Dan_Dilger

GeorgeBMac said:

Apple is investing in AAPL?    No, it is not investing in itself.   It is doing two things:

1). Giving away its profits to stock holders

2)  Propping up its own stock pice

I read a few days ago (I forget where) that in the last couple years Apple's Earnings Per Share have increased 25% -- on the SAME PROFIT.   That's all due to buybacks reducing the number of shares outstanding.

But, Apple is not alone in its Financial Engineering.   It seems most large U.S. companies are doing it.

So, while "we" complain about China competing unfairly against U.S. corporations, those same U.S. corporations are refusing to invest in themselves.

Perhaps China is not the problem?

Do you think Apple is not investing in itself? Why?

The thing is, Apple can’t effectively spend 5x as much on R&D or plants and retail to get 5x the result. It can’t simply hire 5x as many people to get tasks done. So the options are, hold the money in tbills or distribute to shareholders—the owners of the company.

Quite obviously, reducing shares outstanding is going to affect the earnings per share at the “same earnings.” It’s not a trick, it’s very basic math. 

Reducing shares by buying them back and retiring them is the opposite of printing new shares. When companies issue new shares, they are diluting the value of the shares held by their investors. This is the opposite. Why the confusion?

The complaints about China isn’t that companies are investing in their future, but that they are stealing IP, copying the design without the same concern for safety and quality, and maintaining poor working conditions that brutalize labor and expose workers to very bad conditions. That’s why apple has been forcing its suppliers to reach a much higher level of standards for worker rights, environmental protection, safety and product quality. 

China is a huge problem. Look at what they are doing to their own air and water. 

proline said:

I’ll leave it to DED to write thousands of words praising an unannounced feature that may or may not see the final release as an Android killer. 

Now time to re-read his piece about street view being creepy and flyover being the next big thing. That one is always good for laughs. 

Its 2019 and every time I use Flyover, I still have iPhone users looking over my shoulder saying "what is that?!"

Also, I've written well over a thousand articles since 2012, the article that you're supposedly still butthurt about. But that article wasn't "about" StreetView being creepy, that's was the headline put on it for SEO. In fact, the article I wrote doesn't say anything about being "creepy" at all. If you'd read it, you'd know that.

What I actually wrote was: "While not without controversy from privacy advocates (and with government stopping Google's work of StreetView mapping the world in countries like Australia, Germany and India), Google has effectively covered vast areas of Europe, Russia, North America, Brazil, Japan, Thailand, South Korea and South Africa with its camera cars."

Again, if you'd actually read the article rather than googling for a quick personal attack, you'd know that said "there are a variety of attractive features Google has bundled into its web and app-based Google Maps portfolio, providing a tall order for anyone hoping to replicate all those features. Apple certainly has big shoes to fill in the maps department."

It applauded Google for delivering the future, noting that "Conceptually, StreetView can be dated back to an ARPA project developed at MIT, which in 1978 began mapping the town of Aspen, Colorado, using photographs stored on interactive Laserdisc, allowing users to virtually walk down streets, and even bring up seasonal views of the town from multiple perspectives.

The Aspen Movie Map was one of the first advanced examples of hypermedia, and was described by a young Steve Jobs in a 1983 speech describing the future potential of personal computing.

"It's really amazing," Jobs said, describing the project in contrast with conventional, static forms of old media. "It's not incredibly useful," he added as the audience laughed, "but it points to some of the interactive nature of this new medium which is just starting to break out from movies, and will take another five to ten years to evolve."
So the phony here is you, falsely attacking me for something from 2012 in the most childish fashion possible.

zAAAz said:

The iPhones are indistinguishable from Androids in the way they look. There were 0 interesting inventive breakthrough designs coming from Apple in the last 10 years. Everything is derivative, incremental, safe. Good, but far from insanely great. Nobody has the balls to go out on the limb and dare. They do know how to maximize profits, god bless them, but so what? 50 years from now, nobody will care how much money Apple made under Tim Cook. The stuff SJ did was timeless.

One can't help but wonder if the reason Cook is so pissed off is because the article bears a grain of truth. 

The more you refute, the more people suspect that it must be true. 

This article may have been crap, but it did capture the essence of how the company changed from something insanely great to ordinary and well run.

In 2017 Apple radically changed the form and entire navigation model with iPhone X. 

Mickle’s article is classic cult psychology: say two things that are true and then lie once. Over and over. 

It doesn’t capture any essence. It just allows people to change their memories of how things were and accept a new history full of made up bullshit. 

TomPMRI said:

“Before Windows PCs, home computing vendors including Apple, Acorn, Atari, and Commodore all built complete systems using integrated, internally developed software and hardware, often right down to their own custom silicon.”

For those who weren’t born yet when the Commodore PET 2001 was introduced in the 1970’s, I need to correct the above statement.  The PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) was (1) based on a standard 1 MHz 6502 8-bit microprocessor (the same processor family that Apple used for many years before the switch to Intel), and (2) used the Microsoft qBASIC interpreter (ROM based) for programming the PET in BASIC.  Of, course, the user could also program the PET using 6502 assembly language, which became useful when the PET memory was expanded by the user from the standard 8K to 40K using 32K memory board kits that were available from 3rd parties. For the curious out there, the board used 16 16K x 1 bit dynamic RAM chips at $8.50 each (1978 dollars) to create the 32K x 8-bit additional memory.  Since the qBASIC interpreter could only access up to 32K RAM, the user could push machine code into the additional 8K.

The PET did have a custom boot ROM (no toggle switch booting required like the Altair 8800), but most of the other components were “off the shelf” and could be easily purchased at Radio Shack.

I’m certainly not a Microsoft fan (proud Apple user/customer since 1981), but I just want the historical record to be correct.

Yes the PET was pretty basic in 1977, but Commodore's much more popular Vic20 was in fact named after its custom MOS video chip. And the C64, which was the most popular home computer of its day, made notable use of custom silicon for sound and graphics. The next generation Amiga was basically a video game console, with advanced graphics and video custom silicon, and also ran its own custom multitasking OS at a time when Commodore had lots of licensing options. Same with Atari ST.

As the home PC industry hit its stride, there were so many different, incompatible systems in play, each with their own hs and OS, that generic Intel-Windows PCs stood out as a compatibility solution to the problems of finding apps that could work on a given system.

Then, as integration became more important in driving costs down and proprietary value up, Apple's OS X and iOS created a market alternative to generic Windows and swung the pendulum back towards custom integrated systems. 

macplusplus said:

“As the PC business grew into an increasingly valuable segment, IBM attempted to develop its own, more sophisticated OS and hardware platforms with PS/2 OS/2. It continued work with Microsoft to do this, but as soon as Microsoft felt it could do better on its own, Gates' Microsoft dumped IBM and launched its own plans for Windows.”

You’re right that OS/2 was the sw platform, but PS/2 was the name of IBM’s hw platform intended to replace the easy to clone IBM PC with a proprietary new architecture.

MSFT worked with IBM on OS/2 and then backed out to focus on Windows instead. But IBM launched PS/2 on its own, only to get undercut by the rest of the industry that kept shipping faster old PC clones. 

PS/2 introduced the standard for mini-DIN keyboard and mouse connectors, which is why they were still called that up until USB.