radarthekat

lewchenko said:

I guess the intention was that the buybacks would reduce the shares in circulation and thus the remaining shares would be of higher value. 

It it would also reduce the amount paid out in dividends. 

What they didnt factor in was the share price collapse. So shareholder value hasn’t exactly worked out well for those who hung onto their shares after they peaked at $227. A multitude of mistakes on Apples part and a series of timed articles to pull the stock down. 

People on these forums say the analysts and WSJ don’t get it , and the stock is manipulated. Etc etc. The truth however is that they do get it.. the world isn’t fair and that the word of the media and analysts do indeed manipulate the stock, but that’s just normal and they leverage it to make money. No surprise there. Expect to be played if investing in stock. If you make money, chances are it’s only because some other heavy weight players are. 

There are two camps.  Your comment reflects the thinking of the camp who measure their wealth daily and see a drop in share price as a negative.  The other camp, which I inhabit, along with others here, and Warren Buffett, is comprised of those who feel the only times the stock price directly matters to us is the day we buy and the day we, long into the future, eventually sell.  In the interim, periods during which the stock gets oversold, based upon misconception by analysts or global events and political folly, simply offers opportunities to acquire more shares and for the company to increase our percentage ownership through repurchase of additional shares. 

Removing excess cash from the balance sheet via buybacks or dividend payments shifts the ratio of operating business to dead 1%-return cash, which means that each new dollar invested in shares is purchasing more of the cash-flow generating operating business and less static cash.  No smart investor wants to invest a dollar to see that dollar buy just 75 or 80 cents of operating business and 20 or 25 cents of cash.  We want to see that whole dollar working on the operating business side of the equation, and Apple understands this, thus its initiative to become cash neutral.  I applaud that, and am looking forward to hearing Apple management report how much they spent on cash return this quarter.  I’m hoping it’s a bump over the $20 billion they’ve been spending in recent quarters.  

MplsP said:

Something doesn’t seem right here - the speed of light is roughly 3e8 m/2, or 3e10 cm/sec. This means that to have a resolution of 0.5 cm, a sensor would need to be able to have a temporal resolution of at least 1 cm/3e10 cm/s = 3e-11 seconds, or on the order of 30GHz. In practice it would be higher. That means no only would the sensor need to register that fast as well as be able to sample that fast. 

Yes, 30Ghz would provide a resolution of about 4.5mm.  Not bad if you’re measuring distances of 100 meters, as you would with a sensor being used in an autonomous drive system.  The 3Ghz of current CPUs would yield only 45mm resolution, which would not work at all for close in objects, like portrait mode pictures.  However, these sensors aren’t controlled by the clock speed of the CPU.  They are more akin to an anolog system, with a timing signal built in to the unit that synchronizes the emitter pulse with the sensor array.  Light returning to the array generates a voltage in each pixel, basically operating at the speed of physics on the sensor side.  The timing period itself determines the distance at which the sensor operates.  For example, one type of system modulates the pulse with an RF carrier.  The sensor array then measures the phase shift to determine time of flight.  Such systems are limited to a range of up to about 60m, but can be tuned for shorter ranges (limiting their accuracy to the short range but maximizing resolution at that shorter range).  Such a modulated system is what’s used by Microsoft Kinect.  Other methods yield sub millimeter accuracy.

Here’s more on the various technologies employed and their respective resolutions and applications.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-of-flight_camera

zoetmb said:

radarthekat said:

I guess it takes a lot to tickle my funny bone these days.  When I was young I’d be rolling with laughter at stuff that today I just look at and think, really, someone spent time out of their life producing that?   Not sure if I’d characterize it as childish, adolescent, or what?  Maybe adolescent is closest.  Like the American Pie movies, or those Hangover movies.  I occasionally am recommended to watch those, and for the longest time I resisted, but a while back I switched on one of the Hangover movies.  It proved to me what I already knew; my friends have retained but not refined their senses of humor since high school.  And let’s be clear on one thing... I absolutely will judge your intellect by your sense of humor.  I’ll take a pass on meeting in person anyone associated with this Bad Lip Reading trope [sic].

