rmoo

rob53 said:

Samsung isn’t an American company so no profits stay in the US. Texas is basically giving Samsung the land for 2000 jobs, which won’t necessarily be good paying jobs. Does anyone actually think their products will cost less? Not me. 

These actually are high paying jobs. In the current Samsung plant in Austin, technicians start at $50,000 and engineers start at $90,000 a year. And those are old nodes: 14, 28 and 32nm. This facility will have 3nm nodes, meaning that Samsung will be able to charge more for them, and in turn the workers will get paid more. 

Also, Taylor, Texas is merely waiving property taxes for 10 years, not writing Samsung a check. I know that outrages the pro-tax crowd for ideological reasons, but how much property taxes would Taylor, Texas have collected on the VACANT plot of land that Samsung is going to build their foundry on otherwise? Exactly. Taylor is half an hour from their Austin foundry, but land is a lot cheaper in Taylor than in Austin, making the property tax and other financial considerations practical while still being able to tap the same talent pool. All things considered, a good deal. Far better than letting Arizona, California and New York - all of whom wanted this plant - get this foundry merely for the privilege of being able to say that you didn't want Samsung unless they were going to pay their fair tax burden. If you are New York City you can play hardball while adhering to that philosophy and wind up losing Amazon to Virginia, but Taylor, Texas doesn't have NYC's constellation of billionaires and Fortune 500 companies to fall back on.

lmasanti said:

Qualcomm is saying: “Attention Shareholders: We are going the way of Intel with Apple!”

Intel had record profits in 2020 and is on pace to have record profits again in 2021. 2022 will be even better for them because of the combined benefits of finally producing CPUs that outperform AMD - though at the cost of A LOT of power - with Alder Lake as well as joining Nvidia and AMD in the GPU game. So yes, Intel is fine and Qualcomm is going to be fine also.

There are certain areas where market share does matter, and being a component supplier is one of them. Apple has only 15% of the smartphone market and 35% of the tablet market (with very few iPads having mobile radios to begin with). Qualcomm won't miss much from their $23 billion annual revenue by losing money on the $40 modems that it sells Apple. And no, they don't need to sell very many CPUs for Windows on ARM devices to make it up. Qualcomm's next big bet is on CPUs and platforms for IoT and AI, and if that pays off - though Nvidia, AMD, Intel and Samsung are competitors there - it will more than make up for the lost Apple modem revenue.

It is losing ground in the Android and ChromeOS CPU device market to MediaTek - and potentially Samsung - that threatens Qualcomm. Just as AMD is a much bigger threat to Intel than Apple will ever be because both are going after the same Windows and ChromeOS (for PCs) and Windows and Linux (for servers) market share that is much bigger, MediaTek and Samsung are bigger threats to Qualcomm. MediaTek is now the #1 chipmaker globally - surpassing Qualcomm - and Samsung in addition to stealing Google's business from Qualcomm is going to start replacing Qualcomm SOCs with their own Exynos SOCs in their midrange phones starting in 2022. 

Google notified Apple in August.
Apple patched it in September.
Google notified the infosec community in November.
The way these things are supposed to work. 

lkrupp said:

The problem with Disney+ is that once you’ve watched all the Marvel, Star Wars, and Mickey Mouse content for the umpteenth time what’s left. Critics of Apple TV+ are always yammering about the lack of a big catalog. Well, Disney+ has a huge catalog that most have now seen over the decades. So what’s new about it?

Judging Apple TV+’s success by how many subscribers it has is like comparing Android numbers to iOS numbers, or the speed in GHz of a CPU. It’s really all about the actual performance or quality.

But just like a certain cadre here relies on technical specs alone to ‘judge’ the success of a system, the critics count the number of shows available on Apple TV+ and compare them to the useless crap thats available on Amazon Prime Video, for example.

