Dan_Dilger

red oak said:

Re: “innovation”

Apple has only launched AW and AirPods since the release of iPad 10 years ago.  

In the meantime, R&D spending has gone through the roof.  It is IBM-isk in the low number of products coming out the pipeline.  The focus on R&D spending as % of sales and number of patents/yr are a cancer to any org - Apple included

Cook talks about how Apple will remembered on “contributions to Health”.  Great.  So, what is It doing other than incremental improvements to the Watch?   Apple is moving way too slow - like it is running in sand 

Ditto on the massive effort on Apple Titan car.  Too much R&D spend, too slow,  no go to market plan (still), no timelines

I think it is okay (and healthy) to question Apple’s recent innovation record

Except that Swisher was just being lazy with a cliche trope about "Apple not innovating" which is total bullshit, apart from being incorrect and misleading. There was no honest question of how much Apple was delivering for its innovation investment. But the answer to that question is also that Apple spends much less than its peers and delivers far more in terms of new, expansion and profits anyways. 

It's easy to get lost in counting Apple's big innovations" as iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, etc, but it's not three innovations. Apple has now delivered 19 years of the worlds best selling, most profitable phone. It's also a camera, camcorder, computer, mobile music, TV, game device, and so on. It's an everything product. And yet its also sold ten years of tablets in a world of competitors that can't manage to sell any material number of tablets even at break even for any period of time. And on top it is now selling its 6th gen watch in a climate where nobody else can compete. And now AirPods. 

To look at that and ask, where is the results for apple's minimal R&D?! is just asinine beyond words. It's literally the laziest, least insightful thing a person who writes about tech could sit in front of a camera and say to an audience. So shame on her. 

Where are the pundits reminding us that Google and Microsoft haven't innovated their R&D into a functional hardware business, even after just trying to copy Apple verbatim? They get a full pass for failing for the last 15 years of peak smartphone and Apple gets drilled about failing to "innovate?" That's just bullshit beyond the pale. It's like looking at the British empire in 1850 and asking, where are Britain's colonies!? They haven't added a new continent lately!  

Abalos65 said:

And you were wrong about Apple's supply chain being prepared for the coronavirus, not more so than other companies. Are you willing to admit that?

There was never any claim that Apple wouldn't be affected at all. 

Instead, I noted that Apple is well positioned to get through a temporary problem, and contrasted that with the situation for Huawei and other Android makers who are seeing not only sales disruptions, but are desperately dependent on year-round volume sales, trade shows, retail discounting, and Chinese sales to a far greater degree than Apple.  

It is impossible to argue that Apple is not prepared for crisis after turning around sales in China last year and surviving previous supply chain disasters such as the devastation in Japan. 

On the other hand, the wild media narratives of doom described in the article have been wrong, wrong, wrong over the last year. Point your waging finger where it belongs.

avon b7 said:

As you have been reminded several times, there is NO national security issue here.

And even if there were, the U.S should not be trying to call the shots on what other sovereign nations should do.

You can repeat a totally unfounded and absurd idea as much as you want, but it doesn't make it true. 

Installing PRC/Huawei networking equipment into the communications infrastructure of a nation China is actively spying on and actively stealing the IP from very clearly does create a security issue for that nation. 

Also recall that China didn't welcome German or Japanese high speed trains; they required foreign minority investment in a domestic Chinese company, then appropriated the technology until they could build their own trains with German tech. 

China also required US automakers to do the same, creating Chinese led firms to actually build "US" cars for the Chinese market. 

China has also blocked Google, Facebook and most other western internet companies from coming in and building the online infrastructure of China. That was all declared to be related to domestic sovereignty, control of communications, and protectionism of local internet firms. Apple is one of the few success stories in China, largely because it set up manufacturing through Taiwanese and Chinese assemblers. 

China can't do those things and then expect the rest of the world to allow it to flood their markets and build their infrastructure with high tech communications equipment that would be fantastically easy to use to spy on communications in a very sophisticated way that would be impossible for the customers of that equipment to even know what is happening. You'd be safer just having Chinese spyware on your PC than having PRC-developed routers handling all of the calls and communications in your country. 

steven n. said:

I find this article woefully lacking by leaving out Tango. While it seriously drove up the cost of the phone, it was a significant achievement by Google. It was also accurate and more powerful than ARKit. 

Apple took the idea of Tango and did the following:

1) reversed it so if could map the face. 

2) decreased the range but significantly increased density and precision. 

3) miniaturized the heck out of it. 

4) made it fast. 

5) made it mass produced. 

Then called it FaceID. They used software and sensors for ARKit. It’s good enough for many applications but can still get better IMO. 

We wrote about Tango back in 2017: https://appleinsider.com/articles/17/10/13/how-apples-iphone-x-truedepth-ar-waltzed-ahead-of-googles-tango

The Information is now writing about Google's revamped ARCore efforts following Apple's ARKit shipped. Google did what it usually does when Apple comes out with the correct approach to something that it had been fuddling about with for years: throws out its past failure and starts over with an exact copy of what Apple just shipped (Android, Google Pay, Android TV, Android Auto, Wear OS, etc).

This copy is hailed as genius and original and never does anything really amazing but actually just barely allows firms in China to use a Google-cloned version of Apple tech. It's been the core of China's competitive strategy for the last two decades now.

Americans wail about Apple delegating its least valuable jobs involved with assembly labor to China--while building real jobs in design, development, apps, and content at home and elsewhere--but Google has been working overtime to shift the highest value layers of American development directly to the PRC, forcing Apple to compete with a Google-facilitated clone of its own efforts, also assembled in China.

By also devaluing journalism with its ad-click centric content drive that has defunded newspapers and replaced them with clickbait factories, Google has set up the final end stages of capitalism where greed facilitates a dictatorship with a choice between nationalist fascism and nationalist communism, our two remaining superpowers. All it took was a lack of curation and an empowerment of all voices without any editorial control. Freedom is slavery!

The only hope is if Apple can advance ahead of China and the West can reestablish an authentic 4th estate where its illegal to lie, so we can shut down Fox and CNN and Facebook and go back to politics that are boring and routine and instead get excited about sports or fashion or whatever.

avon b7 said:

sflocal said:

Our resident Huawei spokesperson is about as loyal as the most die-hard Apple fanboy.

The the way Chinese government has its claws into everyone doing business in China, Huawei IS in the cahoots with the government.  AvonB7 needs to accept and get over it.  His dismissal of Huawei's IP theft habits going back decades is shameful to say the least.

I don't dismiss anything but I have yet to see anything even remotely in line with the level of the accusations. No one has.

What is evident is that the current situation sees Huawei stuck between two governments, with one of them hellbent on destroying the company.

The accusations" are linked right there in the article. Read them. #1 is Huawei stealing Cisco IOS and using it to ship its own routers. Huawei doesn't even contest this. I raise this earlier and you avoided it entirely. So rather than arguing 16 accusations, start there. It is impossible to argue Huawei didn't steal Cisco's software. It's like building a hackintosh, then actually going into business selling fake Macs running Apple's software so that people would buy your PCs. That's exactly what Huawei has a history of doing. 

Can you argue that Huawei didn't steal Cisco IOS? No. Even Huawei can't. So you are refusing to look at the facts and announcing that nobody has seen any facts or proof. That's a lie. The first one is totally impossible to argue against and is well known.

If you were interested, the list keeps going on of known rippoffs of US tech Huawei pursued. Just like Samsung. Huawei shamelessly rips off everything. It's pathetic.