Well now I'm a bit less happy about them putting up the prices on services the other day.
Are you okay with more money going to content creators? From https://9to5mac.com/2022/10/24/apple-music-tv-prices-going-u... : Apple said the increase in Apple Music subscription price was due to increased licensing costs. The company said artists and songwriters will earn more per stream as a result of the pricing tier changes. Regarding Apple TV+, the company said the increased price reflects the growing catalog of…
I don't think anyone whose job title is "content creator" deserves anything at all.
AppleCare doesn't make it last longer. It's just an expensive insurance policy with often high deductibles. If you manage a fleet of Macs it's much cheaper to just keep extras on-hand since most AppleCare claims require two shipments to get it fixed and you need something to use during that time.
I was talking about startup/personal usage from my own experience. Managing a fleet is a totally different usecase.
Personal usage it is still an issue. If you have a problem you to send it back in most cases and be without a replacement. The best move is usually to buy a new one, time machine over to it, use it during the repair window, time machine back to your original after the repair and then return the new one. Still unless you are a total basket case with the care of your laptop you are better off saving your money.
I will admit publicly this post is so terse yet comprehensive I am aggressively searching your history on this site for more nuggets like this one. UPDATE …and, not disappointed. World-class commentary. Not sure how PP flew under my radar so long.
appreciate that, thank you!!
I would love any personal background you’re willing to share just because your writeups are lapidary. Do you do this professionally? how do you decide what to cover? Seems like a broad array of tech stocks but maybe you cover other companies that you just don’t mention here at hacker news?
Again, absolutely none of my business. I’m just fascinated with how great minds operate.
You're right, not much status in just owning an iPhone. You need to own the latest iPhone, preferably the "pro" model to gain status. However, you can lose status by having cheap or old gear. When I was a kid if you wore off-brand sneakers other kids would make fun of you. Now I understand that kids feel some pressure to appear with the right colored chat bubbles in iMessage. The status game is pretty complex.
In the US almost anyone can afford the “latest phone” on a no interest payment plan from either Apple or the carrier. T-mobile doesn’t even run a credit check if you have been with them for a year. Apple has kept the same design for 3 years. You can’t tell whether it’s the “latest” or not. You definitely can’t tell whether it’s pro or not if you have a case.
You win, nobody feels like a bigshot for having the latest phone, they buy them because they need all the new features.
What can't be emphasized enough here is how much Windows created this. They went from the 95-XP arc, some of the best operating systems from a user's perspective, to 7 (another hit), to now windows 10 and 11, which turn your device into a slow always-connected ad platform that you don't really control. In other words, Windows became one of those toolbars that we all have to remove from our grandmothers' browsers. For…
> They went from 95 and XP, some of the best operating systems from a user's perspective I mean that's some rose-tinted shit if I ever heard it, 95 especially. 98 OSR2 improved quite a bit on the situation, but I don't recall having a great time with 95. It was still a glorified DOS extender in many ways, often slow to start up and shutdown, PC hardware and drivers were a mess and system stability therefore poor. Thi…
In the US almost anyone can afford the “latest phone” on a no interest payment plan from either Apple or the carrier. T-mobile doesn’t even run a credit check if you have been with them for a year. Apple has kept the same design for 3 years. You can’t tell whether it’s the “latest” or not. You definitely can’t tell whether it’s pro or not if you have a case.
You win, nobody feels like a bigshot for having the latest phone, they buy them because they need all the new features.
You can buy an iPhone 14 Pro Max for $46/month. You can buy an iPhone SE for $18/month - both from Apple interest free.
No one is impressed by a device that over 300 million people buy a year or that you spent $46/month instead of $18/month.
Based on the stridency android users tell me how "they're sorry for me" I fear never. I didnt want a religious war, I just want to use my phone in peace without hearing how you feel about my vendor of telephone. I cant even mention it in passing.
I have way more iphone users dump on me for using an Android than I see android users dump on iPhones. Just another anecdata. I don't really have many techy friends though so, that might weigh into it a little.
Their numbers seem utterly unreal to me. How on earth do you sell $205 billion worth of just a single product (iPhone) every year? This is simply the greatest business to have ever been created. I can't imagine anything else ever topping it. The margins AND the volume are both insane.
> ... I can't imagine anything else ever topping it ... In 2500 (say) this will probably seem like a very funny statement (because some amazing developments we can barely imagine will surely come along and be monetized to an extent we can also barely imagine). Either that or you're right which would be very bad news for humanity (think the great filter).
For the record, I was very surprised to get a downvote for this. I think it's very common, more or less universal actually, to forget that we are only alive for a tiny slice of human history - and it's basically absurd to imagine that things that happen right now will remain uniquely important for all of future time. Basically this is flawed thinking, like those fallacies that people routinely debunk here. Of course one way that this thinking might not actually be flawed is if it turns out there's not too much future time (for the human race). And my comment covered that too, more elegantly than I'm doing here.
Apple has 150k employees. Probably get <$15 revenue on average per employee/day, 230 days a year. So <$500M of revenue a year, and with the price/quality of the food, I doubt it's being run at a profit (It's not like they have a wine menu to boost their bottom line).
Do they own and operate the cafeterias? Or is it a third-party service provider?
I'm not sure to what extent this is true for all their cafeterias, but the Cupertino based cafeterias are very much in house, with quite a bit of executive attention. Steve Jobs made the revamp of Cafe Macs one of his first priorities on his return, and he personally recruited Francesco Longoni, who I think still runs the cafeterias, from Il Fornaio.
> words vigorous market competition as a famous person once said about companies "the last thing anyone wants is competition"! * * https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...
I meant vigorous market competition from the economical point of view not from the entrepreneur's point of view. But yeah the ultimate goal of every "for-profit" company is monopoly but the goal of every economist is vigorous market competition which improves quality of products and drives prices down.
oh definitely, i don't disagree with that at all, sorry if it was confusing
was just pointing out that what we want (competition) and what they want (monopoly) is kind of at odds..