Apple is a generally more well run, mature, patient, and scrupulous company than most others.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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..
Fixed it for you!
In a world where Amazon, Meta, Google, Wal-Mart, Time-Warner, Comcast, etc exist, you think Apple is the most anti-competitive?
Wal-Mart might be the world's foremost practitioner of predatory pricing, not to mention the control they exert over their suppliers.
Was that a problem before?
https://www.freepress.net/blog/net-neutrality-violations-bri...
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.
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
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
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.
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...
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/business/dealbook/foxconn...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/23/huge-foxconn-iphone-plant-in...
I mean, it’s mostly a topic, but I expect more suicide from unemployed, disabled or old people, not employed adults.
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.
Russia 580 Brazil 390 Norway 350 United States 310 France 120 Iceland 110 Malaysia 80 Bhutan 70 Kazakhstan 67 India 60 Spain 58 Canada
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.