Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
blog.pragmaticengineer.com
blog.pragmaticengineer.com
> Amazon, for instance, hired about 780,000 people during the pandemic. Meta, too, had more than doubled its staff in this period, going from about 40,000 to 87,000. Even Microsoft had hired about 77,000 people just before the pandemic.
> Apple, in comparison, is believed to have hired under 20,000 people during the period of the pandemic.
Can't layoff people you didn't hire.
Besides, if they lay anyone off, it'll be through retail (already happening in their third-party channel sales staff, who are employed by Apple but work in stores like Best Buy) and eventually retail closures when/if they can do it without being accused of more union-busting.
Stripe, as an example, drastically slowed down hiring when the pandemic hit expecting an economic slowdown. It then turned out that so much commerce moved to online—rather than stopped—so they ramped up hiring to meet demand.
The bet that companies like Shopify and Stripe [1] made was that COVID created a “new normal”; much of the economic activity that went online would stay there. They were wrong, so there were layoffs to correct it.
[0]: https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team
[1]: https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons-email...
People quit after layoffs, which means attrition isn’t as balanced as when the layoffs were planned. Talent isn’t distributed equal to business need, meaning the company will lose great people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Depending on how it’s executed, the company could burn bridges. Even if they do it well, some people would never come back.
It’s not like the people hired were working for free so I’ve never personally put much stock in the, “employees were screwed over.”
But again, it depends on some of the items above. If a company is doing well, less-direct revenue teams are fine. In a sketchier environment, not so.
Maybe I've been lucky, but every time I've been looking for a job I've had AT LEAST two options.
People move cities, sell houses, buy houses, give up apartments, plan their finances, and plan their career around their job all the time. Investing a year learning the ropes at a company, finding ways to fit into the structures, etc. only to have the rug pulled out from under you just as you're starting to get the hang of things...
> and they probably got severance packages for more than the average American makes in a year.
Maybe I've been unlucky, but I've never had a job where my expectation of a severance package was anything more than 2-4 weeks wages.
The FAANGS have severance of several months pay, which to the OP’s point, is likely more than the annual median wage in the US.
These laid off workers have some of the best “job loss” conditions around.
Those jobs don’t exist. If there are they are such a minuscule number of openings it is not worth thinking about them.
> If you took a calculated risk and took the job anyway, well that’s on you.
Let me break it to you: almost everyone works because otherwise they would go hungry, loose their home and die in sad circumstances. People who don’t are statistical anomalies.
Are you saying that by having the misfortune of not being born independently rich and working basically any job the poster “took a risk” which is “on them”?
He is saying that. Its the Puritan Christianity's mentality of blaming the poor for not working hard. Repurposed into the modern free market capitalist ideology where its used to blame the ills of the system on the victims - "You havent worked hard enough" "You werent smart enough" etc...
You got many offers precisely because a lot of companies were (over)hiring. And the fact that you had many options on the table allowed you to get a better compensation (either because you negotiated, or because everyone else did so the industry standard increased). You benefitted from these hiring binges.
When that was the case, I saw a grand total of 0 complains by tech workers that tech companies were hiring too much; it benefitted them immensely but that did not translate in any article praising CEO for taking these risks.
Could these companies keep on these workers ? Many can ! But a hallmark of good governance is having a budget and taking care of your expenses. At your household level, you can probably afford to pay for Netflix, Disney+, HBOMax and Amazon prime at the same time. And maybe you did during COVID because you were watching TV more. But now that you are back to doing more "real life" things, you maybe don't need them all. It's not that you risk being evicted because you can't pay rent; you are probably still saving a bit of money every month. But that is not a reason to not ask yourself "do I really need these all now ?" and if the answer is negative, to do something about it like cutting one or two. What is someone then told you "But look, you can currently afford all these streaming services ! You should keep paying for them all for as long as you can, and since you have them, make sure you reorganise your life to schedule some time to watch them all !".
(For just one example, a household has a single non-varying income stream and everything else is expense. Large companies have many revenue making depts, lines of business, products, etc)
I got multiple offers when I was looking for a job in 1999, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018
Then those people are naive. I never plan my life around an employer. I plan my life around my employability. I wouldn’t move somewhere that there weren’t other jobs in the area. Well now I wouldn’t work at any company that wasn’t fully remote
While a good principle, I'll posit there are a lot of more or less specialized professional jobs--especially at more senior levels--where you can't just walk across the street and slide into a similar role at a different company. Even if it's in the same general area, a 2 hour commute each way is probably not sustainable.
Yes I’m self aware enough to understand the irony of the only reason I fell into my role at $BigTech at 48 years old is because I did become overly specialized in enterprise dev + cloud.
If you're an embedded systems programmer, maybe you can hack on some Javascript but no one is probably going to pay you very senior comp to do junior programmer work.
It is certainly true you don't want to be too specialized in general. You didn't want to be the Y2K guru in 2001 or the world's expert in performance optimization for some specific computer architecture that isn't manufactured any longer.
When I took my current job, there were probably a few companies in the general area that would have been somewhat obvious potential matches. But it was sheer coincidence that the one I connected with first through a connection happened to be the closest major tech company to my house.
On the other side, how many jobs are (were?) available to the generic software engineer who could do the DS&A monkey dance (junior/mid) and “design Twitter” and talk about “scope” and “impact@ in STAR format (senior).
I'm not disagreeing with you, but your tone lacks empathy. Fuck them, I got mine, those idiots deserve what they got for not being smart enough.
These are real people who lost real jobs, not just some cells in an excel sheet.
