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Apple Set to Become First $4 Trillion Company
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I know that there are a lot of great business comeback stories but Apple’s has got to be the greatest of all business comebacks... In history.
Mainly because android phones are cheaper.
Not saying there aren’t expensive, high-end android devices, but iPhones still command the premium handset market (and the profits that come with it)
Ask yourself if you would prefer android’s market share or iPhone’s profits and you have your answer.
Disciplined? Not sure to be honest, 10 billion set on fire on a car project that they didn't have the stomach for to then reassign engineers to AI where they didn't (and still don't) seem to have any kind of real answer beyond 'hey why not use the chatgpt API'.
It isn't about where they are now or that anybody thinks they are going to go out of business obviously there is no chance of that happening but where are they going next?
They have all the feel of Microsoft in the 90's, so enamoured of their current cash cow that it has landed them in regulatory problems and they are risking having their lunch eaten if tech shifts away from smartphones being the dominant computing platform. Just like MS having 90% of the desktop and letting Google and Amazon steal a march on them in mobile and cloud.
Sure people love their iPhone and they yeah they have some lock in with iMessage etc but people loved their Blackberrys, people were all in on Blackberry messenger.. until something better came along ..
If it were so easy to replicate Apple hardware because none of the parts are theirs, then why do Windows laptop trackpads still suck so much?
Apple's value is in putting these supposedly commoditised parts together in a manner that results in a user experience that's desired for me, more so than any other vendor out there. It's like asking what's the value of a chef when he doesn't grow any of the ingredients he uses to prepare a 10-course meal. Why not just buy the ingredients from a supermarket and cook them yourself if it's that easy?
Engineering and design is, at its very core, about deciding what tradeoffs to make in a product, and I generally value the decisions which Apple has made. So to answer your question, I don't buy Apple products because I am a die-hard supporter. I am a die-hard Apple supporter precisely because my Apple products work great for me (I have been using an iPad in the classroom since 2012, for example), which in turn improves my impression of the Apple brand as a whole and makes me more amenable to purchasing additional Apple products in the future (I just purchased the M4 iPad Pro earlier this year, complete with the Apple Pencil, Magic Keyboard and magic folio).
Maybe you can all enlighten me then - what exactly is this next big thing that will supposedly leapfrog the iPhone and make it obsolete and bring Apple to its knees?
Someone tried AI-powered wearables and it sure doesn't seem to have paid off. Sure, chatGPT is all the rage now, and you still need hardware to run it on, and it isn't profitable, and it's unclear how viable it will be in the long run.
At the same time, there seems to be this constant pressure for Apple to somehow have the answer to everything (I think people were arguing for Apple to have its own search engine in another thread?). On one hand, Apple receives flak for not giving third parties more access to its ecosystem. On the other hand, Apple is criticised for not doing more on its own. Or Apple releases new products and the focus is constantly shone on what is missing from their products while the company's supply chain prowess and design-led focus do not receive as much attention as they should.
I guess what I am trying to say is that a lot of the "Apple is no longer innovating" criticism seems to stem from idealism around ideas that are still some time away from materialising. eg: Meta's glasses prototype (the company will still need to solve the issue of manufacturing and selling said product), Waymo and self-driving cars, Tesla, OpenAi. It's still not clear whether these ideas will even become mass-market successes in the future, or if they will even happen. They sell people a vision of a future that gets them all hyped. And then time passes and some of these products never make it to market or it loses it lustre and people just move on to the next hot topic while criticise Apple for not having an equivalent alternative...
It never quite ends, does it? 😕
Well nobody knows do they? That's exactly the point, nobody is Nostradamus. Blackberry and Nokia didn't see Apple creating a phone that would crush their phone business. Microsoft didn't see Amazon, the guys who sell books out of a warehouse, building a cloud computing business that would move be ahead of them as a market leader.
Do you honestly think we will be here in 10-15 years time with some stuffy Tim Cook clone bowling up every September with a new iPhone with a new colour option, slightly better camera and a new Apple Watch with a 1mm larger screen and that will be a major tech news story of the day? I would be very surprised if something hadn't come along and disrupted that to one degree or another.
If I had to guess, probably thin clients that can access advanced AI capability is where we are going next. That seems much more likely that people wandering around with huge headsets on which Apple seem to think is the future of computing.
If i was Apple I would be slightly nervous hearing this, if someone builds a phone where the OS is built around AI from the ground up it could be as disruptive to Samsung/Apple as the OG iPhone was to Blackberry and Nokia.
