blastdoor

mike_galloway said:

If demand in your home country is weaker than expected, then this would be a good reason not to roll out to other countries.

So if you can't sell as many as expected you should sell nothing? 

I think you need help. Here's a starting place:

https://cogbtherapy.com/cbt-blog/cognitive-distortions-all-or-nothing-thinking

avon b7 said:

blastdoor said:

The quote that resonated with me from the WSJ article is that Apple can do pretty much anything they set their minds to. I think that really is the bottom line. Apple has competent management, smart employees, and practically limitless financial resources. When you have those things, you can do just about anything (within the laws of physics)

Yet two major endeavours didn't, or haven't, materialised. The car project and the 5G modem. AI is coming, but later than others and part of that would seem to be contracted from outside. They also had to halt the ship for a week for a bug fixing effort.

Perhaps they are stretched a little thin on the required resources and the strategic decision making process might not be as good as it could be. 

Perhaps I should have also added "laws of patents" as a binding constraint. I think that's the issue with 5G. 

Cancelling the car project doesn't mean they couldn't do it, only that they concluded doing it doesn't make sense. It would also seem that autonomous driving is a much harder problem than first imagined. 

I think you're right that the strategic decision making process is an issue. I'm not sure it's correct that it could be better, but I think it is correct that it WAS better under Steve Jobs, just because he had an uncanny ability to realize early in a process which ideas were worth pursuing and which were not. I recall him making the point that R&D is only expensive when you spend money on a bad idea. If you only spend money on good ideas, it's not very expensive at all. And so the key is to quickly identify the bad ideas and shut them down. So Apple is missing Steve, but the good news is that nobody else has him, either. 

twolf2919 said:

If I had guts, I'd short AAPL stock

Me too, but for a different reason. Apple’s dependence on China makes them highly vulnerable. 

twolf2919 said:

tmay said:

twolf2919 said:

Opt-in would make sense since agreeing to it will likely mean giving up some privacy to ChatGPT servers in the cloud.

If I had guts, I'd short AAPL stock - it's been rising for the past few months simply on analysts' expectation that Apple will make big announcements regarding AI.  I.e. letting the world know that it isn't behind in AI, after all.  But if, instead, we find out that they are indeed hopelessly behind - by essentially offering us another company's AI on their devices - the stock will go down, for sure.

And this sounds about right - Apple hasn't managed to improve Siri in 10+ years.  There's no reason to believe Apple could inject a massive improvement into it in the 1-2 years that AI has become a hot topic.

You seem to discount that fact that Apple has something on the order of 1.45 B iPhone users, and it those users haven't abandoned Apple from the lack of noticeable Siri improvements, then likely, there isn't any impact to Apple from "leading from the back" in AI. pp

I haven't discounted that.  I have no doubt, any existing Apple users - including myself - will appreciate any significant  new features Apple bestows on them.  But if Apple's great AI announcement turns out to be a partnership with OpenAI, where interactions are sent off-device to ChatGPT servers, it's hard to see how that would lead to some great "super" upgrade cycle as analysts are currently predicting.  After all, if all the heavy lifting is done in the cloud, why would you need a new phone?  Just install iOS 18 on your existing device and you're ready to go!

On the other hand, if Siri received a real overhaul using AI and finally became a really useful personal assistant - with my privacy kept intact by using an on-device LLM - I'd certainly stand in line for a new phone that has the required power/RAM to do this.

People don’t care how/why the feature is there, only that it is there. The how/why is interesting to nerds, but not to normals. Mac sales went up when Apple switched to Intel because switching to Intel made the Mac better — people didn’t care that Apple was abandoning a processor they helped develop for the dreaded x86. 

Marvin said:

aderutter said:

Apple would be leaving money on the table if they don’t update the Studio & Mini 

Apple net income 2023 = $97b
Mac revenue 2023 = $29b
Mac desktop revenue = ~10% = ~$3b
Mac Studio & mini revenue = < 5% = < $1.5b
Mac Studio & mini net margin ~25% = $0.37b

That's how much would be left on the table, assuming nobody bought the older ones that are available now. How much potential revenue determines most companies' priorities.

It's not like the Studio and Pro are outdated, they were refreshed 12 months ago. The mini is 1.5 years out. They can throw an M4 in the mini whenever they want but it's not impacting Apple's income.

The big number of total revenue is the sum of a lot of little numbers. If you rationalize ignoring each little number, it will eventually affect the big number.