Even back in 1996 when “having mine” meant making $33K a year as a hybrid computer operator/programmer, I saved aggressively. Again, I was 22 years old and had enough sense to be paranoid about depending on one specific job.
Incorrect. Many of those people already had a job when the moved to Amazon/Microsoft/wherever.
Since no one makes a horizontal movement, all the roles they vacated when moving where lower roles. And this argument goes recursively when the old company fills those roles.
This means that most people who did not have a job prior to the hiring explosion and had a job after the hiring explosion, had low-paying jobs, in very low roles.
People who had been there 12, 13, 16 years; people who had been just promoted. People who were senior management. People who were engineers. People who were on mat leave...
Management there effectively fed people's employee numbers through a random generator. And people who (IMHO naively/foolishly) gave their lives to the company suffered.
Decisions to overhire during the pandemic impacted people who had nothing to do with that decision. And not just because of the layoffs, but also because the company growth during that period was so intense that it led to onboarding and project mgmt difficulties as well.
> And people who (IMHO naively/foolishly) gave their lives to the company suffered.
they didn't "give their lives" for nothing, right? Didn't they trade it for an incredibly desirable compensation package?
But my experience when working there is that there are definitely people whose emotional (and physical) engagement with their jobs goes well beyond just what is required to get that compensation.
edit Rewritten to take into account sokoloff's remarks, thanks!
I was also hired for a remote role at $BigTech in mid 2020. Fortunately I didn’t get laid off. But I wouldn’t exactly be bitter that I got paid 50% more during the interim. I save/invested/paid off debt with 80% of the difference in take home pay.
Yes, I’ve been laid off before when I was making a lot less in 2012. I made sure I had savings then
The biggest thing I got from the pandemic is flexible work arrangements. But I and everyone I knew all wanted to get back out there. Just not back out on public transport to work. We were doing things online because there was no other option.
But once the borders opened and restrictions eased, everyone did what they said they would. Travel. Eat out with their friends. Play their old sports. Who in their right mind would think they would continue to stay home and do everything online?
Even the "experts" were flip flopping globe affecting decisions, we had no idea what the right solution was and how long it would be... 3 months? 6? Permanent?
Long term decisions had to be with numerous unknowns, it is clear now they were wrong but I am not certain I would have made the right choice either.
I wouldn't go so far to say they wanted an excuse to fire, but they definitely bet the wrong odds.
From a theoretical perspective at this level of scale the number of engineers in particular does not scale with the ebb and flow of the selling of ads to the degree of the layoffs. Many were for divisions that were not related to ads, except for getting funded by them.
Obviously if there is not funding for these other divisions because the ad business dries up there would be large cuts, but these companies are still very very profitable even on lower ad sales. So perhaps they did not have a positive ROI, and that is fine, but a far different reason than waving vaguely at interest rates.
When the risk-free rate increases, the RoI hurdle for any investment also increases. That's how economic stimulus by lowering interest rates works, by creating incentive to "try things" (by removing the incentive to "park your money").
Advertisers on Google now bid on ads based on an environment where they are more conservative (because they have better alternative investments), where their input costs have increased (labor, raw materials, energy), where some industries (like mortgage refinancing) have been dramatically curtailed directly by the change in rates, and for some companies, buying back their own bonds is more attractive than advertising on Google with a portion of their spend.
Google can look out on the horizon and conclude "OK, we had a really great business when rates were near zero; now we have a pretty damn good business with rates several points higher than that, but it's definitely not as good as it was, so we need to tweak our frugality dial in response."
It's not like all those people who wanted to travel and go out were actually making plans and booking post pandemic flights back in 2020.
We're lucky that things are solidly back to normal this soon. Not just the restrictions that kept us inside, but the massive paranoia that made many fear the outside, and some new, worse virus
Yes on the whole most people do go out and travel again, but on average much less frequently than they used to because they retained the desire but not the same habits. They find they can scratch the itch with fewer outings.
All it takes is for people to go out 20% less than they used to, averaged out, and that’s a massive shift in economic terms that can heavily impact businesses.
That said, I'm pretty sure the overall picture is that things didn't change as much post-pandemic as many predicted. Travel is pretty much back to normal. Dining out is somewhat back to normal--though you need to factor in inflation effects as well. If I drive into the nearest major city, traffic sure seems back to normal--especially mid-week. The shift to remote seen in tech is something of an outlier.
You need to provide some data to back this up, because all of the data I've seen (and all of the full flights I've been on) says the opposite.
I do want to visit friends, go out in nature and once in a while eat at a restaurant. But for me, I am so happy to wfh 80% of the time and do 99% of shopping and groceries online, that has certainly stuck. And while I am a bit more of a recluse than most people I know, almost everybody is happy to work from home at least some of the time and does far more online shopping than before the pandemic.
Maybe this varies between countries. Or social circles. I certainly see a lot traffic again so people do like to move around again and get stuck in traffic jams a lot, but something _has_ changed for at least _some_ people. A couple of years ago working from home was unheard of, now a company seems out of touch if they don't allow it at all.
As someone who lived in Atlanta during the restaurant revolution, it went from "I could do better than this at home" to most places being able to put together an interesting plate I couldn't/wouldn't do at home. And oddly, pre-pandemic prices didn't change that much when it happened.
My working theory is that restaurants only strive to be a bit better than the average restaurant in an area.
Not that I ever used grocery pickup during the pandemic, my anecdotal observation is that, at least around where I live, you see very few pickers in stores for curbside pickup at this point. Curbside delivery/home delivery/meal kits/etc. are by all indications extremely niche from what I can see. I'm sure things have changed for some small minority however.
Neither of these are true. The truth lies somewhere in the grey area between these two things.
