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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

When you've reached all the people that are going to buy iPhones, "services" is where you still have growth. Cloud storage, music, video streaming...

To be sure it is not the hardware company of the 20th Century any longer.

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Then you invent the next iPad. Or Watch.

Or stop carrying about growth. There are plenty of well respected dividend investments, even in tech.

AR glasses aren’t ready until the 30s.

Something which I will never, ever wear. Apple is about supporting healthy lifestyles, not escaping from them. I see value in an Apple version of the HoloLens, but not as a consumer device.

First of all they haven’t stopped looking for the next next big thing. At least I hope they haven’t.

More importantly, services, or really software, can be very exciting too, no less than hardware. Apple isn’t a hardware company, they’re a company that integrate hardware and software into packages that users desire. Services are just the extension of device’s software.

Yes, but are any of Apple's services really that exciting?

There all just 'me too' products levelling the ego system.

Apple TV+ is an odd one for example, it's not needed, there are plenty of streaming services around and they all work fine on apple devices.

They have not tried to do anything interesting or exciting with there services, they've just attached them in the most basic way and watched the cash flow in.

> all just 'me too' products levelling the ego system

Apple created what was pretty much the first real platform for selling music online with iTunes. You could call Apple Music a “me too” move, but they really pivoted an existing business that had been threatened with disruption.

People have enough gadgets already. The services income is largely going to be people switching from other brands services so it’s not much of a change for the user but they now get a more integrated experience.

I haven't owned apple hardware for about a decade, and I was seriously considering buying a MacBook Air to try the ecosystem out again, thinking that I'd give it to my gf if I didn't like it, or if I really liked it I'd upgrade to a MBP and still give her the air.

These comments about services have me reconsidering this plan.

Apple doesn't really push or require their services. The Google and other ones work just as fine as they do on Windows. Apple wins people over by just making their stuff work better and you naturally end up using their stuff simply because its better rather than because you had to.

* Some of their services actually don't work better. Apple Music sucks so people still use Spotify. Which is one of the areas of growth for Apple since they have the ability to make Apple Music the best, they just haven't yet.

The music experience on Apple has sucked for like 15 years, since I last used iTunes.

Apple has had plenty of time to get their shit together with music. The fact that they haven't after 15 years tells me that they don't want to.

So far the services are value add and not required at all. I have a paid iCloud account because I like syncing photos between devices and seamlessly sharing with family, and I need the cloud backup option. The other stuff I don’t have and I don’t feel like I’m missing out on.

That said, this could change on a whim…

The next iPad or Watch only come every decade or so.

About two per decade by my count. And we’re overdue for the next one.

The next iPhone is likely what they are really shooting for.

The next 'watch' would be a relatively minor product. The watch is a fairly pointless niche device. It helps apple and it's another product in the eco system, but it doesn't move the needle that much.

Is moving the needle bigger that a Fortune 120 company? (~$25B). https://www.macobserver.com/news/product-news/apple-wearable...

This includes airpods, aren't airpods a lot more popular than the watch?

Profit can't grow forever. At some point your company is so saturated you have to wring water from stone, literally nickel-and-diming people.

The best is when you buy a new $1400 phone and it starts panhandling you for $4.99 to upgrade your iCloud Backup storage.

They're not asking for $4.99 -- from their perspective, once you sign up, you'll likely stay for years. $4.99 a month for ten years is $600. And you'll likely need to upgrade your iCloud storage at some point, because you'll run out of space, increasing your value even further. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the people paying for iCloud now will remain iCloud customers for the next 20 years, or even longer.

Is there nothing that can be done about this? Must profit continue to grow forever for a company to be "good"?

Plenty of companies don’t have much if any growth, utilities for example. It’s just Apple is no where near the end of the line for growth and new opportunities.

Your company transitions to dividends. And Apple (AAPL) has already begun that.

what's the connection here between growth and dividends? Come to think about it it's something that's carved out in investment products huh: growth stocks, rising dividend stocks, etc. Are growth and dividend payouts semi mutually exclusive or something?

A growing company reinvests profits into further growth, developing new products, building new factories, whatever. When you can no longer grow, you return profits to shareholders.

Wow is that so, is this the case because of some fiduciary responsibility or some regulation or is it good will to those invested in the company?

> "services" is where you still have growth. Cloud storage, music, video streaming

Too bad Apple is still so, so very bad at this. Their services are barely functioning, at best, with multiple WTFs daily.

When they work, they are not even magic. They are the bare minimum of what you expect them to do (like, for example, to quickly and correctly sync photos between me and my family).

Well, seems like it would be relatively easy to make growth happen then. Imagine if Apple properly applied itself and brought the magic from the early iPhone to its cloud services.

I would give them all the money then. And I'm only half-kidding.

Just need to resurrect Steve Jobs to belittle everyone until it's good.

Tim Cook said under oath that they don't need to differentiate themselves because they don't have to compete.

Sorry to bother you, but I read this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31101384) and I was wondering myself: how did XP managed to have the transparent rounded corners? AFAIK, it doesn't use any compositing, yet the system is able to tell what should be "behind" the window to whatever that was in the transparent regions of the corners. The same thing applies (I guess) to the shadows of the right-click menus.

The transparency is a 1-pixel mask bitmap. There's no partial blending required. Shadows of right click menus are different -- Windows actually had a secret, weird compositor ever since Windows 2000 called "layered windows", but the app has to be rewritten to use them.

Thank you for your great explanation, it's super interesting. I read Raspbian has a patched openbox that has aliased rounded corners.

I believ it uses this patch https://github.com/dylanaraps/openbox-patched

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