for me.

Yes they could be improved. But that’s a far cry from not working.

Ok. I’m excited for the future.

Yeaah...

 

[surferfb]

Yeaah...

View attachment 2466588

I find it great for summaries of iMessage threads, less great for everything else. But as someone who often comes out of meetings to 70+ message group message threads, it is accurate enough there for me to no longer feel the need to go back and read what I missed.

 

[Downhilltenago]

Guess phones are selling okay 😂

 

[grjj]

15.95 years ago on 20-Jan-2009 I had money to buy 4,000 $AAPL shares.

After a total of 28-for-1 Stock Splits today it would be 112,000 $AAPL shares.

At $259.02/share price that portfolio would be worth $29,010,240.00 or ₱1,685,610,895.03.

Last 4 Quarters Dividend was $100,800.00 or ₱5,851,021.84.

I think I'd retire comfortably in the Philippines if I cash out when Apple Inc hits $4 trillion or just enjoy the dividends in a country where over 4 of 5 adults made no more than $4,300 or ₱250,000 annually.

This did not occur because the eTrade documentation was intimidating even when my HS buddy who was into stocks for a decade was with me and I had parents & uncles who were financially literate.

Opportunity loss for at the time a late 20-something.

Th old idiom: The best time to start investing was yesterday. The 2nd best time to start investing is today.

 

[heretiq]

They could be paying $2/share if they weren't doing stock buybacks.

Again, I don't really care about dividends, but I'm 100% anti-stock buybacks, unless a company is going private. No exceptions. It's a market manipulation tool used to prop up stock price unsteady of the market deciding, and nothing more. Legal or not, it's unethical as hell.



If I had the option, I would like a privacy-minded device from a company without an ecosystem, that doesn't sell or push services. Sell me the device, and we're done. One and done.

Pretty jaded about apple getting into services, and baking said services into their apps.

I’m curious. Why not just buy an iPhone, decline the optional service subscriptions and opt-out of targeted marketing? Wouldn’t just buying an iPhone and performing the following steps accomplish your one-and-done wish?

1. Decline Optional Subscriptions: During setup or later, you can decline services like Apple Music, iCloud+, and Apple TV+. Without these, you’ll avoid related marketing prompts.
2. Opt-Out of Targeted Ads:
   • Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Apple Advertising and turn off Personalized Ads
   • This prevents Apple from using your data to target you with tailored ads.
3. Limit Notifications and Prompts:
   • Disable notifications for the App Store and any Apple apps that may prompt you about new features or content.
   • Avoid engaging with promotional banners within Apple apps (like the App Store or Apple News).
4. Use Alternatives Where Possible:
   • Replace default Apple apps (e.g., Safari, Mail, or Music) with third-party apps that don’t promote Apple services.
5. Ignore Built-in Recommendations:
   • Some Apple apps (e.g., Settings or the App Store) may still display promotional content for services like iCloud or Fitness+. Unfortunately, these are baked into the ecosystem and can’t be fully disabled.

While these steps will minimize Apple’s marketing, certain promotions, such as those for free trials or software updates, may still appear occasionally — but that’s a normal inconvenience of modern life and not an Apple-specific nuisance.

 

[Abazigal]

If those numbers are so big and growing, how come Apple’s iOS share fell from 23% worldwide last year to 16% this year (worldwide)

I can think of a couple of reasons.

1) Occam's razor suggests that the research may simply not be that accurate to begin with, and Apple's true market share is nowhere near as bad as what you are suggesting. You are basing your entirely argument on one website's info, and really, only Apple themselves knows how many iPhones they have sold. Which brings me to my next point.

2) There is little doubt that the number of active iPhone users continues to grow in the world, based on Apple's own reporting (which should be the most credible). So even if Android smartphone share is somehow growing at a rate faster than Apple's own (which I find suspicious, given how saturated the whole smartphone market is already), I don't see what exactly the issue is. More people continue to buy and use iPhones, the nature of the apple ecosystem means that these users will in turn go on to purchase other Apple products and services, and Apple is in a unique position to capture the profits from revenue spent on their platform (unlike say, Samsung, which earns no money from an app purchased through the Google Play App Store).

