sirozha

radarthekat said:

sirozha said:

GeorgeBMac said:

rogifan_new said:

Cook needs to stop talking or if he does talk stop being so defensive. Oh and if the ecosystem is under appreciated by the market whose fault is that? Cook’s.

No, it's the fault of analysts who have been dazzled by the bright, shiny object called "iPhone" and were unable to see anything else.

Meanwhile, the ecosystem that powers both it and the Mac line continued to quietly grow and grow stronger each year.

It's interesting  you would say this about the Apple ecosystem. In my opinion, the ecosystem in complete shambles, as Tim Cook's Apple has taken a baseball bat to the ecosystem that SJ built. 

I’m sure you have a few examples in mind, but you’d have to be myopic to cite them and not provide a survey of all that’s changed in the ecosystem since... whenever (Job’s era, 1980s, since iPhone 5?).  Apple has, each year, onboarded huge numbers of new users while adding services, continuity, partners doing medical studies using Apple products, and a myriad of other extensions and additions to its ecosystem.  Show me what Samsung has done, ecosystem wise.  Or Huawei, or _________.  

I'm not an expert on Samsung, but Smart Things seem to be a decent ecosystem.

I don't own anything Samsung except for a non-smart fridge, so I would not be the best person to answer that question. 

However, I can write up a page off the top of my mind of total misses and slips in the Apple ecosystem, but I'm sure you can write up the same page off the top of your mind. 

SpamSandwich said:

Hilarious that they show their security lock on a door with glass panels, which are easiest for criminals to shatter and break into.

Not true. The glass can be break-proof. You would have to hammer it for a long time to get through the glass. We live in a 21st century, my friend. 

entropys said:

AppleExposed said:

entropys said:

It’s like Apple in the nineties again.
A very good CEO once said this, covered in this very interesting reddit article:   

”What happened at Apple, to be honest, over the years was the goal used to be to make the best computers in the world. And that was goal one. Goal two, we got from Hewlett-Packard actually which was "we have to make a profit". Because if we don't make a profit we can't do goal one. So, yeah, I mean we enjoyed making a profit, but the purpose of making a profit was so we can make the best computers in the world. Along the way somewhere those two got reversed. The goal is to make a lot of money and well, if we have to make some good computers well ok we'll do that... 'cause we can make a lot of money doing that. And, it's very subtle. It's very subtle at first, but it turns out it's everything. That one little subtle flip... takes 5 years to see it, but that one little subtle flip in 5 years means everything.

....

Lastly, we're really big on making computers our friends can afford, and not all our friends are Larry Ellison. So, we've got to make computers that are really affordable and I think that's another place that Apple got really off-track and we are just driving that really hard.”

First off, Apple is 5x larger since Cook took over.

Secondly, Steve Jobs said he won't allow Apple to ship cheap junk.

Third, Apple still has the best computers. I cannot think of a company on Earth who sells premium products with the same marketshare as Apple. This says a lot. People are willing to save a months worth of work to buy an Apple product.

Apple in the 90s was releasing junk and making no money.

Used the new MBA’s FaceTime camera, Larry?

It's awful. But, it's not just in the 2018 MBA. It's also in the 2018 13" MBP and 15" MBP. Same awful quality. I've verified it with an Apple Sr. Advisor a few days ago. He told me his wife told him to stop using his 2018 MBP to FaceTime her. 

I almost returned the 2018 MBA. I already got an RMA from B&H, but I decided to keep it. It's an incredible machine IMHO except for the camera. 

I thought the dual-core CPU would cause it to be slow, beach-ball, etc., but it actually really surprised me. I can run two VMs concurrently on it (Windows 10 and Ubuntu 16.4) and the performance is still very decent. I got the 16 GB RAM and 512 GB SSD version. 

I also LOVE the keyboard. After all those horror stories that I've read about the keyboard, I actually like it a lot better than the scissor-key keyboard. I can type about 30% faster on this keyboard, and I was already a fast touch-typist. 

Anyone can explain to me why Apple spent $43.5 billion in the first half of 2018 on buybacks and probably the same amount in the second half of 2018? What were those buybacks trying to achieve? Higher stock price? Delivering value to the shareholders? Wow, that REALLY DIDN'T WORK, did it? 

As Tesla was about to fold earlier in 2018, wouldn't it have been a better idea to spend about $72 billion to buy Tesla at the price that Musk set ($420/share) when Musk tweeted the infamous "funding secured" statement. If I were Tim Cook, I would have taken a 30-minute drive to visit Musk in Fremont, CA in August 2018 and offered him the funding and the position of the head of the Apple automotive division. Apple could have used another $28 billion or so to ramp up the Model 3 production volume (maybe at a cheaper price). Tim Cook would have had a solid "next best thing" in the Apple's pipeline by now with still over $100 billion of cash left in the bank.

What we got instead is the tremendous downward slide in the share price, huge hit on the shareholders, and nothing to show for the AAPL buybacks.

How am I benefiting as a shareholder from Tim Cook having blown $100 billion on AAPL buybacks in 2018?

bulk001 said:

sirozha said:

bulk001 said:

sirozha said:

Remember "Freedom Fries"? It will too blow over. 

I do. And it might. But there are some fundamental differences. France as a sovereign state is not stealing our intellectual property, hacking our companies, detaining our citizens out of spite, trying to annex other countries, putting their citizens into mass enslavement camps, selling telecommunications infrastructure that may allow them to spy on all data that passes through the equipment, forcing our companies to give them access to all data, expanding their military and threatening destabilizing actions like China is in the South China Sea and forcing their citizens to “Buy French”.These are very different to a short term political spat over Iraq. 

I was referring to the Chinese boycott of Apple. 

I know. You asked if anyone remembered “Freedom Fries” I said I did. 
You said this would pass much like that did. I said “It might”
Then I gave my reasons why I though this could be different to the Freedom Fries spat over the US invasion of Iraq. 

I don't think you are getting what I'm trying to say here.

We controlled the "Freedom Fries" boycott, so we were in control of that boycott.  

In this case, China is in control of the boycott, and we have no control over when they decide to stop it.

Let's just agree on the fact that the misunderstanding was never cleared (at least for me) and move on.