> Who in their right mind would think they would continue to stay home and do everything online?
Hindsight is a helluva drug. Covid has made several lasting, possibly permanent, marks on society and our habits. Nobody could say what those were going to be.
The world is a lot nicer when you (correctly) assume that everyone is doing their best with the tools and the information they have to work with.
Your comment reads as someone who likes to look back on the past with all the knowledge of today as if it was so incredibly obvious.
That said there will be some significant knock on effects from pandemic that will be favorable for those companies however not as large as originally thought.
Aren't the cuts smaller in size than the increased head count going into the pandemic, which would indicate there was a shift, but not one as large as they had prepared for?
Check zoom user growth graph, something like 300% growth was common for the software supporting this transition. Not everything was positioned as good that, but the pull was there.
And now that it's 2023, the stock market expects them to do layoffs.
Exec compensation is closely tied to share price.
In business management, financial markets, hiring, investment, real estate patterns etc etc.
There have been some lasting effects, but it was always clearly a temporary, if not prolonged situation.
> it was always clearly a temporary, if not prolonged situation
Oh, they knew it was temporary, and they knew they'd do a mass layoff when that time came. This was always the plan.
Those businesses boomed during the pandemic and deflated once it was over.
The Amazon layoffs numbers represent corporate roles.
Someone is comparing Apples and Oranges
Meta (and Amazon) weren't with the hiring boom.
any source for that claim?
Global workforce as of end of 2021: 44.8% women, 55.2% men
Only field and customer support: 48.3% women, 51.7% men
Corporate Employees: 32.8% women, 67.2% men
44.8% (global_women) = corp_employees * 32.8% + field_employees * 48.3%
55.2% (global_men) = corp_employees * 67.2% + field_employees * 51.7%
corp_employees: 22.5%
field_employees: 77.5%What I calculated is the absolute ratio. when looking at new hires you need to look at turnover. Turnover rate is significantly higher for field jobs (sometimes intentionally, e.g. Amazon always hire more people before the holidays for a term). Therefore, when looking at new hires, the ratio is skewed even more towards field workers.
At the end of the day, Amazon has around 300K corp emplyees, of those, they are laying off 18K+. This 6% ratio is similar to other tech companies.
It’s unfortunate (and it says a lot about our current situation) that that behaviour is worthy of note.
> Jobs left one last blessing for Apple shareholders in his decision to elevate Cook.
I don’t understand the obsession with shareholders. It’s all about money money money, good products and respect for the customer be dammed. Cook was a fantastic choice to fill Apple’s coffers, but an awful one for those who identify with Apple’s (old) values of making something good.
That’s such a leading question, I’m genuinely wondering if you’re arguing in good faith.
I’m saying neither of those. I’m talking about how Apple’s leadership transition from Jobs to Cook changed focus from what the company used to do best.
¹ Let’s see if that continues with Evans Hankey leaving.
Don't make this mistake. Integrity and humility have always always always been rare traits in high profile, high power leaders.
Tim Cook himself, a decade ago, might have had something to say about that¹.
> It is possible to do what's best for both, and Apple still does that plenty
My objection is the trend more than the current state. A decade ago it would have been unthinkable to me that Apple would ever have ads in any OS. Today, I’m dreading the moment they go “full Windows” and start shoving third-party ads in Spotlight, then Safari, then the Dock².
¹ https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tim-cook-soundly-rej...
² Yes, I am exaggerating to make a point. At least I hope it’s an exaggeration.
It’s analogous to HP of old, which is no great surprise given the founders.
They could be a noodle shop. The distinction isn’t relevant to the point: they are shoving ads in our faces, from their own apps from their own OSs. Always pushing you to the subscriptions. Everything Cook does indicates it will only get worse.
However I don't think Tim Cook in that moment was necessarily saying that accessibility was non-negotiable, shareholders be damned, it's also possible he was taking a broad view of shareholder interest that is about more than immediate ROI.
A job he doesn’t need¹ and which he’s aware he’ll leave in the not-too-distant future.² The only thing stopping Cook from making different decisions is himself.
¹ He’s filthy rich.
² https://wccftech.com/tim-cook-not-running-apple-in-10-years-...
https://9to5mac.com/2023/01/26/apple-china-website-censorshi...
The collision of politics and business is never good though, but in most cases the company has to bow politely, at least in the near term.
So as a consequence:
* Apple is hoarding cash to an extent that business analysts dislike (although Tim has reduced this to some extent)
* Teams are being run leaner than they'd like to be (not nearly as much so as in the pre-iOS times, admittedly)
* Conversely, since the company builds good reserves and not too much bloat in good times, it can and will avoid overreacting to bad times.
I was juts making the point that all else being equal, you wouldn’t invest in a company that doesn’t try to make handsome profit, which was the suggestion. And Apple makes handsome profit, and then some.
The general expectation for any company is to milk the daylights out of every quarter they can. Either put your money back into growth or hand it back to investors - cash reserves bad even though they obviously allow you to weather things (like we’re discussing here).
> not nearly as much so as in the pre-iOS times, admittedly
deserves better than a parenthetical. Zoom out, and Apple's been on a serious hiring binge for the last decade, from 72,800 employees in 2012 to 164,000 in 2022.
(Both numbers include retail; in 2012, 58% were retail, and they don't seem to break it down anymore in 2022.)
> Since 2012, Apple has been buying back its own shares at an extraordinary rate -- Apple is known for spending more on share repurchases than similar tech giants like Meta or Alphabet. Apple's total share repurchases have totaled $274.5 billion, with just $20.4 billion in the December quarter.
> Apple spent $85.5 billion to repurchase shares in 2021, and issued $14.5 billion in dividends.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/04/28/apple-extends-sha...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/shares-...
