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Comment by LoSboccacc | Hacker News Reader

they have to invent new things every year or a complex negative feedback starts because people, analyst and ultimately stock holder won't accept that an iphone iteration is just a little faster and has more battery

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I agree that it is stupid that they have to deliver new things every year or they get negative feedback, but that doesn't mean they should deliver features that make their products worse or that QA should quit doing their job. Apple is a company with many many billions of dollars in the bank. There is no excuse for this. If their QA sucks, fire them all and hire 10,000+ new QA staff. They easily have the money to do that. If they pay all the new QA staff $100,000 each, then that's only $1 bn for the new staff and they'd probably pay a fair bit less to let the existing staff go. Apple has more than $250 bn in cash reserves right now. They can easily afford to do that. In fact, I think that probably should hire a few thousand new QA staff, firing the existing staff should be up to their discretion, but not hiring significantly more when it's clear that they have a QA problem, for a company with so much money, is not acceptable.

Hiring more QA staff doesn’t mean more bugs will be fixed if the bottleneck is engineering output and deadline-driven features. The latter might be better fixed with a re-org.

they have cash reserves but still they issued corporate debt in the US indicating that they're financially savvy AND they don't have free access to their overseas cash hoard. So hiring within US and spending 1bn will cost them a lot more. And if they leverage debt using their overseas cash...well that'd be another pandora's box as they're so big they'll probably move the prices of the entire industry along with every US corporation with funds outside the states...

That’s one explanation but if one company has the resources to innovate and keep up quality control it’s Apple. Especially since they have such a limited number of device models to support. I just hope this is a bad year and not an inflection point.

Such a limited number of device models to support?

iPhone 5S to X (plus iPads, Apple Watches, and the iPod Touch) is a lot. All with different aspect ratios.

That's not a lot. And they have $200B+ in cash.

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