Disney/Marvel/Star Wars/Pixar and the Disney Channel create content for themselves first which then gets farmed out to Disney+. As they aren't going anywhere, Disney+ can leverage them to add new content a lot faster than Apple TV+ can before originals even enter the picture. Also those theatrical movies and Disney channel cable shows are already profitable from theater grosses, cable fees and adevertising revenue before they even hit Disney+. Meanwhile, subscriber revenue will be the only way that Apple recoups the costs for a movies and TV series that they spend hundreds of millions developing and producing. And even comparing originals, for a lot of those Disney+ can just do sequels, live adaptations and remakes of their old movies and TV shows. That puts them in a much stronger position than the other streaming services. Take sector leader Netflix: stuck between giving huge paychecks to has-been actors and directors who can't get movie studios to fund their projects anymore - so that loyal fans of this talent who watched their products in theaters in the 90s and 00s will watch their new streaming projects - and making western remakes of anime. Which model is more likely to still be viable 15 years from now when there won't be any more iconic anime series to adapt and fans of Adam Sandler and Will Smith tire of third rate projects?

Also, the Android vs iOS argument makes no sense for two reasons. First, for hardware, yes it is better to sell 10 million $1000 MacBooks and get a $400 margin off each ($4 billion) than it is to sell 100 million $200 Chromebooks and get a $20 margin off each ($2 billion, with a lot of that given back in returns and service warranty claims due to cheap construction and parts). But with a service where subscriptions are the only revenue source, yes 100 million subscribers at $9.99 a month beats 10 million. 

Second, no matter what Daniel Eran Dilger claims, the idea that Google's model of prioritizing market share over unit sales when they sell almost no hardware has been anything else but a massive success for Google is absurd. Compare Google's quarterly revenue before Android really took off to their quarterly revenue now: $9.7 billion 3Q 2011 to more than $65 billion 3Q 2021. The reason for more than 650% revenue growth in 10 years? Chrome was already the dominant PC browser by 2011, and PC sales generally declined in that time anyway. So the main reason: ad revenue from those 3 billion active Android devices. And if you must discuss hardware, it is why Google still makes Android devices despite selling less than 10 million a year while LG and HTC - despite each having sold hundreds of millions of such devices - don't. 

Yes, Apple has spent the last 40 years proving that market share isn't the only thing. But Microsoft - who like Google makes little on hardware - has spent an equal amount of time proving that it is indeed a thing ... something that can definitely be leveraged for massive profits. Google came along and improved Microsoft's model by leveraging a platform that is free to manufacturers and services that are free to end users to grow market share large and fast enough to win a 3 front war against Yahoo, Apple AND Microsoft despite starting out with much less revenue than all 3 of them (yes, even Yahoo). And even in the hardware game, Samsung spent the early Android era aggressively focusing on growth even as media and industry critics were laughing at them, calling the phones and tablets that they were spamming the market with tacky plastic gimmicks. But absolutely no one laughs at them now. Why? Chinese firms aside, they are the only competition in mobile that Apple has left.

Beats said:

Marketshare and Mac sales have increased. Financial reports aren’t “PR”. They aren’t even advertised.

Sales have increased. Market share hasn't increased because Wintel and ChromeOS sales have grown almost as fast. Yes, Wintel and ChromeOS sales increases will taper off as workers and students return to offices and classrooms but lots of people will have swapped out their Intel Macs for M1 Macs by then too. Apple played these same games during the iOS vs Android wars era - which are now all but over - with their quarterly "record iPhone and iPad sales with unprecedented numbers of people switching from Android to iOS!" statements. The market share remained 15/85 for the former and 35/65 for the latter with the exception of supercycles like the iPhone 6 and iPhone 12 launches, and even then the share reverted to normal within a couple of quarters after the supercycle ending.

Same deal here: globally Apple was slightly under 7% market share before the M1 and is now slightly over 8%. And the biggest seller is the MacBook Air, whose 8 GPU cores wouldn't be enough for Steam even if one of them wasn't disabled.