Apple’s $1T Milestone Reflects Rise of Powerful Megacompanies

Apple's competitive edge isn't just its hardware, just as Google's competitive edge isn't just its software. Apple has decades of user research, hoards of talent, piles and piles of IP (patents etc.), mountains of cash and, yep, you bet they have data, huge warehouses of it. We haven't even mentioned the app-store ecosystem.

You are about as able to compete with Apple as you are with Google et al. It's a different kind game, but make no mistake, taking on Apple isn't as simple as cloning their hardware.

Even with the growth in services (this doesn't reflect the recent quarters numbers), the hardware sales just dominate their numbers by so much.

I don’t fear Google one bit. I fear the out-of-control US military which has access, at will, to all of Google’s data, with or without a court order, should they ever desire it strongly enough.

They cause enough damage to the industry by being crazy bent on lock-in. They are even worse than MS in this. And with more money, that damage will be only worse.

But Apple is making enough user hostiles moves (raising prices, suppressing features, nagging for paid services, etc) that I beliebe in the long term their margin and market share will erode.

But by then I guess they just sell it to Google or Facebook.

So nope. No way that they go away...

But their main business model, as far as I can tell, is making money by selling premium hardware.

Facebook et al. make money by collecting and selling other people's data.

Proprietary hardware, constantly pissing off developers and customers... Great company /s

I dont know why Apple gets a pass for being so anti-competitive.

I remember the annoyance of buying music on itunes and being forced to burn it to CD just to play on my mp3 player.

Today, its a multi thousand dollar event to publish an app on Apple's store, vs the insignificant cost of publishing on Android and Web.

(If anyone has an idea how to reduce the cost of compiling my React Native app and publishing on Apple, I'm all ears, but I'm constantly being told to spend 2k+.)

I also like Google’s products like Play Movies, Play Music + advertisement free YouTube, Google Assistant, and GCP. I feel like I am ‘leaking’ too much of my private data with Google Assistant but it is such a good product that not using it is a little painful.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-04/apple-s-1...

And I think that's why the NYT article quickly moves on from its clickbait headline (they had to put that number up there!) to far more interesting comparisons.

In 1980 GM was considered a monster with $2.8 billion in profit, number two on the Fortune 500 list that year (behind Exxon Mobil).

Apple's profit today rolled back to 1980 would be about $16.x billion. Roughly six times that of GM then, and roughly four times that of Exxon, the high mark.

Using the BLS inflation adjustment calculator, GM's profit in 1980 is about $9 billion today.

That'll get you ranked roughly #25-30 on the Fortune 500 today.

#25 in 1980 was Union Carbide at about $550m in profit, or ~$1.75b in today's dollar. That's good for about #200 today.

The corporate profit boom isn't primarily an inflation based phenomenon, it's the epic expansion of the global economy and the way the large S&P 500 type firms have benefited in an outsized manner.

I can see the inflation around me. Historically and currently countries have an economic crisis where the government has hyperinflation.

Id rather have gold than government money.

NOW HIRING ALL NETRUNNERS!

We have commercial megaprojects like SpaceX, but the cost of this is the society around it a) can't afford to run meaningful not-for-profit space projects, and b) can't afford to keep the baseline level of support for its citizens high enough for them to not spend more time worrying about how to allocate their meager resources than they can doing things which actually advance society.

Is that a fair tradeoff?

Yes it does.

>But I would imagine the very wealthy would have a big interest in effectively researching longevity, revolutionizing healthcare, faster travel, maybe even building a 'comfortable' space station in a Lagrangian point

Your view of what the very wealthy have an interest in is naive.

The rich aren't a necessary piece of the puzzle when it comes to investment in areas that help the public good either, the money that is handed out by NASA, NSF, NIH, DOJ, ect is just as effective at enabling research as money from private benefactors. The reason we it looks like the private sector has provided such huge benefits here is the amount of money they are spending has risen considerably while public funding has fallen considerably.

Now, I'm not saying there is something wrong with multi billionares existing, but to suggest that they are in anyway a positive force beyond what can be provided by the public sector (where at least then there's accountability), shouldn't be a reason to let the rich run around and do whatever they want gobbling up even more of the resources within our economy.

Political donations.

Apple seem to be pretty restrained on this front, but other industries can just buy entire carveouts for themselves. The insurance industry holding back healthcare; the tax preparation industry holding back tax reform.

References:

- https://unu.edu/media-relations/releases/global-income-inequ...

- https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality#the-la...

There is plenty of competition. If you don't want what Apple sells at the price it sells it at, you buy an Android or Windows device - like most of the world does.

They produce their own hardware, running their own OSes with their own app stores, their own web browsers and their own entertainment platform. Instead Google and Microsoft were struck down repeatedly for trying to create similar lock-ins but on arbitrary hardware or arbitrary OSes.

There is an existence proof that proves that's not true. Microsoft and Google are doing the same thing - just not as successfully.

Apple creates lock-in by brute force: you have an iDevice, so you're using iServices because it's convenient and you'll migrate over all your other tech to iDevices too because the synergy is compelling and there's simply no other option (good luck trying to use iMessage with your Android friends, or consuming iTunes content on your Microsoft tablet).

How does iMessage preclude you from texting Android users? On the other hand, thier are dozens of cross platform messaging apps.

iTunes is available for Windows. Even without that being the case, iTunes purchased music has been DRM free for a decade and you can transfer most of your purchased digital movies over to Amazon, Google Play, or Vudu using Movies Anywhere.

Even with Android and Windows, Google and Microsoft don't have that luxury: you may be using a Google phone but that doesn't mean you're using a Google laptop (simply because ChromeOS is not always feasible), or you may be using a Microsoft laptop but Microsoft phones are simply no longer a thing.

Seeing that Apple sells at least 10-15 times more iPhones than Macs, most iPhone users are obviously Windows users. Apple sees this, they released iTunes for Windows over 15 years ago and they have iCloud extensions for Chrome, IE, and Firefox for windows to sync bookmarks.

It's worth remembering that what Apple does with Mac and iPhone is the norm in most other consumer products and in most other industries. It is not normal to have physical products built by one company that has at its core a platform fully controlled by another company. In fact I'm struggling to think of an example outside of computer operating systems.

Revenue has grown because they were able to raise prices and because they sold more services. I think the room for price increases is limited.

So it's all down to services now. I think there is room for growth given their high income customer base, but it will change their business model in ways that will spark many debates on here.