lkrupp said:

alanh said:

To get the best deals on Apple hardware it’s often best to buy from a 3rd party reseller like B&H. You can save a lot more by doing that than the 3% offered by the card! 

Well I come from an era when third party resellers were openly hostile to Apple products and tucked them away in the back corners of their stores. When Apple started opening its own stores those same resellers screamed bloody murder about being pushed out. Because of that experience I always buy my Apple products directly from Apple no matter the price difference. Just me.

If you're willing to pay a lot more, no problem and congratulations on money not being an issue for you.  But B&H has a "Payboo" card in which they instantaneously refund the sales tax.   On a $3200 computer purchase, that's 8.875% in NYC or a $284 savings vs. $96 at 3% on the Apple Pay card.   B&H always treated Apple products well as did the defunct J&R, both independent NYC dealers.  It was the big chains, like COMP USA that presented Apple products badly and IMO, the big chains STILL present Apple badly.  

In all the documentary footage that I've seen of Apple and other factories, individual workers are doing small repetitive tasks.   Circuit board assemblies are more than likely completely automated and assembling an iPhone from the few boards and battery is actually quite easy.   Now the individual parts may still need to be manufactured elsewhere, but the automated manufacturing and the assembly could be done in the U.S., in Europe and elsewhere if there's a will.    Due to the automation, it might not actually create all that many jobs. 

The real issue is that while Chinese wages have increased over the years, it's still cheaper than the U.S., there are no labor unions to contend with and workers work 6 day weeks and 10 hours a day.    So I think Apple is being disingenuous.   

I also think the "lack of skill" argument is bogus because of the above, because of the examples that Christopher126 gives and because manufacturing output in the U.S. actually peaked two summers ago, but it didn't result in a lot of job growth because so much was automated. 

I have always felt that manufacturing should take place near where the products are sold so that the communities where the products are purchased get the benefit of the jobs.   

And if Apple really cared about the environment, they wouldn't create products that can't be repaired by third parties and where end users can't replace/upgrade battery, memory and storage.   

I also think Apple is holding out to see if Trump isn't re-elected with the expectation that if he isn't and especially if the Senate flips, all of the tariffs will disappear with the next administration.   Or that Trump will change his mind again as he often does or that they'll actually be an agreement with China.  

kimberly said:

maestro64 said:

tenthousandthings said:

The fact my wife and I can’t use the same card account lowers its appeal to us. We will still get it because Apple but it sucks we will have two separate bills and our spending won’t be merged in the analytics.

The latter is the bigger problem, in my view. We had talked about only having this one card. We could do it — we only have two now. But the main reason to do it would be to consolidate all of the good Apple analytics in one place. I trust Apple to do a good job with that, and to protect my data. Without that simplicity factor, though, we will opt to keep one of our existing cards, at least until Apple gives us a way to link the two accounts.

That is because you and your wife may get divorce and Apple does not want her account tied to your's, where have you been didn't you know you're not allow to know what your wife spend money on.

That response is straight from the lunatic fringe

Maybe, but as an old guy who has been through a divorce (and it was a very friendly divorce), I do advise all my married friends to have separate bank accounts or separate bank accounts in addition to one joint account, especially if both people are bringing home a paycheck.   .  

gatorguy said:

Kuyangkoh said:

avon b7 said:

Stopped reading after this:

"Cook didn't even mention the millions of Huawei Androids that were diverted from Western markets to the domestic Chinese market in a desperate rash of discounting promotions this year. That's pretty clearly because Huawei's phones are not being sold to iPhone users, despite the constant insistence that Huawei is somehow pushing Apple out of business in China, when clearly that's not the case. "

Please provide supporting links to back this claim up.

As for the supposed claim by certain watchers that Apple wouldn't be able to shift X series phones, why did Apple pay a 'penalty' clause to Samsung for not reaching the contracted orders for displays?

Clearly someone got their estimates very, very wrong.

Yet another research published that Apple market shares dropped and Android are taking over....units shipped does mean unit sold.

I agree with you, in general shipped does equal sold. 

In Apple's case yes, because they don't flood their channels and in general, manufacture just in time.   But that's not necessarily true for other manufacturers who do lots of channel stuffing.  Then they have giant sales or do deals with the carriers to get rid of the phones (or whatever).

As far as Apple's overall success is concerned, fiscal 2018 was a record year.  Not every year can be a record year.  But one has to look at long term growth, and I continue to think it's absolutely incredible that Apple's net income is now larger than its revenue just 10 years ago.   In fact, its net income for the first three quarters of this fiscal is almost as large as its gross from all four quarters in 2009.   Has any other company as old as Apple ever accomplished that?  

It's true that Apple hasn't recently released any "blow your mind" products.   But who has?   And I can't even think of what such a product might be unless it's time travel, holography, AI/robotics (which I still think is the long-term future for Apple) or an electric car that gets 500 miles per charge.    

The question is how well will Apple's streaming video services do once all the new services from AT&T, Disney and others are launched and whether they can maintain growth in services in that world. 