Where Apple is now is a classic example of the innovators dilemma, ironically one of Steve Jobs favourite books.
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Lol, what do they you know about other trackpads. There are several other brands offering the same user experience of their trackpad as with Apple. Again you’re relying on same old assumptions who lived on in the past.
Can you please not copy and paste your story about how great your experience is with Apple gear. It becomes the same story as with Apple’s iPhones. They repeat their same tricks year after year after year while literally nothing really changed.
In the meantime others found ways to out innovate those same repeating tricks and found ways to even deliver better solutions.
I’m glad to hear you’re satisfied with your iPad. At the same time iPadOS still hasn’t evolved into a real modern OS by example it still can’t multitask.
Snapdragon 8 elite will be used by a wide variety of devices being as efficient as the A18 pro while delivering more power (about 40%).
After that, Apple will introduce the iPhone SE with probably an A17 in march. If prices won’t go up for the iPhone SE it’s afstotend underpowered with a 60ghz lcd display??? Samsungs s24 is already faster in real live tasks than the iPhone 16 pro. Wait till the gap is widening by about 40% in February with the S25. Fully multitasking, state of the art camera’s and screen, more RAM, same price as an iPhone pro. And while you love the look and feel of iOS 18 so much: it took Samsung only 2 months to mimic iOS 18 while also offering better AI and a real assistant.
They lost a literal ton of money with Jobs sapphire glass project, and they spent a ton on Operation Titan. But do you think for a hot minute that they didn’t use any of their research in other projects? Get a grip.
Even the iPad was a project well before the iPhone, but they pivoted. They have the money, and it’s what they do. It is the way they worked then and the way they work now.
If you can even be bothered listening to ex employees (Mark Rober stands out), Apple gives people with ideas, scope to explore all the time, and many of them reach their end before the end. It’s what makes Apple Apple, and they continue to do it.
Where are they going next? Stick with Mac Rumors and maybe one day you’ll have the pleasure to find out. Or get loved up with another company who just churns out clones without doing any substantial research at all except maybe blacker LED's without a stupid bezel. Companies should back their employees and take a chance with 'it sounds crazy, but it just might work' attitude in some secret lab in Cupertino.
Or else there will be comments like…. Oooh. The richest company didn’t make a thing…
Omg! Thinner devices. What an amazing breakthrough in technology…. Zzzzzz
Think bigger. If only there were a company making new devices and didn't just fold a screen in half, and did things better than everyone else. Like the AVP, and the Apple Watch and the Apple TV and the M series chips, before they were all copied. Well not the AVP because no one has been able to replicate that experience yet.
It is often said that one's strength is also very often their weakness. I guess it's also a matter of perspective.
For me at least, the chief reason why the iPad is working so well for me is precisely because it doesn't run a "real modern OS", whatever that means. For the stuff I do on it at least, I find I am still better served with it running iOS with native apps optimised for touch and direct input (apps which, might I highlight, are not available on Android or Windows).
And for the stuff that I can't really get done on an ipad, that's where my MBA or my iMac comes in.
This feels like one of those complaints that get amplified on forums like Macrumours because of the demographic of its members, but then you look outside and realise that all the cries for the iPad to run macOS don't seem representative of what the rest of Apple's user base really want out of their device.
I fail to see how this invalidates my own experiences with Apple products in any way. They continue to work great for me year after year after year and if you can spam the forums with proclamations of how Apple is doomed because of this or that, am I not allowed to counteract that narrative with one of my own?
Maybe you are right in that android / windows devices have better specs, and perhaps that is the real magic behind Apple products. That these seemingly anaemic paper specs come together to create an experience that is more than the sum of its parts (thanks in part to Apple's ability to optimise both the hardware and software for each other), and allow Apple to more than hold their own against what the competition has to offer.
Like if Apple launches the next iPhone SE and it still goes on to do respectably well in terms of sales, shouldn't we be trying to better understand just why this is the case, rather than simply dismiss outright just because it doesn't have 120hz refresh rate?
We will see.
You seem very convinced - sure, the S24/25 has more ram, faster processor (on paper), better camera (on paper), full multitasking, better AI etc, and yet something invariably ends up falling short when said product is released and sales don't necessarily match up, doesn't it?
Samsung apparently hasn't been doing very well this financial year. Let's see if the S25 will help reverse its fortunes (or not).
I am speaking based on the experience of the windows laptop issued to me for work. Like I wasn't expecting it to match that of my MBA, but goodness, I find it downright unusable.
