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The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

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Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#21

Something I keep thinking about is how we’re seeing the end of what I call the “tech zeitgeist”. Started upon realizing that we‘ve likely seen the end of the social network era. No new social networking startups have popped-off in a while, and the recent ones are arguably more about connecting you to entertainers than friends. Besides that, a lot of the tech ideas from 2012-2020 have kind of fizzled out. 3D printing…

I notice you didn't mention drones...

Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#22
post #8

[flagged]

Can you explain? My intution and rough calculations say you are wrong.

ChatGPT agrees "To determine the long-term annual sales of phones for a company with a constant customer base of 1 billion, where each customer upgrades at different intervals, you first need to know the average replacement interval, T years. The annual sales can then be calculated as 1,000,000,000 divided by T. For example, if customers upgrade every 2 years on average, the company would sell approximately 500 million phones per year. This approach assumes the replacement intervals are consistent or average to T years across all customers."

Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#23

Something I keep thinking about is how we’re seeing the end of what I call the “tech zeitgeist”. Started upon realizing that we‘ve likely seen the end of the social network era. No new social networking startups have popped-off in a while, and the recent ones are arguably more about connecting you to entertainers than friends. Besides that, a lot of the tech ideas from 2012-2020 have kind of fizzled out. 3D printing…

The online tech space is reaching maturity. It went from nothing in the 90s to the global scale industry we have today. The winners have been chosen and the reality is infinite growth does not exist, infinite ideas do not exist.

But for 2 decades it seemed like tech was the be it all path for infinite growth. VCs pumped in hundreds of billions of dollars into the industry. Marketing painted everything as the next big thing as the money flowed and you had 3000 clone startups for every potential SaaS.

The money tap has run out (interest rates being one factor, but cracks were showing even before this), the bills are coming due. The industry is consolidating.

AI however is the last big hurrah for the industry. Investors and companies see it potentially as a big new exlosive growth space.

Yes, the entire stock market right now in the US is being held up by all the AI sentiment. Though it's starting to deflate.

Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#24

One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned in discussions of communications tech monopoly (or “monopoly” in many cases) is the risk of future political censorship by a hypothetical future evil Apple. Centralized market power here isn’t just about unfair profits or bad products, it’s also about control of information (and therefore control of minds).

There is a lot of discussion going on about this. Most of it is not very constructive, but "power structure" research is a scientific thing that might interest you.

Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#25
post #2

It was very surprising that Apple did not strong-arm the EU by threatening to pull out of the area. The short-term loss of revenue from leaving the EU is nothing compared to the long-term decline this is going to cause in Apple's services/subscriptions revenue if the iPhone is commoditized.

They tried and lost. They can threaten all they want. The EU would let them and good riddance as far as we're concerned. But there is this pesky notion that it's a huge market and Apple earns a lot of money there. So, they really can't walk away from that. For the same reason they play by Chinese rules in China. Because it's a big market and they need to be in on that as well. And if you think the EU is picky, the Chinese are much worse. And of course there's a whole world outside the EU and China that is paying attention as well. Apple's negotiation position simply is not that strong. It has no real leverage. And Apple as a US only company would not be anywhere near it's current size and importance. Share holders would revolt. R&D investment would implode. It has to be an international company for it to justify its share price. So, it has to adjust and can't afford to exit markets. It has no choice.

Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#26
post #5

> Apple executive Eddy Cue pushed for an Android iMessage app in 2016, but Craig Federighi responded in an internal email that “iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove an obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.” This conversation happened 8 years ago and it was about a product released 12 years ago. If anything, this shows how slow regulators are before they take any action and how they…

The truth is, all businesses do what Craig suggested. AirBnB isn't opening up their platform to Expedia. Meta isn't allowing your Instagram data to be accessed by another platform. Your own company isn't voluntarily making it easier for its customers to leave.

This is why executives should be tossed in jail instead of a company being fined.

Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#27

One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned in discussions of communications tech monopoly (or “monopoly” in many cases) is the risk of future political censorship by a hypothetical future evil Apple. Centralized market power here isn’t just about unfair profits or bad products, it’s also about control of information (and therefore control of minds).

I think this is because we haven’t really seen it. Though there is a subset of the right wing that’s been saying exactly this is happening, to them in the context of Facebook and Twitter. I don’t recall seeing any convincing evidence though.

Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#28

Something I keep thinking about is how we’re seeing the end of what I call the “tech zeitgeist”. Started upon realizing that we‘ve likely seen the end of the social network era. No new social networking startups have popped-off in a while, and the recent ones are arguably more about connecting you to entertainers than friends. Besides that, a lot of the tech ideas from 2012-2020 have kind of fizzled out. 3D printing…

It sure feels like 3D printing especially "desktop" has trouble improving recently, and is nowhere near democratized like classic printer, and its not entirely a hardware problem.

Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#29
post #2

It was very surprising that Apple did not strong-arm the EU by threatening to pull out of the area. The short-term loss of revenue from leaving the EU is nothing compared to the long-term decline this is going to cause in Apple's services/subscriptions revenue if the iPhone is commoditized.

I honestly doubt opening up the App Store will cause much of a hit. Maybe 5% of users will download another App Store.

Re: The walls of Apple's garden are tumbling down

#30
post #2

It was very surprising that Apple did not strong-arm the EU by threatening to pull out of the area. The short-term loss of revenue from leaving the EU is nothing compared to the long-term decline this is going to cause in Apple's services/subscriptions revenue if the iPhone is commoditized.

Yes they would leave something like 1/3 to 1/5 of the global revenue, sure that sounds brilliant.
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