Not surprising. You only get to 1 trillion, 2 trillion and 3 trillion market cap with the largest cash hoard of any tech company in existence by being frugal. But now…Tim hasn’t got the memo yet that you need to spend money to make money. A lot more than what they have been recently.
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Report: Apple Bleeding Talent to OpenAI
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OpenAI is bleeding money left and right. They have yet to do their IPO and are targeting $1 Trillion. That's absurd. They're overextending themselves and are taking every third hand site to drum up support and drive more venture capital investment.
Why?
I honestly wouldn't see that as a bad thing. Google's cloud + AI services are great. Apple devices are great.
Must be tooling around in the Tesla with the final release version of FSD.
Building an ecosystem is much more interesting than maintaining one. Apple has a strong, established ecosystem, so companies like OpenAI and Meta that are in the midst of building their own are going to look more appealing.
Apple isn’t supposed to be a company which ever goes into maintenance mode though. They are supposed to innovate and have a constantly evolving ecosystem of devices and services with significant trend-setting new products lines once in a while which typically take years for talented engineers and designers to develop through experimentation.
This is what I meant when I said it would be worrying about the future products pipeline if engineers don’t find any interesting projects internally.
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You speak of engineers as if they are a mono-block of all the same people with the same interest and skills. That's not how humans roll.
Of course, if Apple was losing talents related to old boring product lines while attracting new talents to work on new exciting product lines this would balance out.
But I don’t think this is what we are saying is happening here. They seem to be both losing out on the old stuff and struggling to attract/retain related to the new stuff.
I’d argue they are still doing that, as evidenced by the Vision Pro. The price makes it hard to have a real discussion about it, but it certainly fits the bill of what you’ve described. The way competitors seem to be copying it, especially from the software side, show’s its impacting its industry.
I would think the rumored true AR glasses initiative (beyond what Meta is shipping) would also fall into that.
Edit: I just remember this same sentiment in the mid 2010’s when Microsoft and Google were building out their ecosystems with the Surface Studio (iMac) and Pixel (iPhone), respectively. Apple was “boring” because they’d already been there.
I definitely hope they are, but that’s my point: if they are developing new cool stuff they should have plenty of exciting work internally and not just boring maintenance stuff.
My view on the Vision Pro is that the concept is very promising and the same OS would be very successful on smaller and lighter hardware. But IMO the 2000s era Apple would have kept it as a prototype for longer until they can miniaturise the hardware more to make it more comfortable to wear, and produce it for a cheaper price. As it is, it undoubtedly is one of the worse product line launch they have had in a long time, because of a combination of high price, poor long term confort, and lack of sufficient use cases for the general public (reading online feedback, it seems that a significant proportion of purchasers end up using it less and less even though the paid a high price and were initially enthusiastic about it, while I would argue for most other major product lines they launched since the iPod an overwhelming majority early adopters did stick to using the product and even increased their usage over time).
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