canukstorm

tht said:

In the case of the smartphone market? No, the USA should not be suing Apple.

I do think as Apple's iPhone marketshare goes up, they will have to change App Store rules, allow more types of apps, reduce App Store fees. What is equitable between Apple and developers changes depending Apple's position. People feel differently when Apple has 10%, 20%, 40%, 80% share. As Apple's share goes up, what was a fair deal to people and developers when they had 10% share will not feel equitable when Apple has 80%. There is an implied social contract between a company, its developers and customers as the company gets more and more dominant and monied. So, I think Apple needs to let more types of apps into the App Store, enable more types of use for smartphones, reduce fees, etc. 

It's not a single marketshare number. It's a gradation. The more marketshare, the more flexible they have to be.

I'm frankly surprised Apple has achieved an estimated 50 to 60% share given Apple's pricing structure. It's like the cost of smartphone hardware and software is low enough, and payments plans have made it very tolerable, such that Apple's intangibles are an easy upsell to consumers.

The cost of a cell phone service is a rather large majority of a cell phone ownership. It's like $1200 per year, and it rises every year. So, if the monthly bill is $100/mo, customers are much more accepting of a 30mo phone payment plan at $20 to $30 a month. If the costs for a cellphone was upfront, I have a hard time believing Apple would have more than 20% share in the USA.

One thing I like to note is that Apple and Samsung are 80% of the units in the USA. A good portion of those Samsung phones are Galaxy S20/S21/S22 etc. I don't know about other folks, by those Samsung phones look more like iPhones than ever. They use the same industrial design. So, at minimum, that really tells you the power of Apple's brand.

VictorMortimer said:

Fred257 said:

I’ve been following Apple since 1997. Apple Insider I have been following since 1998. Apple is going to be fined on this one. The lawyers for Apple have made the wrong decision 

And about time, too.  Apple is playing around, they're going to lose this.  They need to just open up the iPhone and iPad for apps installed from anywhere, it's time for this app store nonsense to end.

(Gave up and created a new account today, my old one won't log in and the password recovery won't work.  With how much the posts here have dropped I don't think I'm the only one who had that problem.)

tht said:

I thought Jeff Williams had a deputy that is the de facto COO. The person who does the day-to-day running of Apple which allows Williams to be the C-suite operations strategist and allows him to lead all the other things he has to manage. The blood-glucose sensor for the Apple Watch is one of those high payoff R&D tech projects that warrants a push.

It's definitely Jeff Williams in the immediate future. He will be acting CEO if Cook decides to take a one month vacation. Sometime after 5 years? Who knows. A lot can happen in 5 years, like the retirement of most of the 60+ year olds on this list. Not mentioned on the list is Mike Rockwell, who led the Vision work, and is in control of all the special technology projects at Apple, no?

Too bad Scott Forstall is done as a tech manager. I think in hindsight, it was a huge fork in the road when Cook decided to keep Jony Ive over Scott Forstall. There have been excesses in "design" from Apple in the past 10 years while there would have been differently things happening everywhere. Swift would be different if Forstall was SVP of software at Apple. The iPads would have more PC features. Machine learning would be further ahead.

I'd like to see a more computer oriented product person be the CEO. 

chasm said:

canukstorm said:

Apple, in the last 10 years bet on the wrong horse.  They bet on autonomous systems while the world was heading towards generative AI. 

Nobody in the automotive industry was "heading" towards generative AI in 2014.