3) What I suspect is really going on is that researchers are attempting to use device sales as a proxy for market share, which is inaccurate to begin with. Like say someone buys 3 cheap android phones over the same period of time as another user keeps his iPhone because the former is cheaper and therefore spoils faster. It sounds like android market share is growing twice or three times as fast compared to Apple, whereas in reality, it's still the status quo (when you base it upon 100%).

Likewise, a lot of the doomsaying that people have been claiming over the years simply hasn't materialised. Even if app developers are more unhappy with how Apple is treating them, it doesn't mean they are now embracing the google ecosystem, because Apple still commands the lion's share of profits in the industry (by virtue of having aggregated the best customers in the world). And I believe that companies like Meta and Google have said on record that iOS is still more profitable for them despite Android's larger market share.

Market share isn't quite as meaningful as usage share in this scenario, and I find that Apple's foundation continues to be rock solid in this case.

Frankly, I see nothing to worry about from Apple's perspective. You can rattle off all the hardware specs you want (I seem to recall one member going "Threadripper! Threadripper!" when Apple Silicon was announced for the Mac, and well, look at the state of Intel today.

We will see whether this translates into meaningful sales figures in 2025 or not, but I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.

 

[I7guy]

Yeaah...

View attachment 2466588

I got it. If any software makes any mistake or bug in any platform, the platform is crap. Thanks for pointing that out.

 

[steve09090]

Yeaah...

View attachment 2466588

This is your example?

And in the same story…

In May, in what Google described as "isolated examples", its AI Overviews tool for internet searches told some users looking for how to make cheese stick to pizza should consider using "non-toxic glue".​

​

The search engine's AI-generated responses also said geologists recommend humans eat one rock per day.​

As usual, taking things out of context for your purpose of hating on Apple.

 

[Abazigal]

They could be paying $2/share if they weren't doing stock buybacks.

Again, I don't really care about dividends, but I'm 100% anti-stock buybacks, unless a company is going private. No exceptions. It's a market manipulation tool used to prop up stock price unsteady of the market deciding, and nothing more. Legal or not, it's unethical as hell.

In this case, it makes more financial sense to do stock buybacks, since investors are taxed on dividends, while they can at least defer their taxation on stock they own until they actually sell it.

It results in less volatility in share price, since dividend payout isn't fluctuating every quarter based on how well or poorly the company is doing.

So in the US at least, it seems more advantageous for a stock buyback to increase the underlying value of each outstanding share (since there is now less in circulation), while allowing the investor the flexibility of deciding when he wants to cash out, rather than unloading a bunch of cash into his bank account every quarter regardless of whether he wants it or not.

And from Apple's perspective, they are no longer a company teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, so it's not really controversial for them to use a bulk of their earnings to buy back their shares vs simply disbursing it as dividends. The reality is that Apple is making more money than they know what to do with (after factoring in their various expenses), and the best solution is really to return it to investors who are presumably more financially savvy and able to then re-invest it for better returns than Apple is currently capable of.

I am not saying that stock buyback isn't problematic, but in the very least, the manner in which Apple is going about it isn't.

 

[Abazigal]

This is your example?

And in the same story…

In May, in what Google described as "isolated examples", its AI Overviews tool for internet searches told some users looking for how to make cheese stick to pizza should consider using "non-toxic glue".​

​

The search engine's AI-generated responses also said geologists recommend humans eat one rock per day.​

As usual, taking things out of context for your purpose of hating on Apple.

And while we are on the topic of OpenAI...

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/27/openai-needs-more-capital-than-wed-imagined-moves-to-for-profit.html

OpenAI expects about $5 billion in losses on $3.7 billion in revenue this year, CNBC confirmed in September. Those numbers are increasing rapidly.

Sometimes, the best move is to simply not play, and Apple's reticence to enter certain markets should not be conflated with fear. ChatGPT is already having a hard time staying up with just a small percentage of iOS users being able to access apple intelligence. Wait a couple more years when apple intelligence is standard issue amongst iPhone users (the way airdrop is now) and watch a billion active users bombard openAI servers (assuming it's even still around) and you understand why it's better to outsource this sort of stuff to third parties (I don't think Apple is even paying openAI anything for this partnership).

