131–140 of 246 posts
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> Also it would be quite scary if apple is allowed that type of vertical integration. Scary in what way?
It wouldn't be. People are just afraid of vertical integration because they equate it to vertical monopolies, when the fact of vertical integration does not itself mean that there is a vertical monopoly.
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The point there seems to be that Apple is pretending to invest and align with moving production to US, but it's really gobbling up the entire foreign production and not at all interested in the "patriotic" narrative, even if they are marketing themselves as such. Basically, it's mostly: Apple is lying with their marketing, here's what proves they really don't care about moving production to US, but only about price a…
Tim Cook has an obligation towards the shareholders and takes it seriously. As an Apple shareholder who doesn’t live in the US, moving to US chip suppliers would not help with his obligations towards me. I do like the US - don’t get me wrong - but Apple is in the business of making devices, not making investments the government should be at least facilitating.
Lol, maybe the author should ask himself if we ban Apple will we then see the American semiconductor industry boom and take over the world? If not, then the logic is strenuous at best, you just viscerally hate Apple and want to find reasons to blame it as opposed to doing anything constructive for the American Semiconductor Industry. Something constructive would involve fixing the work ethic of American Semiconductor…
How do you pinpoint this to be the problem? How are you sure that it's not some narrative used by corporate to excuse outsourcing or putting pressure on wages?
I think an industry where technical knowledge was outsourced for cost cutting reasons for decades now is probably having issues because only the managers are left, and they're not productive on their own. Blaming it on the factory worker seems uncalled for.
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Sounds like the tech version of Walmart killing the small town. Except they kill American “tech manufacturing” or whatever you want to call it. It’s 100% about borderline slave labor pay. I used to think it was because chip manufacturing is very nasty but I think it’s both pay and subpar working conditions.
> Except they kill American “tech manufacturing” or whatever you want to call it. This is the part I don't understand... they have placed orders with the new fabs that aren't even built yet. How are they killing American manufacturing if there is no American manufacturing for them to buy from?
As Obama put it, “Those jobs aren’t coming back”.
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Are we buying the same devices? Apple hardware is notoriously expensive.
The article suggests Apple is using its buying power to push component prices down, so that it can keep more of the profit on its expensive smartphones for itself.
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That's a weird look. What is that market segment nobody is even trying to compete in? Integrated ecosystem is something a number of players have tried and failed at, as they simply don't have the resources to build it up and sustain it until they are competitive. Apple has started small too: tiny little iPods with iTunes + digital content sales really put them back on the map, before they scored a hit with iPhone whi…
> iPhone which was an iPod touch with a modem. I mean, that's not totally wrong, but by the release dates completely backwards. The iPod Touch is an iPhone without the modem.
I find the article compelling. He cited a lot of other articles, isn't making outrageous claims, provided concrete numbers, and isn't spinning unrealistic conspiratorial claims. The only core feature of human behavior we need to accept to believe the article is that some people are very greedy.
I thought it was weak, his core argument seems to boil down to the idea that if there were more domestic competition then device manufacturers would somehow be willing to buy worse chips for more money. It just doesn't make any sense. The woes of Intel, Micron, etc are nobody's faults but their own.
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What a bunch of nonsense. I don't buy Apple products because someone might make fun of me if I don't. It's because they are best in class and integrate so much better than any competing offering.
Good for you. That doesn't change the impression that many of us have when we see relatives and friends who buy Apple products yet have low incomes. I'm pretty confident they aren't doing it because of any technical superiority and they certainly aren't doing it because the devices last since they upgrade every couple of years. > integrate so much better Integrate with what?
Congrats on being judgmental without even trying to understand anyone else’s perspective I guess.
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As a tagalong to my comment, I really wish Android phone makers would get their act together and give Apple better competition. If the trends of the last ten years hold up, iPhones might actually become a monopoly product at some point. ;)
Can I encourage you to start the android company you want to see? I'm confident you can get funding
Google would not be doing it if it wasn’t for the advertising business. It’s pretty much the definition of a loss-leader to get people into the ecosystem for things that google can monetize. So android as a product is implicitly, foreverially tiedup with marketing and spyware, because google isn’t onboard otherwise. Same as gmail or search was a loss-leader to get people onboard for advertising too. Google only cares about these things insofar as they might stop being a funnel into their money-makers.
