DanielEran
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Editorial: Will Apple's 1990's "Golden Age" collapse repeat itself?
Do you know what year Apple moved into the Four-Phase complex? Its HQ was only about half the size of today's Infinite Loop.Colin O’Scopy said:IL1 was not built by or for Apple; nor were they the first tenant.
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Editorial: Will Apple's 1990's "Golden Age" collapse repeat itself?
Yes - and iOS employed not just NeXT/MacOS X's modern memory management but added new mobile-ready conservative memory use and liberal recycling of unused memory, something that Android is rather bad at, with a kernel coming from Linux PCs. So that's another example of Google facing an Old Apple problem. Users are left wondering how to diddle with utilities to kill apps in order to get things to run, and Android devices demand far more RAM to work well at all.firelock said:Great article. Having run an imaging and design studio for a major ad agency during the mid-90s, I’ll add that another factor in Apple’s near collapse was its inability to deliver on building a major update to its OS. The biggest issue with the legacy Mac operating system was its lack of dynamic memory management. Raise your hand if you remember having to get info on an app and manually adjust its memory allocation. As a pro it was certainly frustrating to have to be constantly adjusting memory allocation on Photoshop and Quark, and closing one app to free up enough memory to run another. Apps would just crash and sometimes corrupt files because they ran out of memory. But as pros, most (some?) of us at least understood the problem and how to deal with it, but consumers were completely at a loss. I don’t know how many friends and family I had phone calls with trying to explain to them how to manage the memory on their Macs. Worse yet they would run off and take their Mac to get “repaired” because their apps were constantly crashing. What they needed to do was increase the memory allocation for the apps, but the shops would instead sell them more RAM which not only cost them hundreds of dollars, but it wouldn’t solve the problem. The problem was so bad that I stopped recommending Macs to non-professionals in my circle.
Apple had promised year after year to come out with a modern OS that could manage memory dynamically, but they failed to do so year after year and instead just kept issuing minor updates that made small improvements to the user interface (Mac OS 8 & 9). I was very close to switching my entire studio over to PCs over this one issue when the return of Jobs and the promise of OS X convinced me to stick it out. Obviously this paid off and I’m glad because OS X and now iOS are light years ahead of the competition.
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Justice Department investigating AT&T and Verizon for blocking eSIM adoption, Apple report...
Apple began working with Gemalto nearly a decade ago on SIM-less (M is for module, the removable plastic mini-card that GSM/LTE devices have always used) devices, and it was expected that iPhone 4S would ship without a SIM card. It was blocked by AT&T.
"Apple SIM" was a second attempt to achieve device portability using a proprietary solution. Apple then pushed eSIM on Apple Watch 3, with some support of other vendors. Again it is mostly the big two US carriers who are against device portability, even after moving away from subsidising phones.
You'd be surprised to find out how much tech Apple has developed only to have it blocked by partners/patent trolls/rivals. Apple never talks about the things it worked to do but failed to accomplish, because the only thing that can be accomplished by that is burning bridges. Perhaps eSIM will eventually make its way out, sealing another open hole on iPhones that otherwise needs needs a gasket and which takes up unnecessary space inside the device.
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Sloppy report depicts Apple as struggling with LG as an alternative to Samsung OLEDs on ne...
Carli said:Good article. The aspect missing, though is that Apple consistently charges ridiculous premiums for its phones. Recognizing that they have right to do that as long as customers pay for it, is fair point, but it is still worth noting that this is nearly predatory behavior. Eventually, companies do get punished for that by consumers. Good author that wants to sound independent (i.e., avoids being labeled as fanboi) should point that out. It makes article more credible.
It's not really true that Apple charges "ridiculous premiums." What's actually the case is that most commodity PC/CE makers choose to operate with extremely thin margins because they have nothing to differentiate themselves from even cheaper competitors. Google and Microsoft fans have made "Apple margins" a talking point, but its actually backwards.
Apple's overall margins are around 40%. Most retail has a 50% markup on merchandise (such as clothing) to sell in a store. Software is commonly sold at a tremendously high margin because there is little cost in making digital copies.
Back in the late 90s when everyone was pretending to be righteously indignant about Apple's ~40% margins on Macs, Microsoft was earning 90% margins. Google similarly charges whatever it wants without really making anything that involves real costs, so it was making incredible gross margins before its costs began rising.
If you look at overall net margins, Google and Microsoft have historically had higher margins than Apple, meaning they created less compared to the money they took in. Calling Apple predatory because it works harder and demands less money from customers is not really accurate on any level.
Also, Samsung, Microsoft and Google have tried to copy Apple by selling premium hardware at similar prices, albeit cutting corners on quality. None sell premium hardware at similar volumes to Apple, and despite all their trying to (as you say) charge "predatory" prices, they've simply failed to pull it off out of incompetence rather than some righteous generosity.
The difference with Apple isn't that it is charging higher prices, but that its products command a higher price because hundreds of millions of people agree that Apple's products are better and worth the premium.
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Sloppy report depicts Apple as struggling with LG as an alternative to Samsung OLEDs on ne...
klock379 said:"Display estimates for iPhone 7 and 8 models have suggested an LCD component cost closer to $50. Yet the screens' cost ratio to the entire iPhone BOM was only a few percentage points different. And even a nearly $50 difference component cost for the display would only result in a retail price difference of about twice that much, or around $100 of the final price. " I am sure DED has done the math and I am confident that his statement is correct. But for my own education, can someone help me understand how that conclusion is derived?
As a very general ballpark rule, the component cost of a CE device generally has to be roughly doubled to arrive at a price where it can be sold at a reasonable profit.
That's why low-end phones generally can't afford to add an expensive processor or camera that "only costs" a certain amount that by itself doesn't seem very expensive. You have to double that component cost to achieve a sellable price.
