pwatsonwailes

There's a Shakespeare quote from Julius Caesar which would seem appropriate.

It's written by an AI. That's why it's a bit shit.

In most ways, it isn't meaningfully. It became what it is now, but in the same way a 600 year old oak isn't anything like an acorn or a sapling, what exists now isn't meaningfully that.

They're a monster. Vastly impressive stuff.

Short version:

Reported quarterly revenue: ~$111 billion, so a 17% year-over-year increase.

Diluted earnings per share: ~$2. 22% increase compared to the same quarter last year.

Operating cash flow: surpassed $28 billion. Record for a March quarter.

iPhone: Record March-quarter revenue of ~$57 billion, heavily supported by demand for the iPhone 17.

Services: Hit an all-time high revenue record of ~$31 billion.

Capital Allocation: The board raised the quarterly cash dividend by 4% to $0.27 per share and authorized an additional $100 billion for share repurchases.

More generally, we're seeing a transition in their financials away from hardware dependence. At this point we can pretty conclusively say that Apple is now a hardware manufacturer mainly, backed up by a high-margin services ecosystem. Services revenue has grown consistently, providing a smoothing function against the more spikey revenue from the hardware product cycles.

Overall they've managed to maintain an ability to deliver double-digit growth, despite creating categories of product which haven't succeeded, providing enough free cash flow to continue their insane (in terms of scale) capital return program (dividends and massive buybacks in the main).

Terra Mystica, Brass Birmingham, Scythe, Root, ARCS and its expansions, Nemesis: Retaliation and SETI would all get shouts from me for that sort of thing. Slightly depends on your definition of complex and sophisticated, but I'd put all of those in that list.

You may want to check out Siromer tractors depending where you are. Similar idea.

Doesn't seem to do anything on custom game.

A product being good enough isn't enough. At some point you also need to price it, and communicate it's existence persuasively to the market and win market share, and it has to be distributed effectively.

Most businesses fail because they solve for the easier bit (product) and then have no idea about the rest.

My mistake. Nice catch.

That being said, AirPods use a steel frame construction to get the weight up for the same reason. There's a whole thing with weight in neuromarketing for luxury and luxury-adjacent products. There's fringe benefits acoustically to using it, around resonance mainly, but mostly it's to get weight and influence perception. Same reason as the knock-offs, different mechanism.

1. They have steel weights in them to make them that heavy so they feel more premium.

Both built by Claude Sonnet 4.6

Doesn't need to be a single person, but yes, all good products come from someone or a (generally) small team, spotting something, and fixing it.

As for the marketing department - depends on definition, but assuming you mean (as it mostly is nowdays) comms, it's two things:

1. Making sure that potential future customers know you exist, so when they enter the market to buy, they know you're relevant and can purchase from you.

2. Making sure that when someone is in the market to buy now, that they're more likely to buy from you, because you have a compelling reason for people to pick you, and not the other brands in the space that they can think of.

Mostly 1, some of 2, if the marketing team is good. Ratios vary as to how much though by more than you'd think, depending on industry, customer lifecycle, brand maturity and so on.

Good segmentation is mostly not by demography nowadays. At best, demographics are a correlative element to something more fundamental, usually economic, behavioural or psychographic.

"how come no one, in the past 25 years of my life as a consumer, has ever had any time to ask me a single real question"

There's a lot of shit marketers, is my short answer.

Like, a lot.

The problem I tend to see is that companies say they're doing JTBD research, but they're actually just running attribute preference surveys (asking customers to rank features, from a list of things the company would like to build, rather than starting off by assuming you don't know what customers require).

Listening to what people say they want (feature preferences) almost always diverges from what they actually want the product to do (a functional, emotional, or social outcome). That gets more complex when we think about that there's different levels by which you can evaluate what someone wants, which in the JTBD word are thought of as jobs as progress (why they're doing the thing), and jobs as outcomes (how they're doing the thing). There's another famous example, which is from Bosch's circular saw evolution. Professionals said they wanted lighter tools (and that's true), but the constraint they experienced as a result of weight was the impacts that had. So you can solve for weight, or you can solve for improved usability. Symptoms vs causes sort of thing.

This is also why product teams should involve marketers, and why marketers should understand research design. The teams who I've seen do this well at this aren't running quick preference tests and A/B tests on features most of the time. They're generally more focused on running continuous feedback loops, where they conduct broader research, then engage in grounded theory style interpretation to understand what they can do, look at field validation to figure out what they should do, and then iterate.

