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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

#361

Post by acdha »

andsoitis wrote: post #347
acdha wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re also an outlier and a lot of what they do would be judged more harshly by analysts and activist shareholders if they weren’t so profitable. The question should be how we get more companies like Apple.

I wouldn’t want to invest my money, my retirement funds in companies that don’t strive to be highly profitable. Do you?

The answer to that depends on the timeframe and your risk tolerance: a lot of cryptocurrency people said FTX was profitable, too, right up until it wasn't. When you're talking about retirement funds, the timeframe is long enough that you have to think about how stable something is and whether the profits you're seeing will continue. There isn't a recipe for “highly profitable” and you need to consider both the quality of the leadership and whether they share the same goals you have: there are many companies which were bought by a private equity firm who “improved efficiency” by slashing costs and milking the existing customers for as much revenue as possible. If you're the PE guy who cashes out early in that process, this is highly profitable. If you're the retail investor with some shares in your retirement account, you likely had the opposite experience.

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

#362

Post by andsoitis »

berniedurfee wrote: post #266
changoplatanero wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like him halving his compensation makes any material difference in the ability of the company to avoid layoffs.

Nor any material impact to his day to day life. Having half a zillion dollars in the bank ain’t much different from a full zillion.

So given your and the parent’s comment, the reduction of his pay has no meaningful impact other that image/publicity.

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

#363

Post by andsoitis »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #357
andsoitis wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn’t say they were 1,300. I said they were very expensive for their time, relative to the competition. In fact, started at $649. Also, the specs are just not comparable to the latest. From battery life, to screen quality, to storage.

https://venturebeat.com/mobile/iphone-prices-from-the-origin...

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

#364

Post by andsoitis »

acdha wrote: post #361
andsoitis wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t want to invest my money, my retirement funds in companies that don’t strive to be highly profitable. Do you?

The answer to that depends on the timeframe and your risk tolerance: a lot of cryptocurrency people said FTX was profitable, too, right up until it wasn't. When you're talking about retirement funds, the timeframe is long enough that you have to think about how stable something is and whether the profits you're seeing will continue. There isn't a recipe for “highly profitable” and you need to consider both the qualit…

Of course you need to take other things into account as well besides current profitability, such as your trust in management’s ability to steer, for long term product/service foothold, etc.

I was juts making the point that all else being equal, you wouldn’t invest in a company that doesn’t try to make handsome profit, which was the suggestion. And Apple makes handsome profit, and then some.

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

#365

Post by OJFord »

herculity275 wrote: post #327
deltarholamda wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is a real company. Amazon, Twitter, even Microsoft to some extent are not. Apple makes things. The software side works with it, but it's a hardware company. They aren't entirely dependent on conjuring up value out of thin air, they have supply chains and manufacturing and whatnot. Even Amazon, which deals with physical objects, doesn't really make anything.

> Even Amazon, which deals with physical objects, doesn't really make anything. Echo, Kindle, Blink and Fire TV product lines would beg to disagree.

And there's presumably some amount of liasing/branding/QA/etc. that goes on with suppliers of AmazonBasics, Amazon Commercial, and other house lines.

And anyway surely warehousing & distribution is just as much a 'real' (=traditional? physical?) company activity as running a factory?

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

#366

Post by microtherion »

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…

I'm not super enthusiastic about stock buybacks, but to my knowledge, pretty much 100% of Apple employees are eligible for the discounted Employee Stock Purchase Program (which is a no-lose proposition, if you can afford to defer part of your salary for 6 months), and at least in some years, all Apple employees got some outright stock grants, so the interests of "employees" and "shareholders" may be more aligned than you make them out to me.

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

#367

Post by lotsofpulp »

andsoitis wrote: post #363
lotsofpulp wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn’t say they were 1,300. I said they were very expensive for their time, relative to the competition. In fact, started at $649. Also, the specs are just not comparable to the latest. From battery life, to screen quality, to storage. https://venturebeat.com/mobile/iphone-prices-from-the-origin...

I disagree they were expensive relative to their competition, if you define competition as phones that have a decade+ long history of lasting at least 4 years (including software updates).

It has been many years since 90% of people need the “latest” specs. For the purposes of messaging, taking photos, browsing the internet, and watching media, an iPhone 13 serves just the purpose just as well as a 14 pro.

Even a $500 SE will do everything most require, except have a bad battery life, but that is fine for people who are not out in the field like retired people.

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

#368

Post by ghaff »

jaywalk wrote: post #358
simonh wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Eyeballing the TSA's checkpoint volumes (https://www.tsa.gov/travel/passenger-volumes), air travel certainly looks to be back at pre-COVID levels. And that's with a lot of companies watching travel expenses fairly closely.

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

#369

Post by 7v3x3n3sem9vv »

Gigachad wrote: post #70
webwielder2 wrote: post #10

Apple is a generally more well run, mature, patient, and scrupulous company than most others.

Apple is the only one that doesn’t seem to start up hundreds of obviously useless projects. Google will hire thousands to work on an obviously doomed streaming service, to build a new OS, and so many other obviously bad ideas and then just fire them all later. Vanishingly few Apple products seem to be discontinued. Usually after a long life like the iPod.

I prefer Google's method of open sourcing their work. it benefits humanity in the long term, where Apples software generally benefits Apple and is only allowed to run on their "blessed" hardware.

Thanks to Google we have patent-free codecs, an open source mobile OS, and they contribute significantly to the Linux kernel, among other projects that are "available to the public".

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

#370

Post by surajrmal »

olliej wrote: post #136
tempnow987 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google was doing Fuchsia. SUPER cool... but what is the business case there? They are also ham strung by just not listening to customers it feels like - so I think that impacts traction. You get an 80% solution with simple glaring edges. Thousands ask - please fix this edge, but whoever is driving the product is onto something else it feels like sometime. Apple's main product lines all seem to make money, have positi…

Fuchsia is (was?) a long term investment, so would be expected to not be directly profitable for a long time. The core problem I guess is that it suffers from an inability to partially migrate to it. This is a common problem that many people fail to understand actually matters. For example, we know rust is a safer language than C and C++, and so people say "all should be rewritten in rust", but rust is designed with…

This is very false. Fuchsia is built around the idea of making it easy to port software. It just doesn't attempt to achieve it by providing a POSIX interface. POSIX doesn't specify the vast majority of interfaces a modern OS needs to define anyways. For instance you won't see POSIX interfaces that tell you that provide you a signal for when memory on the system is low and you should free up memory.

Instead Fuchsia tries to target porting runtimes which applications are built against. For instance, porting chrome as a runtime unlocks web applications. Porting flutter unlocks flutter applications. Porting Android as a runtime is challenging but still achievable. It is not necessary to rewrite all of Android to accomplish this either.

At the extreme, it's possible to simply implement runtime support by implementing various virtio interfaces and running a full OS in a VM, similar to how other OS like ChromeOS and Windows achieve Android app support today. Fuchsia is written in a way that you don't need to do that, but it's always an option as well.

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