razorpit

urahara said:

The funny (and sad) thing is that those people might actually believe the story they are trying to sell. They think they are right. 

Critical thinking is a skill. Not everyone is skillful. 

Fidonet127 said:

Throttling wasn't misguided, as it was a good solution to prevent phones from crashing due to older batteries being unable to keep up with the load. There is nothing any manufacture could do to prevent the wear on the batteries and to keep up with the load. This isn't planned obsolescence, but a solution to enable the phones to have a longer life. IE the opposite of planned obsolescence. The mistake is Apple didn't tell people it was doing it and people scrutinize Apple more. I'm sure all manufactures do throttling. I'm not sure if any other manufacture tells users they throttle or allow users to disable throttling. Then again, this may not show up as much in other manufactures, due to the short amount of time OS can be updated.

GeorgeBMac said:

danox said:

Marvin said:

elijahg said:

I don't really see the point to AppleTV+. It doesn't bring people to the Mac/iPhone/AppleTV, because the content isn't good enough and even if it was, you can watch it on various third party TVs and set-top boxes with the AppleTV app anyway. The price is such that Apple isn't making a profit from it, and there is zero chance they'll up the price until it's got a decent amount of content. By which time they will have spent so much on that content that it'll take an inordinate time for a ROI. 

Jobs wouldn't enter an industry unless he thought it could be disruptive; there had to be something that Apple could do *much* better to make people say "wow, why did no one think of that before?!" Unfortunately, there is nothing disruptive about AppleTV+. It seems to me then, that the point is actually Cook's attempt at a legacy, albeit a pretty lacklustre one thus far.

Hardware improvements will eventually have a limit - cameras, processors, storage, displays will only get so much better to a point where they aren't compelling upgrades. At that point a hardware company will stop growing revenues from them. They have a huge ecosystem of users who use services though so the company can grow services revenue from different areas.

Apple runs a music store, has Apple Music, they are involved in health and fitness, games, news/magazines. Their combined services revenue is Apple's second largest revenue stream with nearly 64% margins:

https://www.investopedia.com/apple-s-5-most-profitable-lines-of-business-4684130

This will be mostly driven by the App Store but new services usually start out small and they have value beyond direct sales. Apple TV+ could never be a huge service overnight with just original content and it doesn't seem like they want to overtake the other services, they are partners of Apple.

The following interview with Eddy Cue covers a lot of their content strategy starting around 11:50:

Eddie Cueless is wrong, pay close attention to Apple Christmas quarter announcement the software (OS)  and hardware division combo brings home the actual profit, and always will, low margin content is a worthless distraction. Apples mind blowing profit is in big ticket OS/HARDWARE.

Apple has always valued its product above its profits.   So has every successful company -- from Carnegie Steel to Tesla.  That's why they make such "mind blowing" profits.

elmer said:

lkrupp said:

rotateleftbyte said:

kkqd1337 said:

the key to unlock the EV market is public/widely available/on-street charging. 

the cars are not the main problem or barrier

As long as Apple goes with CCS for charging (especially in Europe) then it won't be that much of a problem given the rate at which chargers are being installed, at least here in Europe.

If they go with an Apple-specific charging connector then their whole project is DOA from day 1.

Well, as for Europe, both cities and countries are not that far apart. In the U.S. you can drive hundreds of miles and not pass through another town. The shear scale of the United States dictates a different approach to charging.

I would have thought the most important thing was battery size if you are driving huge distances ?
On the matter of scale: The EU's population is larger than the US, and land size is also larger. As far as charging goes it is down to location not size of the country, and more importanly how many people drive these roads with no gas stations or charging points on them? Probably not a very large number, alot of regulars and goods vehicles maybe ? 
There will always be a small number of poeple who do big milage ( I used to do over 100,000 miles a year around Europe ) and for who range is the biggest problem. But if there is enough demand for a charging station in the middle on nowhere, one will be built. 

The average drive is the most important distance, not the minority who do longer drives.  For example the average daily drive ( to work ) in the US is 29 miles and in the EU is 19 miles ( I search for it ). Even the smallest electric car could do that easily.
Imagine how frustrating it would be if all the manufactures had differnet plugs?
There will be ( if not already? ) a world standard for charging plugs just like USB. So going with a well know tried and tested plug would be common sense, can you imagine a dongle to convert from one to another?

Anyway once batteries improve ( hopefully ) all these issues will go away.

MplsP said:

Anyone find it ironic that Apple would partner with a korean car company after the billions of dollars spent fighting Samsung?

When you look at Tesla, they biggest hurdles they've had to overcome have been manufacturing related. If apple is going to make a car, partnering with an existing automaker makes a ton of sense. They can take advantage of the other company's experience and expertise in manufacturing and assembly and focus on what they do best - the user interface and operating system design. 

As many others have pointed out, Hyundai and Kia have come a long way from building cheap, 2nd rate economy cars. Their cars are now considered quite good and Hyundai's luxury brand, Genesis has gotten very good reviews.