The reduction in outstanding shares is from 26.5 to 16, which is still impressive, but perhaps less than the chart might make you believe at first sight.
Why should they? Who does it benefit? Not their customers. Not their products. Not their future prospects. Not their employees, for the most part.
...Oh, the shareholders? You mean they should throw massive amounts of money—their hedge against future problems—into enriching people who are, for the most part, already vastly wealthy?
Massive stock buyback programs are a symptom of and contributor to a disconnected market.
What should they do once they reach your hedge number? Just keep hoarding?
What do you do with your salary? Do you just put it in your bank account or do you invest it? If I’m Apple, do I really want to become a company with an investment arm? If I’m an Apple shareholder, do I really want Apple buying a broad market index fund and then paying corporate taxes on that and then spitting off dividends to me rather than just giving me the opportunity to invest in a broad market fund myself?
When companies buy back stock, they typically cancel it. That's why the price goes up so much of the remaining stock held by shareholders.
So they wouldn't be able to "just take a loan against the stock". It no longer existed. All they'd be able to do is to ask ask their investers for more money.
Apple makes things. The software side works with it, but it's a hardware company. They aren't entirely dependent on conjuring up value out of thin air, they have supply chains and manufacturing and whatnot.
Even Amazon, which deals with physical objects, doesn't really make anything.
But only just barely missed going under back in the late 1990's.
What a strange timeline.
Echo, Kindle, Blink and Fire TV product lines would beg to disagree.
And anyway surely warehousing & distribution is just as much a 'real' (=traditional? physical?) company activity as running a factory?
Tech companies are largely “interface” providers - they simplify the interface between a human and some other thing. Twitter simplifies the interface between one human and all other humans on Twitter. Microsoft enhances the interface between one human and other humans within a company. Amazon simplifies the interface between humans and retail goods, and AWS simplifies the interface between humans and scalable compute and storage.
Apple simplifies the interface between humans and personal compute, which is the entry point to all of the above (although the relationship with Microsoft is obviously more complex than that). So Apple is just further up the tech value chain, where transient effects are softened and delayed, and where competitive advantage is less easily displaced. Twitter is really only protected by network effects. Microsoft is protected by lots of UI/UX implementation moat and strong vendor lock in. Amazon is protected by others’ ability to scale physical logistics, AWS by backend and interface development and also lock-in. Apple is protected by all of the above plus hardware engineering, and the hardware is an especially difficult one to catch up with or copy.
But even by your flawed definition of "making things" Amazon counts, because of Kuiper, Fire Devices, and Echo alone.
I get that AWS services are a real thing made possible by other real things, but it's also essentially a branded software layer on top of a lot of open source stuff. Over-simplification, sure, but there are enough third-party services that ape enough of the AWS API that I think of it more like a Dell than an Apple.
I can’t imagine you seriously believe that.
I don't think this 'real' sentiment is best used to describe Amazon.
Definitely. Though it might be difficult to test properly. I expect a lot of survivor bias, with companies having a reasonable long-term strategy faring significantly better in the long run (Microsoft notwithstanding, in this case).
The "near death" variety that Apple experienced during the 90s led to a conservative fiscal culture (among the top level executives at least) compared with the rest of the tech industry.
The age of the company isn't relevant imo.
With the latest direction (metaverse), they’re hoping to pave a new future, even if it leverages their current power to bootstrap.
And we didn't even talk about their sweatshops in China which has always had persistent labor-abuse issues[0], the Chinese government boosting iPhone production with child slave labor, and all the many other scandals they've been involved with.
I really have no idea how anyone would get the notion that they are any better than the rest of the pack. Perhaps their upbeat pristine presentations, live from Cupertino. They should broadcast one from their sweatshops in Shenzhen. Some of the highschool kids they pressed into 11 hour shifts to assemble their iPhones could sing the praise of Tim Cook: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/21/apple-iphone-x-reportedly-as...
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/business/dealbook/foxconn...
EDIT: clarified some comments and added better sources.
Russia 580 Brazil 390 Norway 350 United States 310 France 120 Iceland 110 Malaysia 80 Bhutan 70 Kazakhstan 67 India 60 Spain 58 Canada
This tired argument again.
Apple has always led the industry in their auditing of their supply chain and taking proactive steps to address illegal and unethical behaviour. There will always be mistakes but it's how you deal with them that counts.
If you're going to call Foxconn a sweatshop then arguably Amazon, Tesla etc should be called them as well.
Based on what data? The workers staged massive protests just a couple of months ago: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/23/huge-foxconn-iphone-plant-in...
Foxconn has repeatedly had issues with labor abuse: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/business/dealbook/foxconn...
5 years ago it was the massive child-slave-labor scandal, which I suppose is what you refer to as "mistakes happen". Apple chose to continue to use Foxconn for production, even though they had similar scandals before and after the child-slave-labor one, until our present day.
That's not a "mistake". Apple is deliberately choosing to use a producer which has had persistent issues with labor abuse, some of which were as serious as pressing schoolchildren into 11 hour shifts of slave labor.
Let's face reality here: Apple is using Foxconn because they produce their products quickly and cheaply. They don't care about the abuse as long as it makes more cheap gadgets with fat profit margins. They aren't saints, nor better than other companies in their position.
> If you're going to call Foxconn a sweatshop then arguably Amazon, Tesla etc should be called them as well.
I never said Apple is worse than the rest of the industry. I refuted the notion that they are far better, and the overall halo of sainthood hung over them in this thread.
Is that true? Last I read[0] "the suicide rate was comparable to its host country’s".
0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-l...