 

[turbineseaplane]

I have no idea why anyone would stan for a 4 TRILLION dollar company

They won't return the favor my friends

 

[Mrkevinfinnerty]

This is your example?

And in the same story…

In May, in what Google described as "isolated examples", its AI Overviews tool for internet searches told some users looking for how to make cheese stick to pizza should consider using "non-toxic glue".​

​

The search engine's AI-generated responses also said geologists recommend humans eat one rock per day.​

As usual, taking things out of context for your purpose of hating on Apple.

Hi Steve.

Hope you're keeping well and not getting too upset about things that have been posted on the world wide web.

I see you have found an example of bugs in Google AI, that's fun but doesn't seem to have anything to do with Apple's erroneous AI generated headlines. Google getting it wrong doesn't mean Apple got it right, you see.

 

[steve09090]

And while we are on the topic of OpenAI...

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/27/openai-needs-more-capital-than-wed-imagined-moves-to-for-profit.html

Sometimes, the best move is to simply not play, and Apple's reticence to enter certain markets should not be conflated with fear. ChatGPT is already having a hard time staying up with just a small percentage of iOS users being able to access apple intelligence. Wait a couple more years when apple intelligence is standard issue amongst iPhone users (the way airdrop is now) and watch a billion active users bombard openAI servers (assuming it's even still around) and you understand why it's better to outsource this sort of stuff to third parties (I don't think Apple is even paying openAI anything for this partnership).

I think Apple holding back is generally a great thing. Apple has history of doing this and later disrupting the market with the resulting comments of… "This is how it should have been done" from spectators.

If they are slow to the market it really doesn’t matter. Eventually they will get there, with a product that forces competitors to change direction and copy. It happens all the time. Back on the day I had a Fitbit too.

Even the AirPods Pro 2. For $350 in Australia, and just being approved by the Therapeutic Goods Association (Equivalent to the US FDA), the hearing aid function has been endorsed. When a hearing aid generally costs about AU$3000, this will make a huge difference to people, and especially those who only use hearing aids when they go out. I’m sure it won’t solve every issue, but … just wow!

Apple, disrupting the market because they waited and produced the right product. Now watch the copycats come for a share.

 

[steve09090]

Hi Steve.

Hope you're keeping well and not getting too upset about things that have been posted on the world wide web.

I see you have found an example of bugs in Google AI, that's fun but doesn't seem to have anything to do with Apple's erroneous AI generated headlines. Google getting it wrong doesn't mean Apple got it right, you see.

Very well, but don’t make it personal. That’s not cool.

It was on the page for a story about BBC complaining to Apple. I had to search from that out of context screen shot you posted. I found it, but maybe you should read beyond the headlines…. I even linked the page, which maybe once in a while, if you want to keep things in context, you might try. Context is everything.

Don’t for a second think this is only Apple doing this, but reading your comments, you’d have to wonder.

 

[vantelimus]

They could be paying $2/share if they weren't doing stock buybacks.

The last buyback was June 30, 2024. Apple spent $25.08 billion. That's about $1.65/share (pre buyback). So, your $2/share isn't too far off the mark. However, that dividend would be a taxable event for you. An increase in the stock price isn't until you sell. You have far more flexibility in tax planning with the buy back. This ability to defer tax implications is very important for investors. Apple is classified as a growth stock. Institutions and individuals invest in it for capital appreciation. It is not an income stock. If Apple were to switch to distributing more of its profit to dividends, it would change the way investors view the stock and could lead to volatility as portfolios are adjusted to account for the change in tax implications and growth.

 

[Mrkevinfinnerty]

Very well, but don’t make it personal. That’s not cool.

It was on the page for a story about BBC complaining to Apple. I had to search from that out of context screen shot you posted. I found it, but maybe you should read beyond the headlines…. I even linked the page, which maybe once in a while, if you want to keep things in context, you might try. Context is everything.

Don’t for a second think this is only Apple doing this, but reading your comments, you’d have to wonder.

Yes so just on context.

The Google hallucinations although very unfortunate are slightly different as they aren't attributing false news headlines to separate news organisations which obviously could cause reputation damage to third parties.

My comments were about Apple because the thread is about Apple and the comment I responded to were specifically in response to somebody discussing Apple Intelligence.