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Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

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Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#81

Post by steveBK123 »

alistairSH wrote: post #62
steveBK123 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd personally be a buyer for some home stuff, but the average normie consumer just doesn't care very much about home automation. IoT turned out to be sort of a nothing. I say this as an early adopter and continued user.. it just never broke into mainstream and it's been 15+ years. You make a good point re: Nest. I am kind of a doomer on home automation market in that I have been an early adopter and it's been around…

I don't know, the majority of people I know (mostly upper-middle class white collar) have at least a HomePod/Alexa/Google smart speaker. And many have a smart thermostat and/or smart doorbell/camera. Part of the problem with IoT/home automation is a lack of consistency across devices - they all want their own apps. HomeKit is so close to making that easy - you shouldn't have to spin up HomeAssistant with a bunch of p…

What I mean by average normie doesn't care is that - no one is actually excited about the space.

There's also an argument the sales are limited. Instead of selling $1.5k worth of phone/tablet/headphone/watch per person every 3 years.. you sell maybe $$1k of home devices into a home that don't replace for 10 years. So $100/year per household vs $1500/year (3 person household).

I have had since the early days of IoT/homekit, various security cameras, doorbell, HomePod, thermostats, lights, switches, all that stuff. Honestly setting it up and maintaining it is more of a chore than an excitement. I upgrade when something breaks, begrudgingly. I do not breathlessly follow new releases ready to pre-order the new iteration. No one in the house really uses it except me, unless I happen to get up late / go to bed early and the lights need to be told to turn on/off.

In some ways it's not even that new technology wise. My dad had various light control panel via X10 and similar protocols going back to the early 90s if not sooner. Similarly was a sort of set-it-and-forget-it situation

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#82

Post by pdpi »

trimbo wrote: post #39
ZiiS wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't innovation if you don't get 99 Vision Pro's per iPhone.

You can choose not to ship the 99.

You choose not to ship maybe 90 of those 99, because it's obvious before shipping that they won't work. The rest you have to ship before it becomes obvious they're not that last blessed one.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#83

Post by ValentineC »

havaloc wrote: post #9

Cook seems to be dragged for some of his decisions ( like China ), but he was the right CEO for the time. Ternus in turn seems to be the right CEO for this phase of Apple. I'm excited to see what Ternus does in the role! It's a homecoming of sorts having a product person and there has already been chatter he'll be more like Jobs in the role. If they can maintain their hardware lead and tighten up the software a bit,…

> Cook seems to be dragged for some of his decisions ( like China )

Scaling up in China is probably why many countries in the world can get the iPhone at launch these days.

I still remember the early iPhone days where the iPhone would launch first in a few major markets, and there would be massive queues outside Apple Stores by people from neighbouring countries hoping to buy and resell in their own countries for a huge profit. (This still happens every iPhone launch, but I think the scale is much less rampant.)

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#84

Post by andrekandre »

pjc50 wrote: post #51
zenapollo wrote: post #47

I don't think Cook gets enough credit for this [0] - Book: Apple in China. (Author Interview [1]) It's an undisputed damning account of how Cook was used by China to train millions of Chinese electronics manufacturers, managers, and engineers. The US took the most advanced industrial electronics manufacturing tech, and handed the expertise on a silver platter it to a long term strategic enemy. Frankly, he shouldn't l…

When people discuss this subject, I wonder what they think the counterfactual world would have looked like. Do people think China could have been kept backwards forever? I notice nobody goes around accusing Maurice Chang of doing this. Or W Edwards Deming.

  > Do people think China could have been kept backwards forever?
its what the vice prez literally said in a speech; you can look it up on youtube...

fwiw, i have no idea if people that say such things are sincere but sending 100's of billions of dollars investment to china doesn't sound like they expected them to take it and turn around into their biggest competitors otherwise they would never have done it imo... but i'm not a billionaire so what do i know ^^y

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#85

Post by barrkel »

zenapollo wrote: post #47

I don't think Cook gets enough credit for this [0] - Book: Apple in China. (Author Interview [1]) It's an undisputed damning account of how Cook was used by China to train millions of Chinese electronics manufacturers, managers, and engineers. The US took the most advanced industrial electronics manufacturing tech, and handed the expertise on a silver platter it to a long term strategic enemy. Frankly, he shouldn't l…

There's an element of revisionism to this perspective. It used to be thought that integration with the global economy would gradually bring more alignment with Western values as well.