I have to disagree and I wouldn't voluntarily watch an American Pie movie either.   What's hysterical about the Bad Lip Reading is three things:  how well the lip sync is done, the uncanny voice impersonations and most importantly (to me), the attitude.   It completely retained Apple's self importance and over-the-top style at these events.   While I wouldn't want to watch more than one of these and I wouldn't want it to be any longer than it was, I think it worked as comedy quite well.  

But...different strokes for different folks.   One person's comedy is another person's stupidity or boredom.  

I don’t know that good lip syncing necessarily connotes humor.  Nobody was laughing about Milli Vanilli (stripped of their Grammy).  Bad lip syncing, maybe; Eddie Murphy’s intentional out-of-synch take on martial arts movies dialog comes to mind.

As for voice impersonations, I do well over 100, a talent I discovered during the Nixon years.  The key to a humorous impersonation is to use a tiny little compartment in your mind to create a caricature of the personality of the person your intending to impersonate.  And that means you have to be able to replicate thoughts that person would actually think and say.  The way Jay Leno used to impersonate Arnold or Dana Carvy’s impersonations of George Bush.  It can be over the top or subtle, but it has to be true to the person and the target should be a person who’s personality invites caricature.  For example, I used to work with a Russian programmer who’s voice was quite unique, easy for me to imitate.  But it was his persona, a highly excitable but pragmatic personality, and my ability to capture his persona, sufficient to stand outside his daughter’s cubicle (she worked with us summers while at college) and have a full conversation with her without her catching on to the fact it wasn’t her father on the opposite side of the cubicle wall.  Funny.  Mockery, in this case of Tim Cook & Co, is not by itself sufficient to be truly humorous, though it can be the basis of a funny impersonation.  

I don’t at all get what you mean by “the attitude.”  Humor is about the unexpected, the twist, incongruity, unless you think Andrew Dice Clay is funny. 

Soli said:

. . .

The blue comments, of course, ignore the work his/her forebears did to invent the tech upon which Google and other helpful tools are built. I have no college education, but I can use my high school education plus Google and YouTube and TedTalks, etc, to educate myself on pretty much any topic. I’ve done so to fair effect, becoming a multimillionaire in the process (At 56 I’m right at the tail end of the boomer generation).  Which belies the question, is it education (knowledge) that blue-comment person is seeking, because that’s readily available for nearly free to anyone with an internet connection, or is it a college degree he/she is looking for?

lkrupp said:

wood1208 said:

When you compare across the spectrum of users, Apple's laptops are definitely lot more reliable comparing to Windows. IBM said the support cost for MACs are lot lower than Windows machines. In this article, performance wise, compare the same processors inside than different Gen(7th vs 8th) and dual vs quad core.

Okay, you forgot what the article was about. They took similarly priced hardware and compared them. The Windows box won, period. The last paragraph said that the new MacBook Pro would likely keep up but it is now considerably more expensive than the the Razer they tested. According to a significant number of users here and elsewhere ALL that counts is performance vs price and in that comparison Apple hardware is overpriced and underperforming trash. We’re not talking about macOS or the experience or anything else. We’re talking bang for buck and Apple loses big time.

The whole narrative for Apple has changed recently. Now it’s about price and price alone. All the analysts, all the blogs (including AI), all the critics, all the trolls, have zeroed in on price as the be-all-end-all of value. This competition review proves the point. Dollar for dollar of performance, Apple hardware sucks and always has. To the new breed of Apple critics the concept of premium prices for premium hardware is anathema. They’re all made in the same factory and contain the same third party components as everybody else. So price is the only scale by which to make a judgement now. Apple has no reason to exist in this new world. Neither does BMW, or Tesla, or Cuisinart, or Hermes, or Rolex, or Gucci, or Coach, or Calphlon for that matter. 

How conveniently you forget total cost of ownership, which is what you actually experience in life, not merely the sticker price.  This is a perfect illustration of your simple-minded view of the world.