ApplePoor

Old saying: "The proof is in the pudding".  

The satellite company, with Apple's financing, has to launch many (number not disclosed) new satellites to give good coverage just within the US proper let alone Alaska, Hawaii, Mexico or Canada or even other US territories. The coverage has to be across our borders to the North and South so there is solid coverage within all of the USA.

I see this as a multi-year plan and it could be three or four years before useful operation. Musk has been launching thousands of new satellites for coverage and his pockets are perhaps deeper than Apple's pockets for just this one marketing claim.

The SAT phone business will do very well world wide for many years. There are not other options for most of the remote land masses.

I have a M1 Max 14" MBPro (64GB & 4TB SSD) and a M1 Ultra MacStudio (128GB & 8TB SSD). Apple depreciated the MacStudio nearly 75% in one year for a trade in value. Not quite as bad for the laptop. Both are able to run the latest MacOS. Both still work fine for my needs. Both have Apple Care going forward. 

Unless any of the software I use suddenly needs a M4 or M5 to run, I am content to keep the jingle in my pockets.

I recognize the difference between a "want" or a "need".  I may want the latest and greatest but I do not need it for what I do. Thus in the "soldered" world that Apple has now created, I order the maximum system memory and the largest SSD I think I could possibly need for my use for years.

I enjoy watching the "dog and pony" show for the new stuff and the last few years they have really had to work to generate apparent enthusiasm for their new products with small incremental changes.

It has been years since I went to a movie theater. The last one was a Cinema MAX theater for the likes of Avatar. 

But to be fair, I also don't watch many movies at home either. Series yes, movies no.

My family was an automotive specialty products company for many years. The gestation of the cars in the 50s and 60s was measured in years and improvements were hard fought between marketing and engineers. The basics are simple to talk about and even design individually, but the complete assembly is a completely different world as all those components now have to work together. Not every brand has had great success for every model.

I think Apple went down nearly every rabbit hole seeking a solution and discovered that money can not always buy the correct talent for all aspects of a project. We are not graduating enough engineers in the USA to be a world power anymore. China trains at least ten times the number of engineers than we do every year. That is a major handicap for multi highly skilled technical requirement projects.

I think the alarm bells were going off as this project was a sinking dead weight and Apple salvaged the importent lessons in AI they had learned and kept those folks that ere involved with that aspect and is letting the others sink or swim on their own. 

Hopefully Tim Cook's wait to the Fall message has sustenance and there will be another great device/software invention that will keep the Apple ship afloat. There have been other large companies back in the day that are not even sub foot noted in the business history books today.

The extremely expensive novelty Vision Pro device will not be the Golden Goose to lay more eggs but all of the work invested in creating it will provide a firm foundation for future projects that we the public do not even think about yet.

As a reminder, Steve Jobs had to say the new device's three features three times before the audience suddenly realized this was the iPhone that contained the three properties.

Monopoly typically implies over 50% market share. So 20% is less than 50%.  The difference is that Apple gets a larger share of profits associated with the premium cellphones as they do not make the cheaper models.