danvm

bb-15 said:

GeorgeBMac said:

lkrupp said:

viclauyyc said:

Can Apple buy itself and go private?

apple sure don’t need outside investors to fund ny project like many company. 

Absolutely not, no way. Apple is way too expensive to buy itself out and go private.

For many, Apple's biggest attraction has been its horde of cash...   They do have a nice operating profit.  But that's at far more risk from competition or a manufacturing/design error than a Microsoft.  (MS screws up all the time but all they have to do publish another update -- but Apple has a "--Gate" with every new release and nobody knows if or when one of them is going to stick.)

Product wise Apple has always had all over Microsoft.  But Microsoft has always had a better business model.

I’ll clarify what the MS business model is; it is to get a monopoly in a major segment of personal computing and exploit that monopoly. 
Bill Gates spoke about a natural PC OS monopoly in the 80s and MS has it on the desktop with Windows. That led to the MS Office monopoly and now that supports subscriptions to Office.
The financial analysts understand this. They know that MS has desktop monopolies in big companies (including the ones they work for) and in government.

- Now to Microsoft’s screw ups. They are sometimes terrible. Here are just a few of them. 

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/microsoft-suspends-distribution-of-latest-windows-10-update-over-data-loss-bug/

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/11/microsoft-explains-one-azure-authentication-outage-as-another-one-happens/

Here is a list from Apple,

https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/23/18016512/apple-icloud-find-my-iphone-service-disruption-outage

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/macos-bug-lets-you-log-in-as-admin-with-no-password-required/

And there are many others, same as MS and every other company.

* But very important; many companies and governments are locked into MS products no matter how bad the products can be. For the enterprise, overall, Mac OS or Linux are not replacements for Windows and the MS ecosystem. 
- MS may sometimes release junk but companies/government are dependent on MS products. 
That = monopoly and that = a steady stream of $.

** The appeal of Apple’s products is not understood by most financial analysts. Add to that the horde of uninformed Apple haters who don’t have a clue of the preferences of Apple product buyers which keeps the theme of much of tech journalism; spreading ignorance about Apple and its customers. 
- A US financial network, CNBC, will often have talking heads who claim that Apple is doomed because everyone is going to switch to cheap Android phones and watches. This has a 10 year old level of understanding of Apple tech and its customers but it doesn’t matter.
Ignorance makes money with views of tech journalist articles/videos and with the shorting of Apple stock. 

There are articles for about MS, Google, FB and many other tech companies about how they are doomed for different reasons.  It's not only for Apple. 

widmark said:

Absolutely he and everybody else have a responsibility to finger those who are harvesting our data for profit. Zuckerberg is even harvesting data on non users... why, because he can and it makes him money. He’ll say that Apple is just being elitist because it’s users can afford its expensive devices and don’t need to be subsidized by “free” software like Facebook and Android which harvest your data instead. What he is really saying is, Facebook is taking advantage of those who can least afford (or have little understanding) to avoid a deep and aggressive exploitation of their data trail. FB has turned freedom from personal data exploitation into a luxury.

We need regulation on data privacy yesterday... this won’t stop until we do.  It’s too profitable. Facebook is on a tear to exploit the undeveloped world where many think Facebook is the phone OS it’s so universally relied on. Credit to Apple that they haven’t succumbed and are taking a stand.

radarthekat said:

entropys said:

That keynote slide of Cook’s is an absolute classic piece of misdirection.  We need to keep a copy for his retirement speech, you know, for a laugh.

First, a product is turned into a category ‘ipads’*, while a seperate category “notebooks” (which appeared in the slide’s title) is broken into brands to misdirect. Also, I feel like there was a notebook brand missing. I can’t quite put my finger on it.....

*it does show that Apple is selling a lot of iPads, but if all those columns to the right of them were stacked it wouldn’t fit the narrative Cook was attempting to shape. He doesn’t own an RDF.

No.  Quite the opposite.  iOS is regularly stacked against Android even though there is exactly one iOS vendor and multitudes of Android vendors.  That’s misdirection.  Since when is BNW compared against ‘the entire rest of the auto industry?’  Repeat for any brand; nowhere does anyone compare one company to its entire industry, except when comparing against Apple.  

There was one issue in the text, it should have read “sells more iPads than any PC maker...”, where DED incorrectly used the word “every.”

Soli said:

elijahg said:

Here in the UK I see people with Surface tablets more often than iPads, but both are much less common than laptops. How about comparing iPads to the rest of the tablet market, Timmy? Once upon a time Apple was miles out ahead in terms of tablet sales. I do think they have missed the boat a bit with the iPad: iPad is still essentially a giant iPhone, whereas the Surface tablet is a full blown Windows PC.

To be clear, you don't think that the graph showing MS is referring to the Surface? Maybe they really do mean just notebooks, and not notebooks that double as laptops or laptops that are designed to look-like tablets but whose functionality is really only viable as an unpleasant notebook...

...,but I'm not aware that MS has any standard notebooks for sale.

SpamSandwich said:

Found out yesterday it doesn’t support Force Touch, so this model is out for me.