I mean, it’s mostly a topic, but I expect more suicide from unemployed, disabled or old people, not employed adults.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/business/dealbook/foxconn...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/23/huge-foxconn-iphone-plant-in...
Ah yes. Foxconn. The company that only produces products for Apple.
And Amazon
And Google
And Sony
And Google
And Microsoft
And Intel
And Fiat Chrysler
And ...
And yet, only Apple is held accountable, and only Apple publishes regular audit reports on worker conditions etc.
In a world where Amazon, Meta, Google, Wal-Mart, Time-Warner, Comcast, etc exist, you think Apple is the most anti-competitive?
In a world when you can't even hint at the existence of a payment mechanism outside the App Store to get subscriptions?
It's not the most anticompetitive but it's definitely competing for the title in big tech.
PWAs were never alive to begin with.
If they were there would be amazing world-shattering and paradigm-changing PWAs on Android which holds 71% of worldwide market share.
Oh wait. There are still none. For reasons obvious to anyone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34517503
If you sell your product in Walmart they basically own everything about it. They deem how you make your product, the supply chain, the prices you charge, everything
And they use this incredibly granular level of control to run out any possible competition
Oh wait...
Fry's Electronics closed completely, while Best Buy keeps closing stores and laying people off at an accelerated rate[0].
Local grocery stores are almost extinct, as Walmart[1], Amazon, Kroger, and Albertson's crowd out or buy out everyone else.
It's a serious problem, your sarcasm notwithstanding.
0. https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/25/business/best-buy-store-closu...
1. https://ilsr.org/walmarts-monopolization-of-local-grocery-ma...
1. There's no such thing as PWA. There are a dozen or more standards, and everyone selects a different set of them to pretend they are oh so crucial.
2. Safari has supported the vast majority of standards that even Google deems as crucial for PWAs
3. Many of the "standards" some people on HN want are Chrome-only non-standards that are also opposed by Firefox
4. Actual people couldn't care less about PWAs because: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34517503
Was that a problem before?
https://www.freepress.net/blog/net-neutrality-violations-bri...
Wal-Mart might be the world's foremost practitioner of predatory pricing, not to mention the control they exert over their suppliers.
How did Epic fair trying to get around the Play Store?
Hmm, point. People tend to give video game systems more of a pass for historical reasons.
> How did Epic fair trying to get around the Play Store?
I assume they distributed non-Play Store APKs and it all quietly worked without any drama - that's how it is for Amazon, and how it's meant to work.
They are more like big city gangsters willing to do business with whomever as long as you pay them protection money, while Apple's ecosystem is like a gated community where you get shot at the door if you even so much as look like you can't afford to get in.
Google will hire thousands to work on an obviously doomed streaming service, to build a new OS, and so many other obviously bad ideas and then just fire them all later.
Vanishingly few Apple products seem to be discontinued. Usually after a long life like the iPod.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/apple-is-allegedly-work...
I would say that their push for smart speakers has also yielded mediocre results, at best. Let's see what will happen with their AR headset, as they have been working on AR since at least 2017 [0].
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/05/the-full-saga-of-app...
We don't know more due to the secrecy.
EDIT: A few more I just remembered, MacRuby, OpenCL, WebObjects, Quicktime
Otherwise you might as well talk about why IBM is an undefeatable behemoth that dominates the industry...oh, wait, what's that? That hasn't been true for over 30 years now? I thought age didn't change facts?
A behemoth indeed, only HN isn't paying attention where it matters.
These were arguably pretty reasonable hedging; it was _far from certain_ that developers would accept Objective C, and then later there was a general sense that dynamic interpreted languages might eat the world. I can't imagine either were particularly expensive; MacRuby in particular was basically someone's side project?
> WebObjects
This was inherited, and was pretty successful in its day (though it did perhaps outstay its welcome).
Most of the others you name are either _very_ old, or were actually quite useful in their day but have aged out.
Quicktime was never cancelled. It was adopted industry wide as the MP4 file format.
> MPEG-4 Part 14 is an instance of the more general ISO/IEC 14496-12:2004 (MPEG-4 Part 12: ISO base media file format) which is directly based upon the QuickTime File Format which was published in 2001.
Microsoft paid half a billion dollars to buy Andy Rubin's company, Danger. They decided to rewrite the platform from Java to Dot Net, which took so long the product was no longer competitive when they finished. Then they spent a fortune to advertise a product that was canceled after two weeks.
Then Microsoft decided to take another huge pile of cash and set that on fire by purchasing Nokia's mobile phone business.
> Microsoft wasted at least $8 billion on its failed Nokia experiment
https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/25/11766540/microsoft-nokia-...
Researching a potential product and deciding not to go ahead with it is nowhere near the same order of magnitude on the monetary waste scale.
For younger generations Apple might feel unstoppable, meanwhile I remember the discussions to migrate away from surviving Macs on our IT department, and my graduation thesis was porting a particle simulation engine from NeXTSTEP into Windows, as those boxes were to be sent away.
Hell, how much did they pay for Skype, despite already having several text and video chat clients of their own? Then they completely rewrote Skype before replacing it with Teams.
They have a longstanding habit of taking shareholder value and creating huge bonfires from it.
Fixed it for you!
Thanks to Google we have patent-free codecs, an open source mobile OS, and they contribute significantly to the Linux kernel, among other projects that are "available to the public".
Google does what's best for Google.
Not saying that's necessarily always a bad thing for the end user, but they do play the long game. Chrome was great at the start, did a lot to drive the web forward, and is now suffocating those advancements with Manifest V3 etc (including delaying removal of third party cookies).
It almost feels like embrace, extend, extinguish..
