thompr

sog35 said:

Here we go again.

This is probably the 15th time these supply chain rumors have come out since November.
And each time the stock losses $10 billion to $30 billion in value.

Yet Tim Cook says absolutely NOTHING.
The stock is down nearly $180 billion since these rumors have started.
Yet Cook does nothing.

Cook will say all he needs to say at the conference call.  If the rumors were true, it's baked in.  If not, AAPL will eventually come back.

 You suffer from a lack of patience, not to mention integrity. (Weren't you supposed to be gone now?)

bdkennedy said:

Siri couldn't get me to my local animal shelter last week and kept me running around in circles...

Are you a doggy?

gatorguy said:

...and then Apple failed at that task, with none of that decided in this court case even tho that was a supposed goal and focus. Settled before it ever began. It all came down to money. That's actually a real issue with real effects. "Android the big loser because Apple and QC are back in a bromance" is a made-up one.  

You do not know whether Apple failed or not.  The settlement the two companies reached may have addressed all of those issues, both in terms of the one-time payment (from disputes over past royalties & promises) as well as their future chip deals (potentially no double-dipping, etc).  I don't know either.  But given the fierceness Apple has always shown in its negotiations (some deals have been revealed after the fact)... if I were forced to place a bet regarding whether Apple took a chunk out of what Qualcomm was hoping for, I would bet "yes".

OK, so you might say that even if my bet were correct, then Apple was only successful with regard to cash but not with regard to "being the hero" for the community against Qualcomm's licensing practices.  You don't know that either.  There are still several court cases brought by multiple governments against Qualcomm.  I also don't know, but my hunch is that by now there is little else Apple could reveal in those cases that they haven't already revealed.  So Apple has played its "hero card" about as far as it could go from that standpoint.

The bottom line is that I believe Apple probably came out of this settlement with much nicer terms going forward (and potentially reduced payment for what occurred before) and that Qualcomm's licensing practices with many of their customers are still under the microscope and will possibly have to be revisited going forward.

David H Dennis said:

I wonder how this will work, since all the satellite services I know of require a dish — which is certainly not portable equipment.  

Also I wonder how much this service would cost, and whether it’s a first step to introducing an Apple cell carrier, which I would think would be an almost guaranteed success if service isn’t awful.

Certainly Apple’s level of customer loyalty is far, far higher than Verizon’s will ever be.

All of the satellite services that require dishes use satellites in Geosynchronous orbit, which is approximately 40,000 km out from Earth's center.  Low earth orbit is 2,000 km or less, meaning 1/20th of the distance... translating to 1/400th of the power requirements (each way).  Still, it would be quite a feat to make the uplink work.

Metriacanthosaurus said:

eightzero said:

No mention of the value of TouchID to applePay though.

Because this isn't a thing. ApplePay has nothing to do with Touch ID. Apple's security mechanisms are why Apple Pay is acceptable to the industry. Touch ID is a convenience feature, that lets you skip entering a password. It has nothing to do with the overall security protocols in place. For this reason, Touch ID is interchangeable with any equally high quality convenience feature that Apple develops.

And within the last sentence lies the rub.  The system developed needs to be equally convenient when used with ApplePay, and that may not turn out to be the case.

Do you use ApplePay at retail checkout counters?  When you place the phone near the NFC system, the iPhone switches to ApplePay mode instantly, regardless of what app it was in or even if it was previously asleep.  At that moment, the phone needs to confirm that YOU are the one holding it while it is still very near the NFC system so it can complete the confirmation of payment.  The current mechanism, i.e. relying on TouchID, is perfectly convenient because your thumb is right there to do the trick.

Contrast that with any other system of ID confirmation, whether it be entering a PIN, scanning your face, or even scanning your retina (not that that is even in the cards right now, but just for the sake of argument).  Given the position and angle that these readers are at relative to your face (often a couple of feet away and at an obtuse angle with respect to your face) I wonder how well the face scanning will work from that position.  How broad of an angle in space will the 3D sensors cover (so your face is even in its view), how near does your face need to be (to give it enough "voxels on target"), and how well will it work if your face is not nearly perpendicular to the beam pattern (how complete is your stored 3-D "face model")?  It's entirely possible that Apple will have to design in a few extra steps, such as either:

(1) after ApplePay is invoked, requiring you to tilt and/or lift your phone a bit to scan your face (or type in a PIN) and then place it back down again, which NFC systems may not even support, or...

