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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

It’s CLV (customer lifetime value): the integral of the MRR. Something most companies mentioned on HN should understand though it feels like Apple is the only one that takes it seriously

(And with Apple’s new CEO, the early signs are that commitment is headed for the ash heap as well, but it seems the Mafia may have a longer horizon)

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The Mafia may also have shorter horizon: - Fantanyl 'customers' have munch higher risk of sudden-death and then stop being customers. - Fentanyl is a much more debilitating drug than heroin and much cheaper. So Fentanyl customers are less able to gather the money for the next fix, and don't need as much (less revenue).

> Fantanyl 'customers' have munch higher risk of sudden-death and then stop being customers

The Mafia kills people directly. That's a sudden-death right there.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39mr81j2j1o

though this is controlled and planned, I assume. As opposed to random numbers of customers dropping dead whenever they feel like it.

At much much lower rates than accidental overdose rates assuredly.

"The Mafia" is... many different things. From self-defense post-war southern-italian village organisations to pure-evil predatory psycho-clans, to anything in between.

For starters: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gomorrah_(film) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o44Zv4DY64

> From self-defense post-war southern-italian village organisations

That's not what the Mafia is. It's an origin story. Was would be more accurate.

Eh its islamic cultural remnant ?https://i.imgur.com/9zqcn0m.png https://i.imgur.com/tpClCSt.png

It's not sudden to the person planning the hit

But they’re not killing their customers (unless they want send a message, of course…)

More than simply being alive, they want customers who can stay employed and so continue to pay higher prices over a greater number of years. Cocaine and pot are horrible but their users can maintain a working life for years or decades, making them more profitable drugs in the long term.

> Cocaine and pot are horrible

citation needed

>Cocaine is God's way of telling you you are making too much money. ---Robin Williams

>It made me feel like a new man. The problem was, the first thing the new man wanted was more cocaine. ---George Carlin

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/04/us/cannabis-marijuana-ris...

David J Nutt, Leslie A King, Lawrence D Phillips, Drug harms in the UK: a multicriteria decision analysis, The Lancet, 2010.

https://bigfatgenius.com/2220%20Fall%202010/Nutt%20King%20Ph...

Cocaine (in crack form) was found to be the third most harmful recreational drug overall, after alcohol and heroin. It also caused the most direct harm to users out of all drugs. Cannabis, not so much, mid-table. Non-crack cocaine was somewhere between the two.

Note that this study is now over 15 years old.

> cocaine *and* pot

I don't think these very different drugs should be compared equivocally.

And while both drugs have the possibility of abuse; most issues stem from legality - not the chemical effects.

We should probably start saying "sugar and cocaine". Since sugar is heavily addictive it can be equivocated the same.

Maybe that will help some people see how ridiculous it is to generalise like that.

The slope of addictive drugs with negative side effects starts with alcohol, then comes nicotine, pot, cocaine, crack, fentinal .... and then all the really exotic modern stuff. It is a spectrum. Some argue that there are upsides, and there are certainly uses for all these drugs, but no sane doctor would say they have no downsides, that unrestrained use is ever a good thing.

How are you determining this scale?

Alcohol has greater negative side effects than pot, and nicotine is more addictive than cocaine or pot. I’m not sure what you mean by “exotic modern stuff,” but if it includes hallucinogens (what people usually mean by modern/exotic drugs) then they’re not really addictive at all.

I ask because the scale reads more like a morality scale than anything based on actual negative effects, either in the individual or society.

That's what CLV means, dude ... come on.

Also if the family has some addicted to “normal” drugs it’s acceptable; but if they get fentanyl from you and die the next mafia family reunion will be spicy.

Hence they have a shorter CLV.

lol. Whoosh

> with Apple’s new CEO, the early signs are that commitment is headed for the ash heap as well

He’s been CEO less than a month and everything that’s happening right now has been in the works for multiple years….

that doesn't mean the early signs aren't here that that commitment is headed for the ash heap.

What, specifically, do you find to be an early sign pointing in that direction?

my argument pointed out a flaw in the previous argument which was pointing out a perceived flaw in the previous argument: where did you get lost?

This didn't happen under Ternus, but Apple really needs to undo Creator Studio. It's a bad idea. Not good. Keep iCloud+ responsible for generation limits across every app. Keep apps as a one-time purchase.

What do you see as signs? I was hopeful that Ternus’s hardware background was a positive.