The ideas was that a rising middle class would demand more say in running the country. That elites would need to become accountable to the people, ideally via democracy. That geopolitical competition would be positive sum.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#87

Post by ValentineC »

ecshafer wrote: post #48
snowwrestler wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tim Cook refreshing his 401k page every day to see if he’s ready to FIRE.

I know this is a joke. But when I was at Vanguard, something like 95-99% of our users literally just logged on, checked their balance and logged off. A decent percentage of the user base does that every day. So only a few percentage a day actually made a trade or anything else. I always found it pretty odd before I realized I only make a trade 1 or 2% of the time.

> But when I was at Vanguard, something like 95-99% of our users literally just logged on, checked their balance and logged off. A decent percentage of the user base does that every day. So only a few percentage a day actually made a trade or anything else.

Most people just want to keep tabs on how that petulant orange manchild is wrecking their portfolio with his disgusting market manipulation antics.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#88

Post by toast0 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #33
heroicmailman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly shocked they haven't done more with HomeKit and in-home devices. Give me a low-power, always-on, iPad-mini style display on my nightstand, on my fridge, on my kitchen countertop, as a desk companion... there are so many things they could do with that form factor. They could even just offer me a dock or a mount as an accessory in most cases and it'd probably juice iPad sales, but they don't even do that.…

I'd personally be a buyer for some home stuff, but the average normie consumer just doesn't care very much about home automation. IoT turned out to be sort of a nothing. I say this as an early adopter and continued user.. it just never broke into mainstream and it's been 15+ years. You make a good point re: Nest. I am kind of a doomer on home automation market in that I have been an early adopter and it's been around…

> I say this as an early adopter and continued user.. it just never broke into mainstream and it's been 15+ years.

I'm not an Apple fan beyond the Apple II era. But Apple has a way of taking early adopter markets and breaking into mainstream. x10 is from 1975, so there were probably people running home automation on Apple IIs, but...

The iPod was kind of early for portable mp3 players, but it wasn't the first. It made portable mp3 players mainstream.

The iPad wasn't the first tablet; Microsoft had been kicking around tablets that didn't sell for ages. But it's the only tablet with mainstream adoption.

Apple didn't invent HiDPI screens, but they brought them back to the mainstream.

Apple does have HomeKit to address home automation, but something more concrete could be nice.

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#89

Post by lateforwork »

aworks wrote: post #43
retired wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being eligible for Medicare, Cook can finally afford to retire.

Likewise he can probably defer his Social Security payments until 70, in order to get the higher benefit... +1 for Medicare for the non-rich, though. I'm a retiree and the monthly payment is about 1/4 of what I was paying for health insurance before I was eligible.

But is Medicare as good as the insurance you had before?

Re: Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

#90

Post by arcatech »

pjc50 wrote: post #59
steveBK123 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Ternus is the kind of leader who could bring 0->1 innovation back to Apple in some form. Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup? Or simply just taking more chances on completely new product lines that may or may not pay off in 5-10 years (like VisionPro). I mean when was the last big new bet previous to VisionPro? Wearables, with the Apple Watch in 2015 is probably it, a decade prior. (AirPods are huge but f…

For a while people were talking about the "Apple car". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project ; seemingly they gave up on it because they realized that FSD wasn't quite going to work. I'm not sure why they wouldn't just pivot back to making a regular EV, it would still be guaranteed to sell millions of units at a premium price point by being a Tesla without (a) That Guy (b) build quality issues like panel ga…

You're asking why they wouldn't pivot to making a regular EV, but I think the Apple way is to ask why they SHOULD make a regular EV.

They could do a lot of things that would make money. The hard part is figure out which ones to say no to.

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