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Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon

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Re: Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon

#301

Post by Dylan16807 »

scarface74 wrote: post #280
inetknght wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you saying Cook’s 10+ years that took the company from $100B/year to $400B/year are the short term Yes, however it's clearly successful. > Are you saying Cook’s 10+ years that took the company is at the expense of the next 90 years? Apple is slowly pulling away consumer ownership of their devices and is turning into an advertisement company. I honestly believe that is at the expense of the next 90 years. And th…

“Apple is doomed any day now”. That’s been the narrative for over 40 years. So which customers aren’t satisfied? The people on HN that want to run Linux on the Apple Watch?

Are you saying that "any day now" and "next 90 years" are the same narrative?

Re: Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon

#302

Post by GeekyBear »

flangola7 wrote: post #217
bell-cot wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...more on short-term gains instead of long-term quality... Considering that Tim has been CEO for 11 1/2 years now, and things are still going incredibly well for Apple...it seems pretty hard to argue that he is too focused on the short term. (FWIW, I mostly agree about their software quality.)

And what's the last revolutionary consumer technology that has come out of Apple? The original successful Macs, the iPod, the iPhone, iTunes, those were all under Jobs.

I don't know about revolutionary, but Apple's service revenue alone for 2022 was larger than the revenue of McDonald’s and Nike combined. Things can be wild runaway successes without being revolutionary.

https://finbold.com/apple-services-2022-statistics/

Re: Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon

#303

Post by brookst »

scarface74 wrote: post #280
inetknght wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you saying Cook’s 10+ years that took the company from $100B/year to $400B/year are the short term Yes, however it's clearly successful. > Are you saying Cook’s 10+ years that took the company is at the expense of the next 90 years? Apple is slowly pulling away consumer ownership of their devices and is turning into an advertisement company. I honestly believe that is at the expense of the next 90 years. And th…

“Apple is doomed any day now”. That’s been the narrative for over 40 years. So which customers aren’t satisfied? The people on HN that want to run Linux on the Apple Watch?

Look, if Apple just made the watch open source with fully-user-upgradable parts and modular CPU + display + battery, and a command line interface, they would reach dozens of new customers.

Re: Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon

#304

Post by scarface74 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #301
scarface74 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Apple is doomed any day now”. That’s been the narrative for over 40 years. So which customers aren’t satisfied? The people on HN that want to run Linux on the Apple Watch?

Are you saying that "any day now" and "next 90 years" are the same narrative?

Seeing that Apple and Microsoft both have a history of staying relevant for over 45 years, Microsoft has been one of the most valuable companies in the world for two decades and Apple for over a decade, I would bet on these two companies before any other company.

But it’s not good enough just to be right, you have to be right at the right time. How many products categories failed during the dot com bust that are doing well now?

It’s like me predicting the heat death of the sun. There is a big difference between saying it will happen eventually and that it will happen tomorrow.

Re: Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon

#305

Post by ynx »

naravara wrote: post #266
bell-cot wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...more on short-term gains instead of long-term quality... Considering that Tim has been CEO for 11 1/2 years now, and things are still going incredibly well for Apple...it seems pretty hard to argue that he is too focused on the short term. (FWIW, I mostly agree about their software quality.)

I people tend to have a bit of rose tinted glasses on about Apple's software quality of yore. There have always been big stability issues with new features and apps. And they've simply never been good at the UX for anything that involves a network connection or has to sync across multiple systems (besides Safari). The big difference is that more and more computing requires syncing and networking, which is their tradi…

Been on macOS since 10.3. In general, the .1 or .2 patches were solid, and if one release seemed like a stinker the next one tick-tocked its way into stability/quality pretty reliably, and staying on N-1 version while N was out was a pretty good choice if you wanted to keep your setup as-is without falling TOO far behind.

Also, Safari was really bad, early on. It was rendered unusable for me when a runaway bookmark sync problem with iCloud turned the default set of bookmarks into 30+ thousand copies.

Re: Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon

#306

Post by officeplant »

guhidalg wrote: post #202
sam0x17 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are probably one of the best run companies in the world. I would disagree with this. Although their risk is spread much better than it was in the early 00s, a huge amount of their recurring revenue right now teeters on the brink of destruction in the form of their 30% app store cut and the walled-garden nature of their app store. All it would take is a morally principled, non-lobbied regulator to step in and r…

Commenting on the campus bit.... Apple makes devices, not just software. Good luck developing device from home and dealing with the constant headache of shipping samples around the world. The campus was not a mistake.

Trusted engineers get to take home prototypes. Usually also loaned a maxed out Mac Pro so they have something with enough memory to unpack MacOS's built in system process recording mode. (digging through a 5 minute recording of MacOS took ~~200GB of system memory to unpack and evaluate.)

Re: Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon

#309

Post by wincy »

kenjackson wrote: post #134
mabbo wrote: post #32

Apple's underlying economics haven't changed, so they have not had any reason to over-hire in the first place. Amazon, Google, Meta, Shopify and others are all e-commerce based. There was a clear trend that e-commerce had shifted up due to the pandemic, and looked to be permanent. That bet was wrong, so they all had layoffs. Other companies were willing to hire lots of developers because the ROI on devs was good comp…

Not only that, but you have to recall there was the chip shortage before and during the pandemic. Given Apple's reliance on HW sales, it would be foolish to ramp up hiring when you can't obtain the materials for your products. While at the same time people moved to buying everything online and having Teams/Zoom calls for all work and school. The situation was just very different for Apple vs Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Z…

There was a chip shortage for old machines, bigger fabrication sizes, and because car manufacturers and others stupidly canceled their contracts with chip makers, anticipating a downturn when instead there was a huge boom in demand.

Apple was largely unaffected by this because they are first in line for new fabrication processes, did not cancel their existing chip orders, and uses mostly modern fabs anyway, not bargain basement 40nm+ stuff.

The M1 and other 5nm and smaller chips largely kept pace with demand. It’s never been difficult to find a Mac throughout the pandemic.

Re: Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon

#310

Post by boshalfoshal »

lapcat wrote: post #51
shmatt wrote: post #40

All of these "company X has avoided layoffs" articles are pretty foolish, are all the big layoffs done? Are we even sure there won't be second rounds by summer? Apple could layoff 4% in a week and these same analysts will try to explain why there was no other way

> Apple could layoff 4% in a week Highly unlikely: https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/02/apple-layoffs-tim-cook/

Have you ever worked at a high profile company that laid off people? I have. Everything is good and the narrative is "We aren't like other companies" until it actually happens.

Its suboptimal to explicitly telegraph layoffs from an employee morale perspective. As leadership, its better to ask for forgiveness after the layoff than to ask for permission to lay off.

They may actually get through this without laying off, but its certainly not guaranteed just because the CEO says "no layoffs."

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