SOC vendors can’t make a run providing 7 years of driver/firmware support for a product they sell once at bleedingly thin margins. Or at least, they really don’t wanna.
OEMs can’t make a run providing 7 years of support for someone else’s software, especially when they also have to do a lot of the driver work themselves thanks to IHVs abdicating their job.
Consumers get stuck with a product that loses support in 2 years or whatever, and may even have landmines involved with unlocking it to continue support (Sony wipes the camera firmware if you unlock the bootloader for example). They face a completely unnecessary hardware and software treadmill due to all these other factors. Supporting your own phone is not a reasonable expectations for Joe Sixpack either.
The idea is supposed to be the “linux model” but honestly linux has the same problems, it is reliant on the same unpaid labor around driver work to make up for the inability of vendors to track the ecosystem and provide the long-tail of support. In cases where the vendor can’t open source it, the functionality simply ends up broken, and driver support, kernel versioning, and DKMS is a constant battle for end users. Just like with custom roms for android.
Android simply has too little margin split among too many disinterested parties to ever really work. And fixing it would involve either increasing the size of the pie (margin), which consumers in this segment hate to an unfathomable degree (android users = cheapskates is a reliable first-order approximation, borne out by the app store revenue too).
But that's the free-market system working as intended, right? Literally every penny has been squeezed out of margins, software costs pushed onto free labor in the open-source community, and ad revenue used to contra-fund and push end-user prices even lower. Android is the finest solution the free-market can deliver, that's how the system is supposed to work, and it’s delivered an excellent product for the needs of the customer - it's just you're not the customer, you're the product.
The alternative is vertical consolidation and bringing more things under the same roof, raising the price, and targeting the consumer needs instead of the ad revenue needs. Basically the apple model. But that can never be a viable path in a GPL world. And it will still probably involve paying more - phone costs are currently subsidized by all these indirect costs like ad money and vendors cutting corners on support. There is more work that will need to be done, and that contra-revenue from advertising revenue needs to be backed out of the purchase price, so at the end of the day consumers will simply have to pay somewhat more (hopefully not apple prices of course). But again, people are cheapskates, android users doubly so.
I don't know why people got so allergic to the idea of paying for their operating system, the baseline assumption now seems to be that it needs to be free, and if that's the case you will never be free, only stuck in a choice between advertising-mongers and exploiting unpaid labor. And that can either be in hardware costs, or in actual recurring support costs, but either way, someone needs to be paid to sit down and make sure the bluetooth and sound drivers work.
You see the same problem in software too - open-source projects get commercial entities tapping their value without providing contributions back, or existing via patronage to the needs and goals of the commercial entity. Without an incentive by the actual developers to provide end-user value, and with permissive licensing, you end up with a constant struggle for financial homeostasis. Firefox/Mozilla, for example.
People complain about android but they still are not willing to pay a little more to opt-out of these problems. The revealed preference is for purchase price above all else, and people still think in the yardstick of Apple being "too expensive" rather than Android being "too cheap". The yardstick is still the artificially-cheap advertising-subsidized Android product.
These are fundamentally problems of not enough margins to support all the players in this ecosystem, which leads to them looking for places to find the revenue to make it work. Pay a little more and these problems go away.
If you want to stop being the product, get used to opening up your wallet. That transactionality is a good thing - you can’t really demand boundaries when you’re living on someone else’s dime. It’s Google’s house and they’re letting you crash for free. But this is the very deepest core of the problem - people will do anything except just pay a little more.
You will never stop being the product if you can’t bring yourself to be a customer.
(Yes, I pay for kagi, how did you know!?)
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Yeah I'm a little confused by the premise. How would reshoring chip production be easier if Apple weren't out there buying chips? I get that they are buying up all of the TSMC chips in some segments. Doesn't that just create demand for an alternative? I can't cohere the themes of this article.
It's not just TSMC chips. Apple forces other chip manufacturers into exclusive deals to lock out the ability for 3rd party repair to be done cost effectively and reliably. Apple shouldn't be able to control the chip markets as they do. As indicated in the article they create slave labor conditions in a lot of these manufacturers because they're wholly dependent on Apple's whims. This also creates an e-waste problem g…
How is this relevant to the chips TSMC manufactures? You can't exactly hand solder a 24nm feature.