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Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#351

Post by pwinnski »

juve1996 wrote: post #336
lanza wrote: post #75

This is such a weird topic. The comparison is between companies that didn't exist 20 years ago like Meta and the 50 year old industry veteran Apple. Of course Apple didn't hire as fast, they were established. That's like saying a 20 year old college student grew more over the past decade than a 40 year old engineer. Yea, that's how life works.

To say that Meta is not established by this point in time is absurd. They're plenty established and have been the leader in their industry. The age of the company isn't relevant imo.

The age of the company would be relevant if any of the companies were less than five years old. After that, it's irrelevant.

Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#352

Post by [deleted] »

culturestate wrote: post #170
daevout wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon, Meta, Google are most certainly cut from the same cloth, only slightly smaller. For Wal-Mart I can't think of anything strictly anit-competitive, but its practice of paying sub-subsistance wages and counting on government relief programs to make up the difference is so disgusting I don't know how to describe. Time-Warner, Comcast I'm not too familiar with, but as I understand they are under regulations that p…

> For Wal-Mart I can't think of anything strictly anit-competitive... Wal-Mart might be the world's foremost practitioner of predatory pricing, not to mention the control they exert over their suppliers.

[deleted]

Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#353

Post by abduhl »

danaris wrote: post #298
asdff wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does apple hoard cash instead of buy back their stock? 5 years ago they had 90 billion cash in hand. If they put that into their stock then, It would be up at least 260% by now even with the losses last year, then if they need cash they could just take a loan against the stock.

Setting aside the fact (pointed out by several siblings) that they do buy back stock... Why should they? Who does it benefit? Not their customers. Not their products. Not their future prospects. Not their employees, for the most part. ...Oh, the shareholders? You mean they should throw massive amounts of money—their hedge against future problems—into enriching people who are, for the most part, already vastly wealthy…

What else should they do with it? Just hold it so that they can hedge against future problems? How much do they need for a hedge? 1 year of expenses? 2 years? 5 years?

What should they do once they reach your hedge number? Just keep hoarding?

What do you do with your salary? Do you just put it in your bank account or do you invest it? If I’m Apple, do I really want to become a company with an investment arm? If I’m an Apple shareholder, do I really want Apple buying a broad market index fund and then paying corporate taxes on that and then spitting off dividends to me rather than just giving me the opportunity to invest in a broad market fund myself?

Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#354

Post by scarface74 »

pjmlp wrote: post #335
scarface74 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QuickTime wasn’t a failure. It was the basis of their entire media playback API for over two decades. WebObjects came in with the acquisition of NeXT and from what I gather is still the basis of the backend of iTunes and the App Store. Most of the rest were pre 1997.

Doesn't matter when it happened.

Yep you’re right. I don’t know why Apple was dumb enough to release the Apple /// in 1982.

Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#355

Post by pwinnski »

midoridensha wrote: post #130
culi wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big fan of PWAs, but this really seems like small fries compared to something like Walmart which has an internal planned economy many times larger than the Soviet Union ever achieved. If you sell your product in Walmart they basically own everything about it. They deem how you make your product, the supply chain, the prices you charge, everything And they use this incredibly granular level of control to run out…

I guess that's why Amazon, Best Buy, local grocery stores, etc. all went out of business. Oh wait...

I think you meant that as sarcasm, but...

Fry's Electronics closed completely, while Best Buy keeps closing stores and laying people off at an accelerated rate[0].

Local grocery stores are almost extinct, as Walmart[1], Amazon, Kroger, and Albertson's crowd out or buy out everyone else.

It's a serious problem, your sarcasm notwithstanding.

0. https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/25/business/best-buy-store-closu...

1. https://ilsr.org/walmarts-monopolization-of-local-grocery-ma...

Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#356

Post by andsoitis »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #261
midoridensha wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bring prices of the phones down to 50 bucks. Put it in the hands of everyone. 60% of Americans already have them, and are perfectly happy to spend $1300 on them every few years, even if it means not paying rent or having to starve themselves. Why would they want to bring the price down?

