Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 116 posts

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#71

Post by benologist »

msbarnett wrote: post #63
benologist wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much what I said - it's a problem that Adobe, Mono, Unity etc. are hoping they can solve for us. I don't think it'll ever be as simple as write once, deploy anywhere ... but write once, in one language, and deploy everywhere with minimal fuss is an admirable goal.

> That's pretty much what I said - it's a problem that Adobe, Mono, Unity etc. are hoping they can solve for us. It's a problem that companies have been trying to solve, in one form or another, since the advent of the microcomputer. I'm highly sceptical that a solution is ever going to appear. There is no silver bullet that will allow you to paper over the significant differences in platforms in a transparent, non-cl…

It's a problem that HTML5 is promising to solve too, and that HTML/CSS/JS in general did a pretty good job at in many use cases.

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#72

Post by numbchuckskills »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #2

Down 5.8% (-18.70) in AH trading: http://www.google.com/finance?client=ig&q=AAPL edit: whew, and seeming to stabilize around a 4.5% drop still leaving it above $300. I was amazed it broke $300 so easily last week and was afraid it'd fall back below with this drop.

Down because the market is tired of apple sandbagging their quarterly results (seriously). All companies put out conservative numbers, but come on.

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#73

Post by joezydeco »

macrael wrote: post #65
mattparcher wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, each time Apple has a record quarter (which has been quite often lately) folks doubt that they will sustain that growth, but they’re almost always proven wrong. Where is Apple slowing? In Macs, which see only modest increases year over year, and iPods, which are in decline. But both of those categories are not losing to competitors — they are being cannibalized by Apple itself, who is busy selling incre…

I'm not sure I would characterize the Mac growth as "modest" for the past several years they gave been growing several times faster than the industry average.

Several times faster during a major recession. Go chew on that for a minute.

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#74

Post by mattparcher »

macrael wrote: post #65
mattparcher wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, each time Apple has a record quarter (which has been quite often lately) folks doubt that they will sustain that growth, but they’re almost always proven wrong. Where is Apple slowing? In Macs, which see only modest increases year over year, and iPods, which are in decline. But both of those categories are not losing to competitors — they are being cannibalized by Apple itself, who is busy selling incre…

I'm not sure I would characterize the Mac growth as "modest" for the past several years they gave been growing several times faster than the industry average.

Indeed, “modest” is very much an understatement to describe Mac sales :)

Everything is relative, and in the greater market context, Macs are strong. But among Apple’s products, the iPhone brings revenue equal to Macs, and arguably greater potential greater, with the iPad not far behind — likely catching up to Macs by 2012. [1]

[1] http://aaplmodel.blogspot.com/2010/09/ipad-to-exceed-mac-rev...

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#75

Post by [deleted] »

msbarnett wrote: post #63
benologist wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much what I said - it's a problem that Adobe, Mono, Unity etc. are hoping they can solve for us. I don't think it'll ever be as simple as write once, deploy anywhere ... but write once, in one language, and deploy everywhere with minimal fuss is an admirable goal.

> That's pretty much what I said - it's a problem that Adobe, Mono, Unity etc. are hoping they can solve for us. It's a problem that companies have been trying to solve, in one form or another, since the advent of the microcomputer. I'm highly sceptical that a solution is ever going to appear. There is no silver bullet that will allow you to paper over the significant differences in platforms in a transparent, non-cl…

[deleted]

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#76

Post by msbarnett »

benologist wrote: post #71
msbarnett wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's pretty much what I said - it's a problem that Adobe, Mono, Unity etc. are hoping they can solve for us. It's a problem that companies have been trying to solve, in one form or another, since the advent of the microcomputer. I'm highly sceptical that a solution is ever going to appear. There is no silver bullet that will allow you to paper over the significant differences in platforms in a transparent, non-cl…

It's a problem that HTML5 is promising to solve too, and that HTML/CSS/JS in general did a pretty good job at in many use cases.

HTML/CSS/JS don't solve the problem at all. As they are used today, they target a small set of viewers which happen to go out of their way to provide a fundamentally similar presentation on different platforms. If the viewer happens to deviate from how the most commonly used viewers render, they tend to break horribly (see, for instance, a heavy javascript site viewed via lynx). It's easy to do "write once, view on most viewers" when most viewers try to act more-or-less the same and freely break underlying OS conventions because users have learned to expect that web sites will look and behave the same regardless of the underlying OS conventions.

