They are really asking to have the App Store regulated, aren’t they.
It’s not like Facebook is a competitor of theirs, and they’re already making plenty of cash and market share. Why stir the pot and give regulators even more ammunition?
It’s not like Facebook is a competitor of theirs, and they’re already making plenty of cash and market share. Why stir the pot and give regulators even more ammunition?
- Apple was pretty much dead when Steve Jobs came back but he rescued it through a string of great products (iMac, iPod, OSX Macs, iPhone and iPad)
- When Tim Cook succeeded Steve he knew he wasn’t a product person so Jony Ive took on that role
- Thanks to (mainly) the iPhone Apple stock started climbing and more and more investors started taking an interest in the company
- The iPhone 6 and 6S were the turning point - the 6 sending the stock through the roof and the 6S crashing it. As far as investors are concerned, the trouble with product companies are that you’re only one quarter away from disaster
- Ive struggled with his grief over losing Jobs, plus the weight of being the company figurehead without Jobs to shield him and gradually withdrew from Apple
- Acquiring Beats and launching Apple Music, plus the revenue from the ever growing App Store offered Tim Cook a way out, in the eyes of investors.
- Apple changed their strategy to become a services company that values recurring revenue rather than one reliant on continuing product innovation. Cook was quite explicit about this but it’s taken a few years for the shift from products company to services to become apparent.
Apple's hardware revenue, both in general and in specific categories such as iPhone, Mac, and iPad, is higher now than ever before. Plus now they have Watch, AirPods, etc.
Apple is pursuing "services" revenue simply because it can. It's a supplement for hardware revenue, not a replacement. It's easy money, because customers are locked in. The margins on "services" revenue are practically obscene.
If you look at the trajectory of iPhone sales (others devices barely matter), its reaching a peak. As are smartphone sales in general.
Last quarter, iPhone was 49% of Apple's total revenue, other devices 28%. Obviously iPhone is the biggest, but I wouldn't say 28% barely matters. That 28% is by itself bigger than most companies in the world.
> its reaching a peak
You could have said the same thing in, say, 2018. There are peaks and valleys. I'm not sure anyone can predict the future. In any case, hardware accounts for 77% of Apple's revenue currently.
Revenue is higher in 2021, but probably as a result of selling higher priced SKUs.
At this scale these types of strategic changes play out on a large time horizon (decades) so from an external perspective it is difficult to know.
If Jobs were still CEO I'd expect him to be continually looking for the next breakthrough in consumer technology. Are the leaders at apple currently doing that? I don't know. I have heard that they may be investing into a self driving car play.
Also if Jobs were still CEO I wouldn't be surprised to have seen Apple behave as they have in the past 15 years (slurping up easy revenue like headphones, recurring revenue services) but as a visionary Jobs would concurrently be intensely focused on the future.
I would argue in Steve's calculation, Tim Cook was suppose to settle any dispute between Ive and Scot Forstall. And Ive would stick to Industrial Product Design. While the Software would be from another Team of UI expert.
Instead Tim Cook gave every design decision to Ive. And Tim Cook "merged" those group together in the name of "collaboration". A few from HIG Group retired due to conflict with Ive. And we end up with iOS7.
>- Acquiring Beats and launching Apple Music, plus the revenue from the ever growing App Store offered Tim Cook a way out, in the eyes of investors.
I am pretty sure that is Eddy Cue's idea. Arguably the current Apple seems to be Eddy Cue's Apple. Apple Music, Apple TV+.
It only affects EU users though.
Apple's about to launch a new virtual reality headset in just over 2 months, that'll directly compete with Facebook.[0] Facebook's product, unlike pre-iPhone smartphones, is very decent, and Apple seems to target a high price, so the competition will likely be fierce.
[0]: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/09/04/apple-reality-pro-to-be...
So it isn't about presence (after all, we have and have had VR/AR/XR equipment for quite some time now), but rather about relative ubiquity and obsolescence of what came before (in this case, replacing smart phones).
I might have a blind spot here (or lack imagination), but I think some of the reasons why I don't see these glasses making mobile phones obsolete in a 10 year time frame as a confluence of:
- people in the US by and large prefer not to wear things on their faces (is it seen as weak, esthetically unpleasing, sign of old age?)
- mobile phones (and smart watches, etc.) provide a good balance between mobility and utility
- if VR/AR/XR moves to contact lenses, the first point goes away but you will still need input mechanisms etc. and I doubt that contact lens formats will be able to supplant photographing/video and music playback which has become such a big use case for mobile phones.
Arguing against myself (somewhat): I think for VR/AR/XR to be truly successful, you need to feed the experience directly into the brain because that gives you high fidelity, high mobility, and removes the physical barriers that a contraption on your head brings. But that is even further out than 20 years, assuming humans don't retaliate against the idea of interpersonal communications that is so heavily mediated (read: manipulated) by a company (this happens in social media already).
- have enough compute to render the virtual artifacts
- are self-powered (maybe from electrical impulses from your body?)_
- have some way to get input
- can power your headphones
- have storage (or networking capability)
WITHOUT you having to carry another device on you (likely a smart watch or smart ring or smart phone).
Anyway, I think we're getting bogged down in boring device debate. The more interesting thing (which you allude to somewhat) is how weird / different the future virtual world will be. My money is on it being more Borg-like and less Matrix-like.
You'd do much better comparing them to smart watches and second screens. That's where they can actually work.
You ask good questions! But you make the same mistake as you accuse the tech market theorists of: You seem to think you know what is (or isn't) going to happen, and what dimensions an unreleased product should be measured on.
Apple like Nintendo doesn't primarily market their products based on specs, or on expected use cases. Novel interfaces and uses are far more important to creating demand for a new product than meeting the spec and feature expectations of the market (or market watchers) before the product is announced.
[0] https://www.engadget.com/2006-11-21-palms-ed-colligan-laughs...
Apple is willing to take on greater antitrust risk for revenue now rather than later. I'm eagerly awaiting their earnings call.
In a way, yes: both are competing for ad dollars in the iOS space.
If Facebook is forced to slow down or increase ad prices, those are dollars that may end up in Apple ad network, if the customer is targeting iOS users.
Probably if they make more profit then X then the bosses on top get a GIANT bonus. If profits don't grow but are still profitable the bonus will be smaller, and we all know this guys want a bigger yacht or sport car each year. If in 5-10 years Apple will not be good for bonuses they management retire or move to the next place.
If Facebook is not a competitor then there's no issue is there? The regulator would step in if there were unfair competition. If they're not competing then there can't be any unfair competition.
Sarcasm aside, if Apple isn't competing, and charges all social media services for the boost, what is unfair?
I remember seeing it before launch at a rooftop party in Chicago. The Motorola engineer said “it’s going to suck, Apple made us cripple it”.
Apple learned; I guess FB gave up.
The lesson wasn’t “this doesn’t work” the lesson was “we need to control this completely for it to work”
Also for a laugh watch Jobs demoing the Rokr on stage, you’ll see him visibly get frustrated with the UI. IIRC.
Remember that the iPhone wasn't really that good at launch, either. No copy/paste, no App Store, etc. There is a scene in the movie Sex and the City, which was filmed pre-launch (right?). One character hands an iPhone to the other, who looks at it for a few seconds and says something along the lines of "I don't know how to use this" and hands it back.