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Comment by lvl102 | Hacker News Reader

Apple hit a plateau. I don’t think AR will be a meaningful driver of growth for awhile.

Perhaps they make a big move and buy Disney.

People suggest this a lot, but I think it's not a good fit. While some of Disney's profit centers would be a good match for Apple (Film and Television), others (Theme parks and merchandise) would be a lot of distraction. Disney's workforce is almost twice the size of Apple, and Apple is very protective of its work culture and how people function in the company.

I think Apple much more prefers to operate as a partner to Disney

Zero reason for Apple to get into a flailing business like Disney. It earns peanuts at low profit margins compared to Apple’s existing business, and has extremely high liability exposure due to all the theme parks and whatnot.

Right. Maybe buy a stake in ESPN and get them to run 3D livestreams of games, but even that probably doesn't go forward until the MLS deal is a success.

eps up 5%, they're doing fine. I think it's much more likely that they go all in on partnering with a sports league, probably NBA, to be the sole carrier of their content. As far as I can tell the most impressive demo for the vision pro is currently live sporting events. I'm pretty sure apple tv's main reason for existing is to create content for their headsets.

> eps up 5%

Only because they buyback.

I don't really see how that's an excuse that's supposed to make me think the quarter wasn't successful. Such high margins are almost always due to market failures. Buying back enough shares that eps grows 5% a year is a good outcome for apple.

PER is >30. For a company that size, with interest rates at ~5%, this is very high by historical standards.

But then, we have Tesla and Nvidia which make them look like a bargain.

There's actually talk that they might pick up the media deal for the PAC 12 (if the conference exists in a week) so you might be right on the money there

Their version of LLM should be fun, they have their silicon, they can make it local and integrate with the ecosystem.

Going by Siri, they are behind competition by a wide margin.

I don't think Siri's quality is a good indication of Apple's ability to come out with a successful LLM product in the future.

One thing I think about is how Alexa is apparently considered a failure at Amazon (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/amazon-alexa-is-a-co...). Alexa devices sell well but people only use them for trivial use cases that are hard to monetize.

I speculate that Apple doesn't see a need to invest in Siri because the market has shown that digital assistants don't synergize with "services" that well.

Additionally, I don't think that Apple will need to leverage the "Siri codebase" as a starting point for releasing a compelling LLM codebase - maybe voice recognition, but who knows.

Apple has shown through other product launches that they will take a "wait and see" approach and release something when its ready.

If that's the case, why do they keep releasing HomePods?

They’re a fabulous Bluetooth speaker if nothing else

HomePods "synergize" well with Apple Music subscriptions.

I also think they're a protective measure to keep people from getting someone else's smart device, which might lead you into someone else's ecosystem.

I think this is a fair point. Taking a look at the product page for the $300 HomePod (https://www.apple.com/homepod-2nd-generation/), I would argue that the HomePod is marketed more as a speaker with Siri integration rather than a Siri device with a really good speaker.

The bullet points I see on the above page, in order, are - really good speaker - Siri integration - integrates with Apple ecosystem for playing music - smart home integration - "private and secure" whatever that means

So, it's not clear to me that "a better Siri" would necessarily result in selling X amount more speakers to make Siri a worthy investment while investing in better audio technology does because it's the main selling point for HomePods.

Homepods are great to pair with Apple TVs for stereo sound.

A major issue with Apple and LLM is that they pledged data privacy. I don’t think they’re training on anything special.

They keep releasing new hardware that could really use a much better Siri (AirPods, HomePod, Watch, and now Vision) so the ongoing lack of a quality voice UI is embarrassing.

I very much think it has to be in their near future.

I agree, this will probably be more impactful than the Vision Pro. Making all their products way more useful. You can already run Llama on a Mac and it’s pretty great. When Apple release theirs it will probably be a very nice experience.

LLM from apple? I tried dozens of voice assistants in my life and non of them was worse than Siri by a very large margin. I can't even remember a single time I got a useful answer from Siri and 90% of the time, it was not even able to understand what I said (no problems with other assistants).

I really thought that the current lineup of Macbooks would be a big driver of growth for a while. Then again, the ones worth upgrading to are really expensive and that is probably keeping a lot of potential purchasers on older versions.

> Perhaps they make a big move and buy Disney.

Or make a search engine and become Google :)

Think they’ll find growth in India, Indonesia and Vietnam

But that’s more than offset by weakness in China.

What , at least do the most basic research https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-04/apple-sur... https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/Apple-posts-3rd-...

I think they are going to buy Nintendo

I've been told in the past that the Japanese government would never let a national icon such as Nintendo be acquired by a foreign firm. I personally am not qualified to answer that though.

With that said I completely see where you're coming from and think that their games in particular match a lot of the ethos of Apple's own products. I do wonder if the internal cultures are vastly different though? The Bay and Japan have very different approaches to problem solving and business in general.

Yeah, I can see that getting stuck on ideology.

It just feels to me Nintendo doesn't have many options. Other than the IP, people would rather use the Steam Deck over the Switch. This was also a similar hardware story for non-mobile consoles.

Meanwhile, both the Switch and Deck are roughly an iPad with dedicated controllers. And the future is VR, but Nintendo is struggling with frame-rates even on the Switch.

I can see Apple making a deal with Nintendo, to build its next console as a peripheral on-top-of the iPad / visionOS. All the power of Apple Silicon and all of the inspiration of Nintendo IP.

Nintendo is a massively successful company that is still somehow selling tons of Switches even though it's an ancient device.

They're not going anywhere, nobody's going to buy them.

With Nintendo Switch currently at 130 million sales compared to 3 million for the Steam Deck, I’m not sure Nintendo has much to worry about. Admittedly, the Steam Deck has been out for much less time, but it also went through a big hype cycle at launch. The Switch is lighter and thinner, has more battery life, is less expensive, and to a significant extent is targeting a different audience. In 2023 it’s long in the tooth, but supposedly it will be replaced next year. As for the iPad, well, the Switch has been competing with it for its whole lifetime and has succeeded anyway. If nothing else, the iPad is much more expensive than the Switch - never mind the Vision Pro’s price!

> Other than the IP, people would rather use the Steam Deck over the Switch.

This is very tech people loop take. Targeted people just want to play games.

Not only doesn't Nintendo have to worry about the SteamDeck sales, the competion in ramping up with devices from Asus, Lenovo and others, all running Windows proper instead of emulating it.

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