doggone

retrogusto said:

In her early years, she was consistently among the most unreasonably bearish regarding Apple, and Gene Munster, who was at Piper Jaffray at the time, was probably the most bullish. Then at a certain point (quite a while ago) after numerous embarrassing quarters she must have realized that she was grossly underestimating Apple, and she’s been pretty consistently bullish ever since, which has been a much more successful strategy. I tried to dig up some of her old comments, but couldn’t really find them, just an old Andy Zaky column bemoaning her pessimism.

I remember that too.  One example she spelled doom and gloom, I think AAPL was approaching 200 at the time. The stock fell sharply.  Instead of selling my shares I went all in and bought at the low.  Maybe I should thank her since she gave me an opportunity to add more stock to my holdings.

premi said:

I miss Johnny, his voice over the products were wonderful. I still wish he had taken over as CEO. Way better than Tim as a communicator. 

You have to be kidding.  Johnny Ive rarely presented at events.  In fact he was very nervous about talking in front of an audience.  That's why they started to record his missives.

There is no disputing that he was a great designer and his influence on Apple's products was a major part of Apple's revival in the 2000's.  Tim Cook was also critical for Apple's success because he created the organization that could deliver on Johnny's designs on time and in volume.  They both worked together with Steve Jobs to create the success story we have today.  Ive is a great designer but he is not a businessman and would not be able to handle running a company the size of Apple.

Back in the nineties, I used to work for a professor who was on the science advisory board for the President.  He said that when the republicans held office in the 80's until 92, they were extremely dismissive of any advice coming out from the board because it did not agree with their agenda and philosophy.  During that time many funding organizations including the NIH were starved of funds and stagnated as a result.
When Clinton was elected, the attitude was completely the opposite.  The new President accepted the advice of the board with very little push back and it initiated a massive influx of investment into basic research.  All areas benefited and a boom in new technologies resulted because on that.  The advances that we now take for granted owe a lot to the willingness of the Clinton administration to listen to the experts.
The US has had a great history on investing in innovation and is one of the main reasons why it has its position in the world.  But innovation and development in the US comes in waves because ideology can get in the way and the powers that be want to hold onto their control.

goofy1958 said:

Those of us that have switched over to completely wireless couldn't care less what port is on the iPhone.  We haven't touched ours in 2 years.

Having USB-C on the iPhone will be good when traveling.  I don't take the wireless phone charger on trips.  So at the moment I have to remember both lightning and usb-C for charging the phone and Mac.  This way I can use the Mac charger and same cable to charge either device. A win for me and a no brainer for Apple.

Having a single cable for charging all Mac devices will resolve issues that places like the EU have about propriety chargers.  Any USB-C charger can charge any device as long as they have suffiicent power.

I wonder how many people are going to be up to repair such as complex device.  I'm pretty handy with repairs and can do such things as upgrading ram or drives etc in a Mac.  I'm sure I could repair a screen or battery in a phone but it will take time, be very tricky and could easily go wrong.  I, for one, would get Apple to repair it, especially if buying third party parts would disable features like FaceID.  Ultimately it would be faster and probably cost the same to get Apple to repair the unit. Another point is that Apple know how to dispose / recycle the old materials efficiently.  

My guess is that only 1 in 100 iPhone users would be up for doing their own repairs on and the rest would get Apple or a third party to do the fix. I get that having choices is important but if this is only going to affect 1% of users it is really worth the effort?