For B2B especially as a side note, if your value proposition is something like accountability or proof of value, but your product's workflows don't make accountability or proving value effortless, fixing that workflow will do more for brand perception than any campaign, because nothing nukes good comms like a poor experience.

It's what always happens when there's a disconnect between the product built and the actual thing people want to do. In marketing, we differentiate between Jobs-As-Activities (the task of "changing a background") and Jobs-As-Progress (the user trying to go from something being unsatisfactory to something better).

When UI feels dumbed down to that level, or hidden behind advanced settings, it’s often because the product team ends up treating users as a gestalt persona, rather than thinking about their constraints around time and attention. The most meaningful innovations occur when customer insights influence development before launch; sadly, that frequently doesn't happen. People launch the thing, come up with features they could add, ask what people want from that list (and potentially don't even do that) and then add stuff like barnacles accumulating on a ship.

Not sure where you get that for Milgram. That's been replicated lots of times, in different countries, with different compositions of people, and found to be broadly replicable. Burger in '09, Sheridan & King in '72, Dolinski and co in '17, Caspar in '16, Haslam & Reicher which I referenced somewhere else in the thread...

You're not wrong strictly speaking - the challenge comes in getting KPIs for ethical and moral behaviour to be things that the company signs up for. Some are geared that way inherently (Patagonia is the cliché example), but most aren't.

People will always find other goalposts to move. The trick is making sure the KPIs you set define the goalposts you care about staying in place.

Side note: Jordan Peterson is pretty much an example of inventing goalposts to move. Everything he argues about is about setting a goalpost, and then inventing others to move around to avoid being pinned down. Motte-and-bailey fallacy happens with KPIs as much as it does with debates.

Responded on this line of thinking a bit further down, so I'll be brief on this. Yes, there's selection bias in organisations as you go up the ladder of power and influence, which selects for various traits (psychopathy being an obvious one).

That being said, there's a side view on this from interactionism that it's not just the traits of the person's modes of behaviour, but their belief in the goal, and their view of the framing of it, which also feeds into this. Research on cult behaviours has a lot of overlap with that.

The culture and the environment, what the mission is seen as, how contextually broad that is and so on all get in to that.

I do a workshop on KPI setting which has overlap here too. In short for that - choose mutually conflicting KPIs which narrow the state space for success, such that attempting to cheat one causes another to fail. Ideally, you want goals for an organisation that push for high levels of upside, with limited downside, and counteracting merits, such that only by meeting all of them do you get to where you want to be. Otherwise it's like drawing a line of a piece of paper, asking someone to place a dot on one side of the line, and being upset that they didn't put it where you wanted it. More lines narrows the field to just the areas where you're prepared to accept success.

That division can also then be used to narrow what you're willing to accept (for good or ill) of people in meeting those goals, but the challenge is that they tend to see meeting all the goals as the goal, not acting in a moral way, because the goals become the target, and decontextualise the importance of everything else.

TL;DR: value setting for positive behaviour and corporate performance is hard.

EDIT: actually this wasn't that short as an answer really. Sorry for that.

It's instructive though, despite the flaws, and at this point has been replicated enough in different ways that we know it's got some basis in reality. There's a whole bunch of constructivist research around interactionism, that shows that whilst it's not just the person's default ways of behaving or just the situation that matters, the situational context definitely influences what people are likely to do in any given scenario.

Reicher & Haslam's research around engaged followership gives a pretty good insight into why Zimbardo got the results he did, because he wasn't just observing what went on. That gets into all sorts of things around good study design, constructivist vs positivist analysis etc, but that's a whole different thing.

I suspect, particularly with regards to different levels, there's an element of selection bias going on (if for no other reason that what we see in terms of levels of psychopathy in higher levels of management), but I'd guess (and it's a guess), that culture convincing people that achieving the KPI is the moral good is more of a factor.

That gets into a whole separate thing around what happens in more cultlike corporations and the dynamics with the VC world (WeWork is an obvious example) as to why organisations can end up with workforces which will do things of questionable purpose, because the organisation has a visible a fearless leader who has to be pleased/obeyed etc (Musk, Jobs etc), or more insidiously, a valuable goal that must be pursued regardless of cost (weaponised effective altruism sort of).

