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Comment by ordu | Hacker News Reader

> We believe that the initial research and design labour costs can be ignored since these costs have been spread out over different models of the iPhone and the contribution of the research and development cost is increasingly negligible for the newer iPhones.

Is it? I believe that there are hundreds (or thousands?) of engineers working for Apple full time. And I can see that just keeping linux at my home computer updated needs combined efforts of hundreds of people at very least. So it seems very unlikely to me that R&D costs for newer iPhones are negligible. Am I right?

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The article says Apple’s surplus is 60%. Looking at Apple’s 2020 annual report, their pretax income was 25% of sales. If you subtract out services, it is 11%.

Another way to look at it is Apple’s company-wide R&D and SG&A were 25% of the costs to create products (not services).

So the R&D costs are not negligible and the article probably overestimates the amount of exploitation. On the other hand, Apple made $67 billion before tax, so they could afford to pay their workers more.

Did i misread the article? It seems it only counts assembly workers.

Shouldnt the costs for sales and marketing, management layers, store janitors, etc. also be included in variable capitol and the stores and buildings housing them in constant capitol (pro rata)

> Shouldnt the costs for sales and marketing, management layers, store janitors, etc. also be included in variable capitol...

I do not know whether they should or not. I'm not an economist, I tried to read some textbooks at some point, but finished not a one. I've decided to read article because I was interested how it is going to deal with the costs of R&D. I had no clear idea how to do it. And with first read-through I missed the quoted excerpt, so I though that it should be a part of a variable capital, though I was surprised it was not mentioned in the article. I reread article and found the statement that R&D costs should be ignored.

Yes, it’s incredibly silly and ridiculous. It’s no coincidence that most of the people I know in real life who support socialism also agree with the statement “We’ve already invented everything”.

Meanwhile we are still in the dark ages technology-wise.

Let me know when a worker cooperative assembles the next iPhone from scratch.

Why don’t supporters of socialism assemble worker cooperatives and prove to us they can innovate?

Not to burst your anecdotal bubble but I’m a socialist and I agree it’s silly and ridiculous. But what do I know, I guess I just also consider tech workers to be workers.

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