Dan_Dilger

elijahg said:

snow66 said:

While the media focusses on Apples shortcomings with Siri, Apple is reaching far beyond cloud based voice assistants.  

Yeah so far beyond the cloud that asking Siri to do something as simple as pause or change the volume regularly causes a 5 second delay and then "just a moment"... then 5 seconds later "please hold the line"... another 5 seconds "nope connection is broken". If that was on-device that would never be a problem. Siri is embarrassing.

Yes, one of the things Apple really needs to work on improving. But it is well-positioned to do that, given that it has powerful on-device hardware and has Siri deployed across a billion users.  

spice-boy said:

do people that are living paycheck to paycheck buy a phone for $1,000? 

Yes they do. It's cheaper to trade it in every two years and keep buying the latest new premium iPhone than buying a cheap $300 Android every year and watching it glitch out and end up with zero residual value. 

ElCapitan said:

First of all there is a rude awakening across the planet of the insanity of shipping production of goods and services offshore, and putting all eggs in the Chinese basket.  The effect of the COVID-19 crisis is that suddenly all countries starts to act like countries again, and global sourcing has to a large extent collapsed. 

With the upcoming financial depression we just have seen the start of, people are going to first cut on subscriptions; cloud services, music, media streaming, software subscriptions, then anything premium.

People are going to get much more aware of purchasing products that creates jobs in their countries and not someone elsewhere. Equally they are going become much more focused on that their hard earned money don't stuff the coffers of international companies that hardly give anything back to their markets (taxes, job creation, local economic growth). 

If you look at Apple and think there's tremendous value in the manual labor assembly jobs contracted out to Foxconn in China, and then discount the 80,000 workers Apple directly employees in the USA (many are retail; ~20,000 are professional designers, engineers, and office staff working in California, Texas, FL, etc facilities), plus the 450,000 supplier employees that work for Apple in the US, and 1.5M developers + who work in content and apps directly attributable to Apple's platforms, there's something wrong with how you are looking at things. 

Apple is doing its valuable creative, design, engineering, planning, product work domestically and shipping the routine low-value jobs elsewhere because nobody in the US is qualified to run precision manufacturing and basic labor and there's nowhere to do it and no supply chain to support it. 

You really need to reconsider what you think about jobs.

Also, you're right that working people who can suddenly not feed themselves or pay rent are going to be cutting services and other luxuries. But Apple's installed base includes a vast number of independently rich people who are at most going to be inconvenienced by this turmoil. The damage is going to hit certain groups far harder than others, as grossly unfair as that is. And those hurt the most are at the bottom, using Android phones already. 

Apple also pays the most taxes in the US, and its sales are hit by state sales tax etc. Substantiate what you're claiming because it sounds awfully weak. 

WarrenBuffduckh said:

More relevant to the Q. “ Will the COVID-19 disaster sink Apple's premium hardware?” is that we’re waiting, waiting and waiting for AirTile, AirPower, AppleHeadphone, AirPodsPro Lite, AppleGlasses, AppleCar, iTV, iPhone SE2, MacBook 14”, iMac, HomePod 2020. No, it’s not COVID-19 that is the (main) cause of delays - although it will certainly be attributed being so. The core problem is the dispersed focus on all the services mentioned, the CEO not obsessed with products, and the money addiction of the immense Tech Bureaucracy he created reaping fruits from Steve’s ideas. Steve said: “Stay lean and mean, stay foolish, focus on products” Tim did: “Become large and keep counting, focus on cash” Hence its inability to act as a lean, mean and innovative aggressor. It has become merely defensive, sadly, where keeping market share is key and innovation considered merely disruptive. On the individual employee level that translates “Think different” into “Think indifferent”.

The fact that you can list off almost a dozen products that a lot of iPhone users know about and are interested in evaluating or buying says much more about Apple's level of competency and performance.
What is anyone waiting to come out of Facebook or Google, and what of those things would anyone actually pay for?
I don't get your contrast between Jobs and Cook. Jobs tried many more wild things out as desperate reaches than Cook ever has. Jobs introduced iPod Socks and floated out some pretty bad software and internet services, including multile things he felt compelled to appoligize in public for. Cook has rather deftly launched hit after hit, even after the obvious product niches were filled.
Cook is sailing a much larger ship. He can hire smart people to make design decisions. Jobs had a magical vision for knowing what upcoming generations would want and need. But if he were still around, he'd likely still be pushing for fake leather trim on windows and shiny chrome knobs in the UX, stuff that just slows down real progress in utility. Jobs was sort of notorious his whole life for occasionally prioitizing something really inessential over the greater good of a product.
Apple would be far worse off if Cook blustered along as if he thought he were really The Visioary rather than being really excellent at operations. At this scale, Apple should be run by somebody capable of delegating work to a design talent team, rather than somebody who is there to stroke their "I'm a genius ego." Imagine if Apple run by some ultra privelaged rich dick who thinks he's smarter than he really is, like Elon.

luxuriant said:

Always great to read your thoughts, Daniel. But the tldr; is simply to apply Betteridge's Law of Headlines:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

I do that ironically to feel clever. It also lets me phrase the question as absurdly as possible, so just reading it conveys what a dumb question it is. The article is just some extra articulated proof.