It would be nice instead, if they used their cash hoard to stop wasting time upgrading the iphone with more superficial shit. Bring prices of the phones down to 50 bucks. Put it in the hands of everyone. And kill the toxic advertising supported attention economy that has caused chaos all over the world.
Now its just another group of unimaginative optimizing corporate robots, with no actual compass heading beyond hoarding cash.
60% of Americans already have them, and are perfectly happy to spend $1300 on them every few years, even if it means not paying rent or having to starve themselves. Why would they want to bring the price down?
And Boost Mobile (where I got mine) is currently advertising a deal for an iPhone 8 for $80, or an iPhone 11 for $350.
Not all of that 60% are paying the full price for a brand new iPhone, probably not even the vast majority of them. iPhones tend to last (and continue to receive updates -- I'm still getting updates on mine) for quite a while.
That being said, I agree with you that they don't need to bring the price down. And I disagree with the parent, because there's already ways to get (older) iPhones pretty cheap, almost as cheap as they were calling for.
Source? This comment sounds hyperbolic when many very capable iPhones versions are available for $700+ and 90% of people would not know the difference between a $700 and $1,300 iPhone.
In my family, we have an iPhone 6, X, XS, XR and 2020 SE still working.
So people are willing to fork over lots of money. And then many many people, though of course not everyone (like yourself), upgrade very few years.
Some people like to claim that everyone is buying a new maxed out iPhone every couple years, but that is nowhere near the truth. If you do not need the latest and greatest camera, people can and do buy the much cheaper models.
https://venturebeat.com/mobile/iphone-prices-from-the-origin...
It has been many years since 90% of people need the “latest” specs. For the purposes of messaging, taking photos, browsing the internet, and watching media, an iPhone 13 serves just the purpose just as well as a 14 pro.
Even a $500 SE will do everything most require, except have a bad battery life, but that is fine for people who are not out in the field like retired people.
A $50 reduction on a $1000 price tag won’t “put it in the hands of everyone”. People who cannot afford it still won’t and it won’t change anything to people who can. $50 over the life of a device is nothing.
Besides, that’s what previous generations are for: usability is pretty much identical to the latest and greatest, and the discount is much more than $50.
Though easy to see how you read it that way as their way isn't remotely realistic.
This assertion falls apart under even basic sober analysis. It may sound tautological but entire point of status signaling is that other people notice it. iPhones look very similar to the equivalents and most people aren't going to be able to tell which model or year you have without a close examination – contrast with a luxury sports car which is audibly and visibly distinct from a fair distance. If you look at what actual rich people do, you can really understand the point: there's no better phone available at any price due to how the product segment works so they buy the same phone as everyone else but they get things like high-ended designer cases because that's where there's room to demonstrate how much money you have. Tim Cook has essentially the same phone as half the people in line at your local coffee shop; that's decidedly not true of actual luxury goods.
It also has two other fundamental flaws: the first is the assertion that there's a substantial price difference when even a bit of research would show that equivalent phones cost roughly the same amount even before you adjust for the extra years of service an iPhone will provide. These comparisons can also be complicated because, for example, if you care about battery life or CPU performance the comparison for a Pixel 7 isn't the iPhone 14 but a much cheaper iPhone 11 but the same probably isn't true if your primary buying criteria is camera quality.
The second is trying to look at this in isolation: the price differential between one phone and another just isn't that much compared to other things people spend money on — a phone costs significantly less than what most people will spend on cell service over the same timeframe, and for perspective the total lifetime cost for that phone is likely to be 1-2 months worth of rent. For something which people derive heavy value from throughout the day, that's definitely not conspicuous consumption.
The U.S. median income is something like $50k so even if you're buying the most expensive model sold you're looking less than one percent of median income over the average 40 months that Americans keep their phones. Contrast that with, say, cars where the average new vehicle buyer is spending the equivalent of that purchase price _every month_ on something they use on average less than one hour per day and most of them are paying significant premiums for models which aren't more useful for the things they actually do just to present an aesthetic style. If you want to talk about Veblen goods, ask why so many people are commuting to office jobs in $60-90k trucks in showroom condition.
Apple isn't primarily in e-commerce, streaming or online ads and did not get as big a boost from millions of people suddenly trapped in their homes as other tech companies. Apple was never tempted to overhire, I suspect Apple had the opposite pressure during lockdowns due to its many retail workers seeing fewer customers, while Amazon's warehouses were brisk.
The Venn diagram between these companies would show some overlap, but not much.
Facebook predicted that it would lose billions in potential revenue because of Apple making tracking optional.
Microsoft is basically just cutting employees that are on products that it doesn’t care about anymore.
You can say what you will about Apple. But no one can accuse Apple of a lack of focus on profitable product lines.
They are also ham strung by just not listening to customers it feels like - so I think that impacts traction. You get an 80% solution with simple glaring edges. Thousands ask - please fix this edge, but whoever is driving the product is onto something else it feels like sometime.
Apple's main product lines all seem to make money, have positive margin. Their R&D is speculative as well, but at least too me seem to have a clearer path to product. I would love an apple interface in my car vs whatever the OEM ships in most cases. Even Tesla, with most advanced interface just can't keep it current / smooth / familiar etc the way apple does (music / playlist / etc integrations alone).
Google only promotes engineers when they are part of a program launch. No credit is ever given for feature launch or program maintenance. If you are not a part of a program launch within a few years at google/alphabet you are managed out.
This doesn’t create a company that I’d find it worth investing my limited engineering hours in long term. A GCE sales person called me last week and I couldn’t help but laughing when I told them that I’d just agreed to five year terms on an AWS private pricing agreement the previous week. Google’s recent actions made me unsure GCE would still be a product in five years.
