franklinjackcon

gatorguy said:

robjn said:

You’re recommending YouTube For Kids?

As a parent I had to delete that app because of the overwhelming amount of ads between, around and within videos. It’s abusive!

1. And the second biggie...Personalized ads will stop running on children's content, child or not. See Change 1.

I hope they cancel all ads on children's content. It seems perverse to me that they can run ads, many of them adult-focused, when they know kids are watching. I never thought anything of it as a child but as a parent now, it's horrifying. I've banned YouTube for my young daughter but I know that can't last long.

sacto joe said:

franklinjackcon said:

I completely agree with everything said in the article and yes, some of the reporting is so wrong it almost looks intentional. But perhaps the crux of the Ives message is correct, even if the details are totally wrong. iPhone revenue is down this year and wearables/home/accessories + services revenue growth is only just making up for it. If iPhone revenue continues declining but the other two growth categories start flattening off, can Apple keep growing? Or it's possible that iPhone sales only look slow this year because of the large jump last year. At the very least, it's a reasonable question, even if CNBC framed it completely wrong.

Nope. The message, as usual, is myopic, especially since Apple no longer publishes iPhone numbers, thus making the assumption that iPhone sales are permanently declining ridiculous on the face of it.

It doesn’t take much digging to find out that iPhone sales, along with smartphone sales generally, started peaking 4 years ago. A clue to the actual facts about the iPhone's prospects can be found in a more detailed analysis of the one piece of information Apple still supplies: revenue. Apple breaks out revenue for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Other, and Services. I've got a chart that looks at all these areas. Guess what: Yes, there was a big pullback in iPhone revenue in 2019. But that's CLEARLY an outlier, caused by the huge impact of the Trump Trade War on Apple sales in China (a negative $8 Billion in  fy '19 comparative revenue). Disregarding that blip, the trajectory of iPhone revenue is up, not flat, and certainly not down!

It is, however, flattening, which is to be expected as we hit peak smartphone.

As you say, Apple publishes iPhone revenue figures and that was what I was referring to. I'm not sure how you can call the last data point in the line a blip and disregard it. Besides, even if we assume you are right and iPhone revenue is flattening off, my point still stands. Can Apple's other categories grow fast enough to offset iPhones in the company's next phase?

I wonder if this is the carrot before they show us the stick. Perhaps they'll start making the free tier more restrictive and push people into the free trial

You can count all 90,000, which is a nice large number, not like the railways or post of old but a solid employment figure for a tech company. A good slice of the 450,000 employed by suppliers but I doubt they have many exclusive suppliers. Still, in the era of outsourcing everything, they should count it. Counting 1.9M developers is seriously stretching it. Yes, it's an interesting data point but it's not too dissimilar to an electricity company counting everyone employed using their electricity. They can mention it in the press release as a side note but putting it in the headline is misleading.

AppleInsider said:

Further, Apple has been assailed for decades over policies including its non-replaceable batteries. Yet from the first iPods to modern devices, Apple has effectively erased the use of millions of replaceable or disposable batteries that would commonly end up as toxic garbage, while at the same time advancing the state of the art in battery chemistry to achieve all-day use without the need to carry a series of battery packs. Samsung and other makers initially promoted disposable batteries but were eventually forced to follow Apple's lead-- only because it became cost-efficient, not because of any real values held by its executives.

In some areas, environmental concerns are simply efficient business decisions. The massive cloud services operated by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple require vast amounts of energy to operate and cool, so it simply makes sense to position these next to cheap sources solar, geothermal, or hydroelectric power. Many of these companies tout their "environmental" credibility in these areas, but Apple is unique in driving all of its corporate and even retail operations from renewable energy, when doing so isn't just the cheapest way to do business.

I get that Apple has values and all and I praise them for it but some of the examples are stretching reality. Is there any evidence that Apple used non-user replaceable batteries for environmental reasons or that they made a positive difference? The argument has always been that sealing the unit and making them custom results in a better product and prevents third-party batteries causing malfunctions.

How does it follow that when Apple does something, it's because of the company's values but when Alphabet does it, it's just for business reasons. Google became carbon neutral 12 years ago. There's once again an Apple lens put on every competitor even though they have completely different businesses. The one most important thing Alphabet could do is improve the efficiency and source or electricity feeding its data centres and its focused on that. Apple sells handsets, they obviously focus on reducing the impact of those.

These article would have been much better if you focused the positives that Apple is doing rather than ranting about competitors. Who knows, maybe you could have even suggested some ways Apple could improve so it can continue getting better.