theothergeoff

canukstorm said:

ericthehalfbee said:

Gee, why did Chris have to go and say that?

He literally took the wind out of the sails of all the haters and naysayers predicting more doom and gloom for Apple and Swift.

He also tweeted this today

https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/819974025371787264

and that is the bigger deal....  getting the 'tech media' to clamor over 'Apple isn't Open' and use Chris' exit as evidence of that meme is sort of counter intelligence/pump&dump/'fake news'/clickbait stuff that causes discussions to spiral away from 'is Swift a compelling application development language?'

In the end, apple has to:
1) make a compelling mobile device experience that holds and retains customers
2) generates a profit that satisfies it's owners
3) do the hard R&D to marry emerging technologies, what future customers want (and likely don't know they want), scalable production methods, and deliver an insanely great UX.
4) rinse and repeat... Until the Mobile Market is total commodity and there is a 'next big thing' that needs to be pursued for corporate survival.
4a)  continually build out your 'ecosystem' to make Apple iOS device dependence a compelling lock in feature (I can't leave my music, my ApplePay, my XYZ)

and you guys are sweating a couple % points in a Trillion dollar market and a 2Billion customer space?

and to be honest, 4 is the hard part, and the reason why Apple's Machine Learning and Cloud has to come up to speed.   Apple isn't competing against Android and WinPhone.  It's competing against Amazon and Alphabet (google makes no money on _android_),  and probably the driverless car builder after Tesla.

And the Car vector is important.   if the buying public is buying a car based on 'personal integrated ecosystem'  Apple has to play in that space, and ideally define that ecosystem.   Making a car is 2ndary to defining the experience, especially if you want to get 3-5% of every 'transaction' your car makes (tolls, energy purchases, in car entertainment, fast food....  If you're not driving the thing, your car is your office, your entertainment, your classroom).   I spend 3 hours a day in the car... That's 20% of my waking time.   Think about the simple 'your car as a big apple pay antenna'  and as you drive up to MickeyD's, you place your order (or it asks which of your favorites you want) from your dashboard, and a big 'TouchID' to confirm and buy.

thedba said:

theothergeoff said:

Rayz2016 said:

Actually, the biggest foulup was missing Christmas for the AirPod launch. 

Biggest?  hardly.  let's see... assuming you sold 5 million last quarter, that's only 750Million in sales (remember, this is a $160 peripheral, that would be on top of a $700 phone purchase, if you have 10% buy through that would be friggin' amazing).

It would have been a massive cluster if they shipped 5 Million defective earPods (See Samsung Galaxy 7).   I think they did it right.

It was big in the sense that by removing the headphone jack Apple's wireless alternative was not ready along side the iPhone7. Their vision of a wireless future was slightly delayed.

big is not biggest. and you're now saying they it was significant because they missed October release, not the Christmas season.
and to complete my pedantism... Their vision wasn't delayed, their delivery was delayed.

Their Biggest foul-up in 2016 was done in 2014, when they 'finally' released a 5.5"  6+.  Which caused a FY 2015 Spike in sales, making FY 2016 smaller in comparison, but if you look YoY, sales are back in line with 2010-14 sales growth.  One could argue they release just a 6+ in 2014 (and an SE to keep the 4" crowd happy), and then in 2015, release the 6s [new model] and 6s+ in 2015, and they would not have had the dip in FY 2016.   

Mikeymike said:

theothergeoff said:

saarek said:

I don't understand how they let the Mac lineup get in the state it's in.

With their money they could easily have upgraded the line up with new internals whilst they finished off any innovations that they wanted to roll out.

Piss poor management, very unusual.

non sequitur.  The Mac Lineup is not the reason they made less money last year.

and it's quite simple:  the Mac Lineup is in the state it's in due to 1) the iPhone is the product that drives the company; 2) Apple's commitment to reduce churn in products (to avoid rapid obsolescence / devaluation); 3) their dependence on Intel to provide 'compelling' upgrades to the x64 computational platform  4) Apple's view that the world [read: the 99% of the buying public that doesn't write code, play computer games, or crashes molecules, planets, or TB databases together] wants lighter more portable products.

I [hopefully] think this is the same conundrum as in 1997-2004 where they had to 'dance with who brung ya' [GSeries chip], until they could get 1) the NeXTSTEP->MacOSX migration reasonably complete, AND the Intel Core/Xeon Chips were Price/Performance competitive with the PowerChips.

I do think that the A series chips will go to the MacOS line... but it's still 4-5 years out, not so much for the Ax chips, but for supporting chip set that provides all the stuff that iDevices don't have to deal with at the performance levels a 'real computer' has to.

I do think the Apple Execs take a very long view in their product pipeline [3+ years], and are compensated such that a couple million a year off the top is a 'pinch' and not a 'penalty'  (If I have a x0,000 shares at 2010 $70 RSUs, the real benefit is still to grow stock price 20% over 3 years [remember this is the friction' highest capitalized public company in the free world 5% YoY is serious growth]).

Nothing to see here, business as usual.

Sounds more like you're saying 'Apple can't walk and chew gum at the same time', to me.

Then you're not hearing what I'm writing;-)   They are walking, chewing gum, singing songs, snapping fingers, and counting backwards at the same time just fine.  They just don't change a stick of gum [Intel processors] until they have a compelling reason to do so [high performance, with heat and power and probably a hundred other key specs coming within their performance envelope], especially since 2 of the other 5 things they are doing (iOS and 'Services' [the real end game]) are where they are and have to advance.

Rayz2016 said:

Actually, the biggest foulup was missing Christmas for the AirPod launch. 

Biggest?  hardly.  let's see... assuming you sold 5 million last quarter, that's only 750Million in sales (remember, this is a $160 peripheral, that would be on top of a $700 phone purchase that has lightning enabled earbuds [you don't NEED to buy them], if you have 10% upsell, that would be friggin' amazing).

It would have been a massive cluster if they shipped 5 Million defective earPods (See Samsung Galaxy 7).   I think they did it right.

Apple knows that revenue will happen this quarter.  if you're spending $160 on ear pods, you a) have a $100 BlueTooth solution already, and/or b) you have $160 available every quarter.