That then gets into a whole thing about what happens with something like the UK civil service, where you're asked to implement things and obviously you can't care about the politics, because you'll serve lots of governments that believe lots of different things, and you can't just quit and get rehired every time a party you disagree with personally gets into power, but again, that diverges into other things.

At the risk of narrative fallacy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKDdLWAdcbM

People's actual measured experience, vs people's experience of the experience, are rarely the same things, when they have prior knowledge of one thing, and low knowledge of the alternative. They prefer the thing they know, even when it's worse.

There's loads of this in the UX space. To overly simplify, people's brains use expected ideas about what things are like, in order to interact with the world. We build models as to what things are like, and then things that look like what we expect, we over-weight to stating as things that we understand.

So when people are presented with something which is visually appealing, we think it's easy to use, even when it isn't. And people will then default to blaming themselves, not the pretty, elegant thing, because clearly the pretty elegant thing isn't the issue.

We call this the aesthetic-usability effect. Perception of the expected experience, and attribution of the actual experience, is more important part than the actual experience.

It's one of the many ways in which engineers, economists and analysts (in my experience) tend to run in to issues. They want people to behave rationally, based on their KPIs, not as people actually experience and interact with the world.

There's all sorts of research that then comes off this, like people enjoying wine they've been told is more expensive, over wine they've been told is cheaper, and the physiological response as measured with an MRI confirms their reported divergence in experience, despite that the wines are the same, as one quick example.

Low contextuality evaluations (my term for where you ask someone to state things about something where they lack enough experience with enough breadth and depth to answer reliably) are always wonky. People can't comment on wine, because they don't know enough about wine, so they seek other clues to tell them about what they're experiencing. Similarly, people don't know about things that are new to them (by default) or that look different to what they expect, so their experience is always reported as being worse than it probably actually is, because their brain doesn't like expending energy learning about something new. They'd rather something they understood. It's where contextualisation and mimicry come in really useful from a design of experience standpoint.

Not quite. The idea that corporate employees are fundamentally "not average" and therefore more prone to unethical behaviour than the general population relies on a dispositional explanation (it's about the person's character).

However, the vast majority of psychological research over the last 80 years heavily favours a situational explanation (it's about the environment/system). Everyone (in the field) got really interested in this after WW2 basically, trying to understand how the heck did Nazi Germany happen.

TL;DR: research dismantled this idea decades ago.

The Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments are the most obvious examples. If you're not familiar:

Milgram showed that 65% of ordinary volunteers were willing to administer potentially lethal electric shocks to a stranger because an authority figure in a lab coat told them to. In the Stanford Prison experiement, Zimbardo took healthy, average college students and assigned them roles as guards and prisoners. Within days, the roles and systems set in place overrode individual personality.

The other relevant bit would be Asch’s conformity experiments; to whit, that people will deny the evidence of their own eyes (e.g., the length of a line) to fit in with a group.

In a corporate setting, if the group norm is to prioritise KPIs over ethics, the average human will conform to that norm to avoid social friction or losing their job, or other realistic perceived fears.

Bazerman and Tenbrunsel's research is relevant too. Broadly, people like to think that we are rational moral agents, but it's more accurate to say that we boundedly ethical. There's this idea of ethical fading that happens. Basically, when you introduce a goal, people's ability to frame falls apart, including with a view to the ethical implications. This is also related to why people under pressure default to less creative approaches to problem solving. Our brains tunnel vision on the goal, to the failure of everything else.

Regarding how all that relates to modern politics, I'll leave that up to your imagination.

To expand on this a little for those interested, time has properties space doesn't. For example, you can turn left to swap your forward direction for sideways in space. You cannot turn though, in a way that swaps your forward (as it were) direction in space for a backward direction in time.

Equally, cause always precedes effect. If time were exactly like space, you could bypass a cause to get to an effect, which would break the fundamental laws of physics as we know them.

There's obviously a lot more, but that's a couple of examples to hopefully help someone.

None of it is them, all of it is LLMs.

Blindsight by Peter Watts

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

Startide Rising by David Brin

A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge

The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks

Semiosis by Sue Burke

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward

Solaris by Stanisław Lem

The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

Translation State by Ann Leckie

Pandora's Star by Peter F. Hamilton

The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle

House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

This is what sprang to mind as answering that sort of brief off the top of my head.

To be clear, this is a pun on A*

That's a stellar observation right there.

Nowhere even close