(2) scan your face (or enter PIN) first mere seconds before placing the phone down on the NFC system.  (Of course, this would require the iPhone to be awake and make you launch ApplePay prior to placing the phone.) 

Note: a third option is that the user has to bend over to get his/her face near and directly over the phone while it is still near the reader.  I think this will cause some consternation for many users.  Maybe not for geeks such as me and many AI readers here, but I can imagine that a non-trivial fraction of users won't want to contort like this in public.

Just two seconds of thought on this and you realize that from a user experience perspective, the current TouchID implementation holds a lot of value for ApplePay.  Any other "high quality convenience feature that Apple develops" to support this ID verification is going to have to be designed with these things in mind, and I (for one) am somewhat concerned that it won't be as good for this use case as TouchID is.  Maybe this is a first-world problem, and maybe you will scoff at me for my concern over a few extra steps, but my observation is that Apple commonly designs for solving first-world problems.  The original implementation of ApplePay with TouchID clearly indicates they worked hard to do just that.  Here's hoping whatever they come up with regarding ApplePay and ID verification (non TouchID) is just as slick.

P.S. I have similar concerns with unlocking the phone any time it is laying on a level surface and my face is not directly above the phone.  Yes, I sometimes do that to see what is onscreen (such as a score, stock price, or whatever page/app I left it on) without having to pick the device up.

... the only way they could get even some Republicans to vote for it was to bribe them or threaten them.

... which is basically what "negotiation" in DC is: bribes and threats.

So Trump only "negotiated" with the Republicans in Congress.  Since they are in the majority, that's all he needed to do.  It would have been a monumental waste of energy to negotiate with the Democrats, who are neither likely to meet him halfway nor are necessary to achieve his goal.

dewme said:

Facebook is a content delivery company that charges advertisers to interleave their ads into the content. Facebook is essentially a "free" radio or television broadcast model with hundreds of millions of content provider channels, i.e., individuals who post on Facebook, and hundreds of millions of viewers, most of whom are also content providers. Using the radio/television analogy, Apple sells the radios and televisions and Facebook provides (some of) the content that gets played on the radios and television.

But the problem is that Facebook does more than just present ads for other companies in their content.  They also provide access to their users' private information for targeted advertising.  This is where your analogy ends and the problems begin.

slprescott said:

SpamSandwich said:

Apple already said they’ll be hiring 20,000 people. What is the real problem here?

No, not “hiring.”

Apple said their investment would “create” 20,000 jobs.  They didn’t provide a breakout, but I imagine many of those jobs will be in the support community — app developers, construction workers for new facilities, etc. All good — I’m not belittling these —but many will not be “Apple hires.”

That argument is exactly what several articles provided, but it is WRONG.  The quote from Apple also stated that the job creation would occur through hiring at US locations.  Go back and read the actual quote instead of just swallowing the conclusions of the authors that wrote about it later.

Here is the quote:

"Apple expects to invest over $30 billion in capital expenditures in the US over the next five years and create over 20,000 new jobs through hiring at existing campuses and opening a new one,” which will initially “house technical support for customers.”"

mdriftmeyer said:

Watch was a grand slam. Definitely buying one.

GPS makes it a must buy for parents wanting to give a watch to their child and know where they are and if anything deviates from their location they can track them down. You call it big brother, I'll call that use smart parenting.

Law Enforcement will appreciate it when tracking children for Amber alerts and more.

The child would still need to be carrying a phone with them  in order for parents to track.   So how does GPS in the watch actually help anything with regard to tracking? 

rogifan_old said:

Facebook is up 12% after hours. Why? Yes they reported good numbers but more importantly they have a good story to tell and they tell it well. What is Apple's story? All we got on the conference call was FX, FX and more FX. Oh and a pretty useless slide about "services" which at this point are mostly App Store and iTunes downloads. Until Apple finds its story and tells it in a compelling way I think the stock is stuck in the mud.

Easy to sell a story when your future growth prospects are potentially bright.  Not so easy when you have already set unprecedented records for performance and have nowhere to go but down.  (Not in my eyes, that is, but in the eyes of many.)

So there is no "story to tell" for Apple other than by the numbers.  And yes, the stock will probably be a slow gainer over the coming years, not a juicy growth story as in years past.  There is nothing Tim could say that would change the perception, because the perception is halfway right.