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Apple lacks strategic vision

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Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#71

Post by cosmicgadget »

drewbeck wrote: post #40

I find it very strange to make this judgement by comparing Apple to Microsoft, nvidia, Meta. None of those companies are in the same business as Apple. If Apple fails to “beat” these companies they will still have incredibly popular consumer products and successful services. The competition is only in the mind of business writers and pundits; it maybe matters for the stock market but Apple has never made their stock…

Apple is in all of their businesses. OS ecosystem, graphics hardware, AR/VR.

They don't need to beat these companies outright, but the more they fail to provide value relative to the competition, the more they will see users leave.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#72

Post by kettlecorn »

I think Apple is doing fine and is reasonably well positioned. The pre-Cook years basically established the skeleton of the company and Cook has fleshed it out with flesh and muscle. Now the company is far more of a Goliath with vast resources to help it weather strategic pivots, in addition to a loyal and trusting customer base.

Looking ahead to the next decade or so I believe what we're likely on course for is some sort of AI OS. AI will be able to vibe-code apps for you and you'll be able to manage and dispatch individual agents to do tasks. There will be a messy transitionary period that lasts a while from today's software.

Apple has a trusting customer base, they have tremendous hardware prowess, they have cross-platform cloud services, and they have design sense to figure out how to establish these new models. I think if a new form of computing emerges Apple basically gets a free first swing at it, in terms of consumer trust. We've seen that with their VR headset, that while a dud was given far more interest and attention than Facebook's and Microsoft's offerings.

I do think they show signs of vulnerability as well, even if I think they're less than their strengths. Apple's famously design focused culture seems to be cracking a bit and giving way to more Microsoft / Google style PM-led culture. That can be OK, but I think PM led cultures are sometimes almost too strategic for their own good, like someone you can tell is a salesmen not a friend, and that can result in gradual brand erosion.

A simple example of this happening is Apple's website. Like Microsoft the tabs at the top of their website now reflect the company's internal organization, not what makes the most sense to the user. In the Jobs era they insisted that there would be no separate "store" tab, a redundancy because the whole website was a store, but I suspect that changed because the "Store" division within Apple wants that extra prominence.

If Apple isn't careful with enough missteps they may dilute their brand and Google / Microsoft may seem just as appealing for early adopters of emerging AI OSs.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#73

Post by ryanobjc »

lapcat wrote: post #47

The author compares Apple to Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia. Broadly speaking, each company is in "tech", but looking more specifically, they are fundamentally in very different categories of tech. Apple is a hardware company. Its primary products are smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, and tablets. That's always been true, since they were "Apple Computer". On the other hand, Alphabet and M…

Apparently Mac sales are seeing a big growth spurt lately. This isnt obvious at the Apple bottom line because iPhone dominates, but they are growing that market segment!

The apple silicon has driven a ton of people to laptops, and the windows 11 migration nightmare has given people an option: why bother buying a new pc laptop to run windows 11, just switch to the apple macbook air.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#74

Post by drewbeck »

bigyabai wrote: post #59
eirikbakke wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the Apple Silicon chips even include specialized cores that allow LLMs to run locally on both iPhones and MacBooks. (See the "Foundation Models Framework".)

Which was a day late and a dollar short, even at release. Those ANEs are only really good at inference, and even then you get faster results using your Apple Silicon GPU. They're slow, incomplete, not integrated into the GPU architecture (like Nvidia's) therefore killing any chance of Apple Silicon seeing serious AI server usage. If you want to brag about Apple's AI hardware prowess, talk about MLX. The ANE was a pre…

These chips were designed to be SoC/SiPs for consumer hardware. It feels odd to judge them for their suitability in servers.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#75

Post by nine_k »

SoftTalker wrote: post #45
alphazard wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of these products could be expected from any well run company. They are both very polished versions of something that already existed. The direction to optimize in was already clear. No one wants to compare Apple to a generic well run company, they want to compare Apple to itself a decade or two ago. Others have said that if Jobs were still alive, AR would be ubiquitous by now, and everyone would have a stylish…

Even Jobs wasn’t perfect. NeXT machines were technically amazing and also beautiful but they never really found many customers. He also thought the Segway would transform society but it ended up being sort of a joke and best known for being used by fat mall cops.

NeXT software though became the base of OS X.

BTW Mac Pros did not find many customers either. I bet Silicon Graphics did not sell very many boxes; it was important who bought these boxes.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#76

Post by bigyabai »

drewbeck wrote: post #74
bigyabai wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which was a day late and a dollar short, even at release. Those ANEs are only really good at inference, and even then you get faster results using your Apple Silicon GPU. They're slow, incomplete, not integrated into the GPU architecture (like Nvidia's) therefore killing any chance of Apple Silicon seeing serious AI server usage. If you want to brag about Apple's AI hardware prowess, talk about MLX. The ANE was a pre…

These chips were designed to be SoC/SiPs for consumer hardware. It feels odd to judge them for their suitability in servers.

The cores and architecture was designed for smartphones, it got put in desktops and rackmount servers anyways. I can judge it for whatever the product is, it's not a untold mystery why Apple Silicon servers aren't flying off the shelves in the AI boom.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#78

Post by david38 »

Wow. This whole comment section is full of armchair CEOs saying how the iPhone, ARM laptops. tablets, and AirPods are just inevitable outcomes.

Yet nobody else was able to do it. Microsoft, for all its power and money, couldn’t make it happen. Samsung+Google have come closest, but even then, Apple dominates the profits.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#79

Post by lapcat »

ryanobjc wrote: post #73
lapcat wrote: post #47

The author compares Apple to Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia. Broadly speaking, each company is in "tech", but looking more specifically, they are fundamentally in very different categories of tech. Apple is a hardware company. Its primary products are smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, and tablets. That's always been true, since they were "Apple Computer". On the other hand, Alphabet and M…

Apparently Mac sales are seeing a big growth spurt lately. This isnt obvious at the Apple bottom line because iPhone dominates, but they are growing that market segment! The apple silicon has driven a ton of people to laptops, and the windows 11 migration nightmare has given people an option: why bother buying a new pc laptop to run windows 11, just switch to the apple macbook air.

> Apparently Mac sales are seeing a big growth spurt lately.

That's not really clear. Mac sales actually peaked during the pandemic, around 2022.

Apparently there was also some tariff fear-driven buying this year. Indeed, I purchased a new MacBook Pro earlier this year for that very reason.

If you compare, say, 2024 Mac revenue to 2014 Mac revenue, there was an increase of 25% over that period, but inflation increased even more over the same period. (Unfortunately, Apple no longer announces unit sales.)

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#80

Post by amelius »

cosmicgadget wrote: post #37
amelius wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes a lot of strategic sense but if you have so much money on the bank, then who wouldn't buy a silicon design firm to design your CPUs in house? I bet everyone here on HN would have suggested to do that if asked in a board meeting. The big surprise was how long it took Apple to bite the bullet. Anyway, despite this, Apple still has their castle built in someone else's kingdom, namely TSMC.

Nothing wrong with being fabless. Plus Apple could switch to inferior silicon and probably convince its userbase that they are the creme de la creme.

> Nothing wrong with being fabless.

Sure, if you're able to buy all the required production slots, as Apple has been doing in the past.

However, with new market pressure from AI this might not be possible in the future ...

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