Out of curiosity, which actions are you referring to?
Thanks!
That's the theory and the marketing copy. Since Fuchsia has only been tried on a few closed-world embedded devices (Nest hub, Nest camera), it is really too soon to declare it more secure, more scalable, or more adaptable. [By "closed-world" I mean the devices run only a limited set of apps, with functionality known ahead of time and from known developers.]
It's not their bread and butter. Their bread and butter is web advertisement. 80-90% of all money they make comes from web advertisement.
Someone in the company said "we need vertical integration like Apple has and we don't like Android", and for a while they managed to run with it. Now they lost the internal power struggle. Oh well. It never had any tangible value to Google as a company anyway.
Android itself of course makes billions alone, which is enough to justify Fuschia. They need a better setup to compete with Apple specifically on decoupling the OS from the drivers for updates on 3rd party manufacturers, in addition to security. I think there’s even some thought it could run in the data center - that drives everything Google. They already employ entire teams that just work on the Linux kernel, compilers, etc. All of that is bread and butter.
Ads are 80% of Google's revenue. Literally nothing else is Google's bread an butter. There's even speculation that Google makes more money from the search deal with Apple than from the entire Android ecosystem.
Android is a vehicle for Google's ads, and suffers from the company's rollercoaster of "interested/not interested" over the years.
Fuchsia by this time is just a 6-year-old money sink with no revenue story.
The core problem I guess is that it suffers from an inability to partially migrate to it. This is a common problem that many people fail to understand actually matters. For example, we know rust is a safer language than C and C++, and so people say "all should be rewritten in rust", but rust is designed with no intent or plan to support partial migration. What that means is that even Mozilla - who created rust specifically for gecko - has been unable to replace the bulk of their code with rust: they can only replace entire large subsections at a time, which is harder, riskier, and as a result slower. Fuchsia's (I guess Zircon's) adoption is hindered because the objectively superior security model also meant that none of the infrastructure around the linux kernel say could work with it, so feature parity required at best significant porting, but frequently complete rewrites of large swathes of the surround infra. e.g. porting android to zircon (the fuchsia kernel) would require significant rewriting of the existing code bases, and the time spent doing that is not time spent adding shiny new features and animations (or chat programs?). Apple is generally much more pragmatic which is why Swift had such good objc and C interop from day 1, and why real C++ interop is something it's working on: if fixing C++ projects can only be done by all-at-once complete rewrites you basically ensure the C++ will live forever - rewriting a file at a time however is much more achievable, which is personally what I want (as for Swift vs rust I'm on the fence I like different parts of both, and also c++ :D).
Instead Fuchsia tries to target porting runtimes which applications are built against. For instance, porting chrome as a runtime unlocks web applications. Porting flutter unlocks flutter applications. Porting Android as a runtime is challenging but still achievable. It is not necessary to rewrite all of Android to accomplish this either.
At the extreme, it's possible to simply implement runtime support by implementing various virtio interfaces and running a full OS in a VM, similar to how other OS like ChromeOS and Windows achieve Android app support today. Fuchsia is written in a way that you don't need to do that, but it's always an option as well.
The problem is that many are now doing a "we need to fire x% of the company so I can get my stock reward... I mean be profitable", and are doing it in arbitrary and short sighted ways (stack ranking is an incredibly stupid way to cut people), so while cutting N-1 of N chat teams at google might be reasonable, cutting teams working on potentially high value future tech _just_ because it's not currently profitable. Take Fuchsia: I worked on it during my brief google stint, and even if they did decide it didn't have a future (and I think that was not the rationale here), there were incredible engineers they've apparently discarded that would still have been good to keep working on other things at google.
Others have said FB and G were also mass hiring to stop people being hired by each other - I'm not sure how true that is, I was never involved in interviewing people at G but even if I were the interview system there seemed very strange to me so even if I were interviewing people I don't know if I'd have been aware of hiring-to-stop-FB nonsense.
I don't know what about their comment implies they want layoffs.
I don't get the point that the money should belong to the customers. They gave it to Apple freely upon exchange for a product. Your argument kind of sounds that products should be sold at cost.
And does Apple offer stock to its retail employees?
Microsoft, Google, Apple all have enormous amounts of cash stored thanks to their fantastic earnings for so many years.
Your earnings are fantastic until they suddenly aren't and then by that time, it's too late to turn the ship around on all the mistakes that lead to it. Just ask Nokia or Kodak.
They correctly identified privacy controls as something people actually want for real, even just knowing it's there is a nice feeling. Knowing my front door is reinforced with 7 optional locks, is much better than a fly-screen door with a privacy policy attached.
Meanwhile, MS and Google and Facebook remove options and rely on the opposite of privacy: over-sharing by default. Telemetry by default. Ads, suggestions, ads pretending to be suggestions, bloatware.
What they simply need to do is make self-hosting (using Mac devices) trivially easy and support a number of new/updated protocols for decentralized online interactions (messaging, blogs, search, social etc).
Monopolies are never optimal, but given the dismal moral basis of the other "big tech" I'd take it any day...
They did this for years: every Mac starting with the first release of Mac OS X had a built-in Apache webserver, and activating it was just the click of a button in the Sharing preference pane.
Problem is, the segment of people who a) are willing and able to create web content, and b) only want the very basics as provided by Apple (including whatever versions of Perl and other server-side languages happened to ship with the OS) is a fairly slim one.
The other problem is, almost no one has an ISP that's friendly to self-hosting from your home.
I believe Apple removed Web Sharing from the Sharing preference pane a few years ago now.