On the other hand, when you're natively targeting several platforms with radically different UI conventions outside of the browser, it's a lot harder to provide a single language and library set that can cover up those differences. You could go for the browser strategy and attempt to convince users that your application is exempt from the underlying OS conventions because it's special, but that's a steep uphill climb (especially with users bases known to be hostile to applications which deviate from expected conventions, like the Apple community; god help you if you're trying to sell an Adobe Air app on OS X).

Like I said, there is no silver bullet here. You can't get polished interfaces on multi-platforms if you're not willing to polish your interface separately for each platform.

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#77

Post by danilocampos »

apike wrote: post #70
danilocampos wrote: post #19

The iPad sales are just staggering. Moving that many units of a product that didn't even exist a year ago, in a category that was long thought dead, is incredible. Identify an optimal user experience, polish the hell out of it, then perform an airtight integration of every single component, from end-to-end. The software and hardware, the content ecosystem, the physical distribution, all of it fits together perfectly.…

When you look at it closely, Apple, as a portfolio of talent, technologies and interacting businesses, resembles the sort of microorganism that Intelligent Design proponents advance as evidence of a god. Having been an Apple employee, it's funny to me when people describe Apple this way. If you think of their operations as perfect, godlike, or seamless, you have no chance of really understanding them or replicating t…

> Having been an Apple employee, it's funny to me when people describe Apple this way. If you think of their operations as perfect, godlike, or seamless, you have no chance of really understanding them or replicating the good parts yourself.

A completely agree, so I think you may have missed my point.

It's worth noting that I think Intelligent Design is horseshit, so god leaps neither from that argument nor from Apple for me. For reference, here's the background:

Flagellar motor (real):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellum#Evolution_of_flagella...

Irreducible complexity (horseshit):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreducible_complexity

Apple, of course, did evolve from a much less complex organism than it is now, but the overall harmony of its successful products is impressive and demonstrably difficult to replicate. The easy route is to ascribe supernatural powers to Apple's success, but of course the history demonstrates methodical system planning, keen insight, hard work, a bit of fanaticism, and some good timing.

The difference between Apple and other organizations is that while in-fighting and conflicting agendas may exist (as in any human system) this doesn't seem to get in the way of a coherent user product. Compare that with Sony, which can't muster a coherent consumer strategy to save its life. (Well, absent saddling every last product with the proprietary storage device du jour.) Apple may itself not be seamless but the overall experience for users of Apple products is shockingly so, especially when compared to competing gear.

What internal back biting can you share from your tenure at Apple, though? It would be interesting to learn just how aggressively leadership must filter and otherwise confine these impulses to end up with the focus, profits and product mix we see today.

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#78

Post by CamperBob »

marze wrote: post #34
ugh wrote: post #18

Steve Jobs is just now highlighting Android’s “fragmentation” and discussing Android’s openness. He is also talking about upcoming tablets and their 7" screens. (Trash talking them, that is. No 7" screen from Apple anytime soon.) Ars Technica is blogging: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/10/liveblog-q4-2010-e...

There were rumors of an Apple 7" device earlier this year. I wonder if they were deliberately started by Apple to send competitors down what they considered a blind alley.

More likely Apple's feverishly working on a 7" device but it wasn't ready to be announced yet. This is a recurring trope in Steve Jobs's speeches -- slag an idea as being unworkable or undesirable, only to announce it at the next major conference.

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#79

Post by CamperBob »

mattmaroon wrote: post #69

I wish I was Apple's CFO. That strikes me as right up there with San Diego Weatherman as the easiest job in the world. Yesterday was sunny and 80 degrees, today is sunny and 80, and tomorrow is going to be sunny and 80.

Then when it does rain, they come after you with tar and pitchforks.

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#80

Post by kabdib »

danilocampos wrote: post #24
jw84 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple wasn't always like that. Took a long time for that maturity and took a lot of centralizing power before everything came into being.

It took Steve Jobs returning and demanding extraordinary focus. It started with Apple's now famous matrix of consumer and pro for mobile and desktop. New products were added only after judicious consideration of both the user experience and business cases. As new parts of the business emerged, they were tightly integrated with existing products (iTunes + iPod, OS X + iPhone, etc) edit: It's also worth mentioning that…

I remember leaving Apple in the 90s, then visiting for meetings (because our start-up had a business relationship with Apple).

The contrast between our small (six person) company and the entrenched folks at Apple was amazing, especially since I had been one of them just a month or two earlier.

Us: Let's get this done. We're three months to financial destruction, let's move.

Apple: (totally not getting it)

... add to this people who stuck their heads in our meetings, saying "Sorry, I'm triple-booked, hi, see you next week."

I can't say I'm sorry to see the old Apple go. (I'm sorry that the Newton was never properly followed-through on, but that's another story).

Post reply on HN