221–230 of 371 posts
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Heh, funny that Apple would be forced to hire Samsung to build their carrier given where they are forced to source their processors.
wait - are they actually building aircraft carriers??
Sometimes just to wrap my head around really large numbers like this, I like to put things in units of aircraft carriers. The US Navy's last finished carrier cost $6.2 billion[1], meaning that $74.6 billion[2] is enough to buy Apple 12 nuclear carriers, a.k.a. a nuclear carrier fleet larger than that of the US Navy. Of course this is an inaccurate and very silly comparison[3], but at least for me it does give some se…
this is why i'm sure that even in the case of military conflict between China and US, the container ships will continue bringing iPhones from Foxconn factories in China into US stores :)
I think these results are amazing. Kudos to Apple. And now I'm going to be "that guy" on HN. iPad is off 18%. So now Apple really is living and dying by a single product? I mean it's amazing how well they are doing with "just" one product but technology tastes seem so fickle that it's an interesting predicament to be in.
They have always lived and died by one product. First it was the Mac, then the iPod, now the iPhone. At the current scale, yes, the iPhone sustains 70% of the company. If the iPhone fails maybe the Mac will be the one product to sustain a smaller Apple. Maybe the iPad will rally and do the job. It's not that weird of a predicament. Not all big companies are diversified. Microsoft has sustained itself for decades with…
Apple sold a lot of Apple II's before they visited Xerox
The best part of the report is that iPad sales are plunging. It's a victory for general purpose computing that that segment of the walled garden is in decline. Let's hope that open systems can gain a toehold in phones sometime too.
Whenever I wanted to do something in an "open system", it usually turned into a giant pain-in-the-ass or I got preached/yelled at by everyone. "oh, sorry, you don't have a driver for that yet. Maybe write one yourself and put it on github? Oh sorry, this system doesn't support that format because that format is bad and it kills baby seals and blah blah blah. Oh, don't use _that_ distribution because _that_ Linux distro spies on you and they're in bed with Amazon and they're literally Hitler. Oh, want to run this piece of software? Sorry, that's not available on this "open system", but here's a hacked-together piece of crap that's just as powerful...so I hear..."
I'm old and tired and just want to sit down to something that works. Is that asking too much?
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More than half of those employees are retail workers, the profit per knowledge worker must be immense.
I disagree. Foxconn employees are employees of Foxconn in name only. They are effectively employees of Apple. No Apple hardware would be produced at the price point, in the quantity needed if Foxconn did not exist. So imo, the revenue per employee of Apple as we are talking about is skewed badly.
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Or to flip it around, an iPhone every 106 milliSeconds.
Ok this did it for me. That's incredible. It's almost into the audible spectrum. That means they're churning them out at something like that rate too. And then realize that not too long ago any one of those iphones would have been the most powerful computer on earth. Seems like a waste of effort? Why are we making smartphones with all of those resources? We could be doing something... less repetitious.
Apple has the technology headroom to keep making more powerful iphones for several more generations... but will it reach a point where people don't need a more powerful phone? (that they don't get any benefit from it, so that power is not utilized). I would have thought they were more powerful than a phone needs to be already, but obviously not! One view is that they are still replacing desktops, suggesting users wil…
Never underestimate the human ability to consume power / CPU / memory / sensors / etc. So far we've never had "enough" of any of these.
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> Any other company that sells like phones at Apple's price range will FAIL. Vivo and Oppo ( subsidiaries of the same parent ) dominate the high-end on China and maintain their image by selling at ' Apple Prices'. Their Western models are often more expensive...
No they don't. The apple of china is of course...apple. Vivo and oppo don't come close to iPhone market share in the high end PRC market.
Vivo don't do low-end models either.
Sometimes just to wrap my head around really large numbers like this, I like to put things in units of aircraft carriers. The US Navy's last finished carrier cost $6.2 billion[1], meaning that $74.6 billion[2] is enough to buy Apple 12 nuclear carriers, a.k.a. a nuclear carrier fleet larger than that of the US Navy. Of course this is an inaccurate and very silly comparison[3], but at least for me it does give some se…
And consider The Monster: http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=WMT+Key+Statistics Just shy of half a trillion dollars in yearly revenue, which generated 15.4 billion in profit. That's $1.3B revenue per day, or $55M revenue per hour, $920K/minute. A million dollars of revenue, every minute. Compared to nominal GDP, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. is larger than Taiwan, Austria and Thailand. Granted, that's revenue, which is 'easy' c…
How about the reverse? Countries as companies? And why don't we look at how large, complex companies can do so much better financially than governments?
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I disagree. Foxconn employees are employees of Foxconn in name only. They are effectively employees of Apple. No Apple hardware would be produced at the price point, in the quantity needed if Foxconn did not exist. So imo, the revenue per employee of Apple as we are talking about is skewed badly.
I disagree because at some point in the supply chain you have to draw the line. What about the company that made the processors? What about the memory? what about the one that mined the materials?
Don't most car companies directly hire employees that assemble the final product (car)?