What you describe are both real hindrances and somehow not fundamental. E.g. people migrated en mass to centralized social media also for simple personalized websites (which in retrospect might not have been in their best interests).
My sense is that as time goes on it will take an active act of suppression for self-hosting not to become potentially much more widespread and ofcourse if a major and credible player can remove friction points for non-technical people this will only open the floodgates.
As for ISP's, yes, they are a big part of the problem.
Meanwhile I'm still looking at bugs in my OS that have survived a decade.
I worked for a company that had similar "cachet," and they were cheap bastards, but they did keep people, and their posture resulted in remarkably few "non-serious" applicants. The people who applied really wanted to work there.
As a hiring manager, I appreciated not having to sort through a pile of totally unsuited résumés, and, as a bonus, the ones that were unsuited, on paper, were often the high-achieving, ambitious "diamond in the rough" types that I looked for.
Also, as an Apple shareholder, that’s definitely not my reaction to the pay cut.
If cutting the CEO's compensation lets them keep even one regular employee who would otherwise have been laid off, then that's made the world a materially better place, if only for that employee and their family.
“The Compensation Committee evaluates and makes compensation decisions prior to the start of each fiscal year. The results of the 2022 Say on Pay advisory vote led to broader shareholder engagement on executive compensation in 2022 of approximately 53% of institutional shares held. The Compensation Committee balanced shareholder feedback, Apple’s exceptional performance, and a recommendation from Mr. Cook to adjust his compensation in light of the feedback received.”
Not from my pov. It’s extremely hollow and insincere from what I’ve seen time and again.
It’ll probably be a very, very long wait.
Granted it’s comparing apples to… adobes, but my point is it’s not all doom and gloom in the valley.
Amazon is a retailer, a logistics company, and a VPS. AWS was spared most layoffs.
I’m not sure what’s going on. Obviously Apple has a stronger vision than most tech companies. Obviously most tech companies chase returns and live in fear of missed opportunities. Maybe it is simply this combination of factors that sets Apple apart from the crowd.
By the way, this is a good example of how vision and ideas (Jobs) will not build a successful company alone without execution. Apple always struggled with that until Jobs brought in Cook.
Of course, Steve Jobs would never allow the Weather App in the new MacOS to be so bad compared to Dark Sky ;)
- 18.3% Drop in the holiday quarter for the sector, but 14.9% drop for Apple.
- 11.3% YoY drop for the sector, only a 4.0% drop for Apple.
I wouldn't be surprised if in the end Apple will have gained marketshare as a result.
This is unlike Twitter where a firm is destroyed and people fired not because of situation but because someone has money to burn. And instead of creating a new firm to compete he just fired people of that firm he did not like.
That is the “good” and “bad” of market system. Sorry but both involved firing people.
People try to find reasons to justify why their team is the goat and why the rest are simply worse.
Getting money and experience in the hands of the workforce doesn’t seem like a bad thing.
Being laid off sucks, been there, but I was glad to have had the work, compensation and experience while it lasted.
I'd like to point out how similar replies and derision were directed at people who suspected there was collusion to fix engineers salaries and how their was a "gentleman's agreement" to prevent hiring engineers away from each other amongst these very same companies. That happened in 2014 and it proved these same companies were all in close communication with each other in regard to staffing and salaries. They were caught and convicted and paid a small portion of the money saved by colluding as a fine.
Do I believe we have any evidence anyone is currently colluding in order to lay off enough people to cool down a rapidly heating up labor market, and suppress the demand to work remotely and be paid the same as their peers in high cost of living areas like the Bay?
No.
Do I believe they would do so if it increased profits or manipulated the cost center they hate the most (salaries and headcount) in a beneficial way, and have the means to communicate with each other unofficially to coordinate such actions, yeah, I do. They've already proven they were willing and able to do so in the past.
So while baseless accusation might be useless conspiracy fodder, cynicism is warranted when a seemingly coordinated action is being taken. Cynicism is warranted in all dealings with all of these companies. They are amoral, and exist at a level of income in which the legal system has only a tenuous hold. They have also demonstrated in the past they are willing to collude in order to hurt engineers to their benefit.
Just food for thought, and discussion. I would prefer to think about how they could be caught if that's what they were doing, and how the issue could be dealt with, rather than dismissing it out of hand. However, labor conditions for people like us has so far not descended to the point where embracing the concept of unionization is appealing, and I don't see any other way engineers could fight for job security, and wage increases commiserate with inflation or pinned to profit margins.
It's funny, there are a lot of brilliant people in this industry, but we are still being taken advantage of by the same old hucksters, and con men, I've seen it for 20 years. You would think at some point we would find a way to fight back even if it didn't involve unionizing, but it's the same pattern of the "business" guys robbing the piggy bank, or turning good places to work into dystopian nightmares for a percent more of return for that quarter. Then we just pull up stakes and move on to another company make a bit more until they do the same thing there. At some point it's all going to suck then what?
Note : fan of the company. Since it's not yet "big tech" ;)
Good brand image, everything appears great on surface, employees all appear homogeneous - however..the internal feuds, dislike for leadership, and cost cutting measures make it completely miserable to work at.
I’m still of the belief Apple probably should do layoffs, but won’t. Pandemic has not been kind to their profits either, but Tim will take the salary cut just to take the good PR.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/net-inc...
2022 $99,803
2021 $94,680
2020 $57,411
2019 $55,256
2018 $59,531
But yeah, I think Apple brand loyalty is at all time high.
Guess I am lucky. Haven't seen anyone dislike Tim or his team. I have access to all the hardware I could ever need, and I am not miserable at work. I do not think any of my teammates are either.