As far as the press is concerned, they've always gotten Apple wrong.   I have to laugh almost every quarter when the press says that Apple is going to fail, Apple beats their expectations, they either turn that into a negative (as the NY Times did today) or say, "OK, well they did okay this quarter but they won't the next".     I've posted this before, but here are some quotes from the past:

 

John C. Dvorak, 1984

“The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a "mouse". There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I don’t want one of these new fangled devices."

 

former Apple VP Gaston Bastiaens, January 1996.

“Within the next two months, Sony will acquire Apple. … Sony will be the white knight who will step into the picture."

 

Michael Dell, October 1997

"I'd shut [Apple] down and give the money back to the shareholders."

 

Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe, 1998.
"The iMac will only sell to some of the true believers. The iMac doesn’t include a floppy disk drive for doing file backups or sharing of data. ... The iMac will fail. 

10/5/2000   Michael S. Malone

Apple R.I.P.

…“Nevertheless, the bloom is off the rose. The incredible run-up Apple stock has enjoyed since Steve's return is over, and the sheen of success that had enveloped the company has been tarnished. 

A temporary setback? Don't be too sure. Unlike, say, Hewlett-Packard, Apple has always been a company that deals poorly with failure. When things go bad at Apple, they go very bad. “

5/21/2001  Cliff Edwards  

Commentary: Sorry, Steve: Here's Why Apple Stores Won't Work 

“New retail outlets aren't going to fix Apple's sales “

 

12/23/2006 Bill Ray (Mobile)

“Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly”

It's the Pippin all over again”

 

1/14/2007 Matthew Lynn

Apple iPhone Will Fail in a Late, Defensive Move

“…Don't let that fool you into thinking that it matters. The big competitors in the mobile-phone industry such as Nokia Oyjand Motorola Inc.won't be whispering nervously into their clamshells over a new threat to their business…

The iPhone is nothing more than a luxury bauble that will appeal to a few gadget freaks. In terms of its impact on the industry, the iPhone is less relevant”

 

3/28/2007 John Dvorak

Apple should pull the plug in the iPhone

Commentary:  Company risks its reputation in competitive business

“… Now compare that effort and overlay the mobile handset business. This is not an emerging business. In fact it's gone so far that it's in the process of consolidation with probably two players dominating everything, Nokia Corp…and Motorola Inc.” 

 

SpamSandwich said:

stevenoz said:

Ignore Donald. He's almost gone.

We need good and beneficial relationships with China and other trading partners.

If Apple wants to build a factory in Texas, great, if it works for Apple. But don't do it for Donald.

That’s a laugh. He’ll easily sail to another 4 year term. Mark my words.

Win the electoral vote?   Possibly.  (He'll lose the popular vote by 5 million).  With 20+ Democrats running, it's inevitable that a fair percentage of Democratic/liberal voters will be unhappy with whoever gets the nomination.  If they pull what many pulled in 2016 and either stay home or vote third party, Trump can win.   But if they show up and vote like they did in the mid-terms, Trump will lose "bigly".   In 2016, if just 14% (on average) of third party voters in WI, MI and PA had voted for Hillary, she'd be in the White House now (or if an equivalent number of Democratic/liberal voters had showed up to vote).    Clinton didn't need a single Trump voter to change their vote.   The election in 2016 was determined by just 77,744 3rd party voters.   Considering that 100 million people in this country don't even bother to vote, that's nothing.   Turnout will determine the election, either way.

And I think we know by now that Donald simply says things that have little or no basis in reality.   He has a friendly conversation with a CEO and tells the CEO that they should have factories in the U.S. and the CEO nods and Trump thinks he has an agreement.    

As far as manufacturing is concerned, I've personally never bought into the argument that China has the infrastructure and we don't/can't/won't.   If the factories did come back and the need was there, the infrastructure would happen quite quickly because there are plenty of companies looking for such opportunities.   If Tesla can build cars in the U.S., Apple (and others) can build computers in the U.S., even if they're just doing assembly with foreign-made parts.   Having said that, in the Summer of 2017, U.S. manufacturing output hit an all time record.   But the jobs weren't there because so much of manufacturing is automated today.   So I think it's a bit naive to believe that if factories did come back to the U.S. that they wouldn't be highly automated anyway (especially in the tech sector) and not that many new jobs would result.   Any politician of any party who claims they can bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. is a liar.  

Besides, I think it's unfair to judge Apple's support of U.S. workers solely by how many manufacturing jobs they would have.  Apple (and any U.S. company) should be judged by how many people they employ in good paying jobs of any type.    Depending upon what you believe, Apple supposedly has 115,000 employees worldwide with "most" of those jobs in the U.S.   Apple claims to be "responsible" for 2 million jobs in the U.S. including suppliers, third party retail, outside agencies, etc.   If accurate, I believe Apple is doing fine as far as their responsibility to hire U.S. workers is concerned.   And with the possible exception of retail store workers, they pay quite well.  

In addition, labor-intensive manufacturing would never come back to the U.S. even if it did leave China.  Instead, it would go to Vietnam, India, Malaysia, etc.   Manufacturing will always go where labor is cheapest unless it's automated.    And 30 years from now, I believe we'll see manufacturing move to countries in Africa.