>60% of Americans already have them, and are perfectly happy to spend $1300 on them every few years, even if it means not paying rent or having to starve themselves. Why would they want to bring the price down? Source? This comment sounds hyperbolic when many very capable iPhones versions are available for $700+ and 90% of people would not know the difference between a $700 and $1,300 iPhone. In my family, we have an…

And those phones were very expensive, relatively, at the time you bought them. But they also last very long.

So people are willing to fork over lots of money. And then many many people, though of course not everyone (like yourself), upgrade very few years.

Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#357

Post by lotsofpulp »

andsoitis wrote: post #356
lotsofpulp wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>60% of Americans already have them, and are perfectly happy to spend $1300 on them every few years, even if it means not paying rent or having to starve themselves. Why would they want to bring the price down? Source? This comment sounds hyperbolic when many very capable iPhones versions are available for $700+ and 90% of people would not know the difference between a $700 and $1,300 iPhone. In my family, we have an…

And those phones were very expensive, relatively, at the time you bought them. But they also last very long. So people are willing to fork over lots of money. And then many many people, though of course not everyone (like yourself), upgrade very few years.

They were never $1,300. And there has always been a perfectly viable non top of the line option for around $800, but still very future proof option.

Some people like to claim that everyone is buying a new maxed out iPhone every couple years, but that is nowhere near the truth. If you do not need the latest and greatest camera, people can and do buy the much cheaper models.

Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#358

Post by jaywalk »

simonh wrote: post #174
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I believe that. It honestly sounds like an excuse to fire people. Or leadership has no clue. The biggest thing I got from the pandemic is flexible work arrangements. But I and everyone I knew all wanted to get back out there. Just not back out on public transport to work. We were doing things online because there was no other option. But once the borders opened and restrictions eased, everyone did what t…

You’re being very absolutist, people don't have be doing “everything” online for the shift in habits to have a significant effect. Yes on the whole most people do go out and travel again, but on average much less frequently than they used to because they retained the desire but not the same habits. They find they can scratch the itch with fewer outings. All it takes is for people to go out 20% less than they used to,…

> Yes on the whole most people do go out and travel again, but on average much less frequently than they used to

You need to provide some data to back this up, because all of the data I've seen (and all of the full flights I've been on) says the opposite.

Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#359

Post by thomasahle »

asdff wrote: post #89
microtherion wrote: post #58

I don't recall whether this was ever stated explicitly, but I always had the impression that this is one of the elements of Apple's strategy that is still driven by the tribal memory of the late 1990s turmoil. Both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook were there at the time, and especially the former (who also had witnessed a 1980s bust) was determined to never be in this position again. So as a consequence: * Apple is hoarding c…

Why does apple hoard cash instead of buy back their stock? 5 years ago they had 90 billion cash in hand. If they put that into their stock then, It would be up at least 260% by now even with the losses last year, then if they need cash they could just take a loan against the stock.

> then if they need cash they could just take a loan against the stock.

When companies buy back stock, they typically cancel it. That's why the price goes up so much of the remaining stock held by shareholders.

So they wouldn't be able to "just take a loan against the stock". It no longer existed. All they'd be able to do is to ask ask their investers for more money.

Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#360

Post by GeekyBear »

pjmlp wrote: post #333
GeekyBear wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compare to something like Microsoft's Kin Phone. Microsoft paid half a billion dollars to buy Andy Rubin's company, Danger. They decided to rewrite the platform from Java to Dot Net, which took so long the product was no longer competitive when they finished. Then they spent a fortune to advertise a product that was canceled after two weeks. Then Microsoft decided to take another huge pile of cash and set that on fir…

Well to compare Apples to Apples we would need to know how much money Apple has spent with many of those efforts, which before Jobs came back almost driven the company to bankruptcy. For younger generations Apple might feel unstoppable, meanwhile I remember the discussions to migrate away from surviving Macs on our IT department, and my graduation thesis was porting a particle simulation engine from NeXTSTEP into Win…

We don't have to wonder with Microsoft. Again and again they have paid billions of dollars for complete failures like the Surface RT and Windows RT. They would have been well advised to cancel the platform before spending a fortune on advertising and unsold inventory.

Hell, how much did they pay for Skype, despite already having several text and video chat clients of their own? Then they completely rewrote Skype before replacing it with Teams.

They have a longstanding habit of taking shareholder value and creating huge bonfires from it.

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