Maybe this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49801939

Yes, this is the problem I was referring to. There is internal opposition but the exec team will clearly turn over in the next few years (due to retirement) which will inherently bring in a team more aligned with the CEO’s objectives.

guy has been CEO for like 3 weeks, this is not his decision. Let's see how he does

People will complain but ultimately won't actually move away from the Apple ecosystem for it to matter to Apple.

The services ads at the top of the Settings app (when you get a new iPhone or add another device to your account) have been there for years and long predate Ternus.

The dubious signs (which predate Ternus) are the focus on service revenue and advertising.

Both these make Apple worse.

I think the “early signs” are a reference to this? https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/06/phil-schillers-app-store-e...

Wait what are the signs that the new Apple CEO commitment is headed for the heap? Seriously asking

To be a bit critical, haven’t Apple software and hardware quality been getting worse for years even before the new CEO?

Apple Silicon was the exception, that was truly transformative. But other things, like how polished and snappy the OS feels, seems to have been getting steadily worse.

Hardware has been improving a lot since the low point of butterfly keyboards and no ports. Jony Ive went out the door and things improved. Then on the software side they course corrected recently after Alan Dye left. I have hope the software improvements will start to accellerate.

The ads show they are out of ideas and with everything enshitifying, and a duopoly, they don't need to serve customers. just be slightly less shitty than google.

This puts them at existential risk of disruption, because it will build huge unseen pressure for customers to flee.

We saw this with Opus 4.7 - 5, losing folks to Sol when it came out. But Anthropic delivered with 5.5

Honestly I don't think lack of new ideas is the problem, it's the bad execution/design of their existing products. Like look at Time Machine on macOS. The basic idea (backups) is almost not an idea at all, but the first implementation was amazing for its time, and the current implementation is a total mess and basically unusable. The idea is not the issue.

Or look at Spotlight. Same deal really, the idea is trivial but they've let it languish and slowly rot. With macOS 27 they've gone back and rebuilt it. That's what we want to see. Go back to the basics and make it work great not just work mostly.

Good examples.

When I switched to Mac in ~2020, the Mac users I knew all told me to avoid Time Machine – at least two had issues where they needed their backups, only to find that the entirety of their backups had been silently corrupted. (I used Arq then based on online recommendations, now I use Vorta on my Mac just because that’s what I use on Linux.)

Spotlight was near-unusable when I switched as well. Often 5+ sec delays from pressing Cmd-Space to the thing actually popping up, and it would sometimes reorder entries right before I clicked Enter, causing me to open the wrong thing. Alfred uses the same Spotlight index AFAIK, but lightning fast.

Those are both things that I agree should… Just work.

I normally can't start apps from spotlight. It literally has forgotten that the applications folder exists, so I have to open it up in finder and scroll to the app to start it.

I think the hardware has improved a lot over the past decade, not always in visible ways. I think this is true even if you disregard the replacement of the butterfly keyboard.

Ternus and Cue are full bore on increasing the number of ads shown in apps and otherwise scattered through their devices. This is explicitly the opposite of Apple’s philosophy until recently and Schiller is stepping back reputedly due to his opposition to this approach.

The idea appears to be to sell the devices as a vehicle for showing ads (incremental ARR) over selling them for their intrinsic customer value. You expect this kind of thing from shitty industries like cars or Google or Facebook. But this used to be an explicit “no go” for Apple.

That is too bad - how do you get the reins of a company that size with something antithesis to their product and identity? I hope he doesn't start trying to monetize privacy.

> how do you get the reins of a company that size with something antithesis to their product and identity?

Convince shareholders that it's been leaving money on the table.

> how do you get the reins of a company that size with something antithesis to their product and identity?

Poor decision making exists everywhere. Size of a company is absolutely no insurance against it. See Tesla for a specific example.

This happens in majority of companies.. visionaries and thought leaders leave, eventually a layer of bean counters and middle managers replace them.

Everything is then run by excel people with metrics. Innovation dies, product suffers and company spirals downward.

where do you get info that Ternus is about increasing number of ads? i've missed that evidently, I was at Apple engineering for several years, so for Cue i believe it just from observation, but no sense of such for Ternus.

> Ternus and Cue are full bore on increasing the number of ads shown in apps and otherwise scattered through their devices

There’s zero indication Ternus is onboard with that - Cue yes, but Ternus was not CEO when any of the stuff that is happening now was being developed

He was part of the management team and they know each others’ views. Schiller’s stepping back was a clear signal to me.

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