Judging by your sig, a large portion is directly from you.
Again, you seem to be getting quite worked up about all of this. I'm perfectly relaxed about it all really.
Yeah thinner devices isn't really what 'thin client' means so there is that..
Yeah I wanted a macpad for the longest time, then I realized it was never going to happen. I was the only one not happy with having both a mac and an ipad. It just isn't wanted by the vast majority of the public.
Eh, I am certainly not worried yet. Google has certainly tried to add AI to every part of Android, and all android users do is complain about how bad it is now.
AI is going through a major bubble. Everyone thinks it will do ALL THE THINGS.
We will see, at its core it is nothing more than a probabilistic engine that gets worse over time as it ingests more and more AI created drivel.
Now, research is where it does have a point. If you limit the model to one file pile, then it does much better. And it will get better over time. But that time is not yet. Apple can still get there, and I hope they do, because they are the only ones that seem to care about people along the way.
Not so much worked up but kind of flabbergasted at the view you have on Apple and where you believe Apple should be spending their research. What comes to mind is what do you actually have to offer that shows that you know more about this than anyone working at Apple, but especially in the design and research area. It comes down to credibility I guess. 🥸
I don't think there is any kind of imminent shift but it can happen quickly. I remember how common Blackberrys were around 2009, even after the first iPhone launched they were still really popular. By time the iPhone 6 shipped, only five years later, nobody really cared about BB anymore.
AI is going through a bubble, I think a Google/Apple/Amazon etc were blindsided to a degree by OpenAI etc and have had to scramble to respond.
It's wild how far ahead Open AI is with voice capability when compared to Siri/Alexa etc. Especially when you take into account Amazon/Apple's resources and the time they have had to work on them. Good article here from Tom's Guide comparing ChatGPT voice mode to Siri.
Apple can get there for sure but they have got a lot to do, a grid of icons and some blue bubbles won't do it when you see what people are doing elsewhere in software. That's where they need to focus on the software.
Apple is at least in my opinion is addressing the innovators dilemma. Have you wondered how it is able to keep growing in spite of heaping piles of MR criticism?
As far as ai being in a bubble. Yep. But like search engines, the genie is out of the bottle with ai and it’s going to be pick your ai provider. I’m not sure apple wants to be in the ai business, just like the search engine business.
No wonder at all
They keeps squeezing the margin lemon from every angle Tim can think of
That combined with customer lock in / momentum and very much "lateral move" options as alternatives and it all makes plenty of sense
The tech space has honestly really stagnated for the last 10-15 years as everyone has moved to milking their users and overpaying shareholders
"Innovation" has moved from trying to create great products, over to "how can the quickest return get created? -- long term planning be damned"
Because nobody has come up with anything more useful that the current smartphone paradigm, nobody is questioning that Apple are in a very strong position there.
Obviously they have a more cohesive ecosystem that what is on offer elsewhere and they are competitive hardware wise. As long as that remains at the forefront of computing Apple will be strong, I just don't think it will remain as the dominant computing platform forevermore.
Companies like Apple/Amazon/Google they have become so big and entrenched they are more focussed on protecting the money and fending off regulators that they are building the next great thing.
I don't agree that AI is analogous to search engines though, I think some of these companies will try to build a full operating system.
This would be the sort of thing the EU should promote. No? Or are you saying the smartphone space is out of disruption because it’s “mature”.
I don’t know what a dominant computing platform even means.
Yes. In your opinion.
I do. AI is a concept (same as search engines) and the genie is out of the bag.
So you believe companies that squeeze their customers, profits first, without providing any useful products, services or innovations can grow and grow? Ok. I don’t believe so, but that’s me.
What customer lock in?
Okay. The above is not my opinion. But as a general comment I disagree.
It hasn’t. If apple hadn’t been long term planning it would have floundered. You may not like apple and that is your prerogative, but the above post is just silly. A company the size of apple puts profits first, has no innovation or long term planning, milking users and overpaying shareholders? Okay it’s your opinion, but I disagree.
A small correction: 2 billion active units. I did some searching and there seems to be 1.5 billion iPhone users. But then there is other hardware as well.
Are you active user if all you have are AirPods?
Probably
It's massively in the interest of Apple marketing to have the largest number of "users" they can plausibly come up with
I also wonder about old devices -- I have about 15 former devices and accessories I can't get off my Apple ID / iCloud, no matter what I've tried over and over on the website or on a Mac/iPhone -- the devices just won't remove.