Fatman

avon b7 said:

The best til last. "At least at this point". 

That is Tim 'Punter' Cook speaking. 

It is literally way too soon to draw conclusions and, given the unpredictability of the situation, why Tim 'CEO' Cook chose to give no guidance for the next quarter. 

He has to hedge, that’s part of the requirement when CEOs speak, otherwise he would be sued for misleading comments. Read any annual report and it is full of disclaimers. I interpret his comments as positive, even miraculous, considering we are living in a global economic collapse at the moment. Apple is still selling lots of product even with their retail channel shuttered and half the world out of work.

The recent odd choices and ‘silent’ product refreshes makes it pretty obvious to me that the pandemic is having a large impact on the supply chain - shortages and price increases of components. Apple is making compromises while trying to move their products forward - at least in some incremental way. The majority of appleinsider readers are savvy and technical and demand more than the average computer buyer. But more memory and a better keyboard is Good Enough for the rest of the world. What Apple really intended will likely come later in 2020.

Apple heavily weighs component cost with demand for that feature. Face ID is expensive, additional RAM expensive, OLED very expensive, SSD very expensive, bleeding edge Intel CPUs very expensive. If they are going to keep their high margins on hardware and hit a certain price point, they need to make compromises. I personally think they usually have a good balance and sometimes even surprise me - with the exception of storage. Putting 256GB storage in a laptop is a blunder.

The reality: Steam can’t sell these things even to the larger installed Windows base. They need to cut costs because they are bleeding money. As I’ve said in past posts, no one wants these big bulky headsets! On a related topic - Apple NEEDS to embrace and natively SUPPORT Vulkan on MacOS and iOS. It can co-exist with METAL and will give developers another option for app development.

I think kids today have less motivation, just overall less interest in doing real world builds and repairs. The information resources available today are absolutely incredible, is there a shortage of 'labs' as this article claims - possibly, I don't know.  Creativity as a whole is dying - and I do blame the smartphone for that. Kids have little interest in the hobbies that I grew up with, R/C, models, rocketrey, music composition with real instruments, building a PC, even programming computers using BASIC. They live in a virtual world - more interested in seeing something on a screen than experiencing it in real life. Most American colleges prepare kids for service oriented jobs, the few colleges that do have excellent STEM programs are filled with foreign students!

I disagree with one point in the article, personally I think "Googling it" has allowed me to learn and fix even more stuff - I never would have taken the entire front fender off my car - if I didn't have a video showing me how. Or install my own bathroom sink, complete with welding copper pipes. During lockdown, there are so many kids that don't know what to do with themselves ... besides play Fortnite and watch idiotic Youtube videos for hours on end.