tundraboy

chutzpah said:

zomp said:

 Curious to know the percentage of people who own and use any branded phone over 5 years old. The only reason why I'm so negative to this story is that I feel Europe would love to bring down success. I'm sorry, but if you don't like a brand, then buy the other brand. It's a simple as that - I haven't purchased a ford car since 2002 because they didn't last long, so I moved to Hyundai. Why doesn't France just say "don't like apple, buy Samsung" or visa versa. Back before apple, all phones were junk and didn't make it past a couple of years.

You're joking right?

Feature phones lasted ages.  Nokia phones in particular were famous for being basically unbreakable unless you went massively out of your way and threw them under an actual bus.  The software was simple and solid, so didn't stretch the hardware, battery life was measured in weeks rather than days, they just went on and on.

They were junk in terms of what they could do in comparison to a modern smartphone, but lots of them were built to last.

Seriously?  You're putting up Nokia and feature phones as an argument to prove that Apple is intentionally designing iPhones to be obsolete in 5 years?  Where is Nokia's phone business now?  Nonexistent.  Why? Because they were stuck on feature phone tech and couldn't innovate fast enough, well enough to the next level i.e. smartphones.

Smartphone innovation goes at breakneck speed.  There is no reason to build hardware that lasts well more than 5 years if it it won't be able to run the software and handle the data bandwidth that will come out in 5 years.

There is no such thing as "Planned Obsolescence"in the smartphone industry.  What there is is breakneck technological progress and murderously intense competition that guarantees bankruptcy if a company fails to keep up with the pace of technological change.   Anybody remember Blackberry, Nokia, Palm?

Any effort to stop this imaginary "planned obsolescence" in smart phones is really an effort to stop technological advancement in that industry. --Which would be an unbelievably stupid thing to do.

danox said:

sconosciuto said:

We already knew why Apple didn’t have massive layoffs: they didn’t massively hire like Amazon and the rest.

Apple has better management than Amazon, Meta or Google, being stupid and hiring more people than you need that’s bad management.

I suppose they were taking Steve Jobs' advice and skated to where the puck was going to be with respect to sales volume and manpower requirements.  Problem is, they thought the puck was going to be a lot farther than where it actually went.

It's easy to skate to where you think the puck will be.  Accurately predicting where the puck will be though, that takes skill, discipline (don't get too excited), and a dash of genius.  Discipline is probably where all these companies stumbled.

"The results follow a disastrous posting from Q1 2023, where Apple reported $117.15 billion, which was the first year-on-year quarterly drop in revenue since 2019."

Really?  Disastrous?  Did the company go under?  Did the stock fall 50%?  C'mon.

waveparticle said:

The CEO club has a formula calculating the performance of CEO and a formula of how much to reward. This was written into the contract when CEO was hired. You need to take a close look of the formulas before criticizing a CEO's pay increases. But this is a secret only members of CEO club including board members are able to access it.  In general the most important number is the performance of the stock in the prior year. 

Yes, and CEOs themselves are board members of other corporations.  I won't block your eye-popping comp if you don't block mine. Corporate governance, especially CEO compensation committees, is the most corrupt but still legal practice in the corporate age.  Its self-dealing and good-old-boy network all rolled into one.