The answer is rather pedestrian: Apple is mostly a hardware company.
Apple isn't primarily in e-commerce, streaming or online ads and did not get as big a boost from millions of people suddenly trapped in their homes as other tech companies. Apple was never tempted to overhire, I suspect Apple had the opposite pressure during lockdowns due to its many retail workers seeing fewer customers, while Amazon's warehouses were brisk.
Apple is the only one that doesn’t seem to start up hundreds of obviously useless projects.
Google will hire thousands to work on an obviously doomed streaming service, to build a new OS, and so many other obviously bad ideas and then just fire them all later.
Vanishingly few Apple products seem to be discontinued. Usually after a long life like the iPod.
You wouldn't know about Apple's failed projects. Like other big tech companies, Apple has teams working on R&D and new products. Unlike the other big tech companies, the bar for publicly releasing a new product is extremely high at Apple, and unreleased products are kept secret.
They do tons of R&D work and sometimes they’re working silently for many years before they release an actual product. This was the case with iPhone for example.
I would say that their push for smart speakers has also yielded mediocre results, at best. Let's see what will happen with their AR headset, as they have been working on AR since at least 2017 [0].
Microsoft paid half a billion dollars to buy Andy Rubin's company, Danger. They decided to rewrite the platform from Java to Dot Net, which took so long the product was no longer competitive when they finished. Then they spent a fortune to advertise a product that was canceled after two weeks.
Then Microsoft decided to take another huge pile of cash and set that on fire by purchasing Nokia's mobile phone business.
> Microsoft wasted at least $8 billion on its failed Nokia experiment
Well to compare Apples to Apples we would need to know how much money Apple has spent with many of those efforts, which before Jobs came back almost driven the company to bankruptcy.
For younger generations Apple might feel unstoppable, meanwhile I remember the discussions to migrate away from surviving Macs on our IT department, and my graduation thesis was porting a particle simulation engine from NeXTSTEP into Windows, as those boxes were to be sent away.
We don't have to wonder with Microsoft. Again and again they have paid billions of dollars for complete failures like the Surface RT and Windows RT. They would have been well advised to cancel the platform before spending a fortune on advertising and unsold inventory.
Hell, how much did they pay for Skype, despite already having several text and video chat clients of their own? Then they completely rewrote Skype before replacing it with Teams.
They have a longstanding habit of taking shareholder value and creating huge bonfires from it.
These were arguably pretty reasonable hedging; it was _far from certain_ that developers would accept Objective C, and then later there was a general sense that dynamic interpreted languages might eat the world. I can't imagine either were particularly expensive; MacRuby in particular was basically someone's side project?
> WebObjects
This was inherited, and was pretty successful in its day (though it did perhaps outstay its welcome).
Most of the others you name are either _very_ old, or were actually quite useful in their day but have aged out.
Quicktime was never cancelled. It was adopted industry wide as the MP4 file format.
> MPEG-4 Part 14 is an instance of the more general ISO/IEC 14496-12:2004 (MPEG-4 Part 12: ISO base media file format) which is directly based upon the QuickTime File Format which was published in 2001.
Titan is another recent big bet that went nowhere, but so happened to be too big to hide. Who knows gow many other secret dead-end projects they buried.
It was never announced so not comparable to other's dropping projects once they're in the open, and if all we're relying on are rumours and industry analysts, then those still say they're continuing the work on Titan, with a view towards a 2025-2028 launch.
But it does change what makes sense to talk about in terms of "Apple" as it exists today.
Otherwise you might as well talk about why IBM is an undefeatable behemoth that dominates the industry...oh, wait, what's that? That hasn't been true for over 30 years now? I thought age didn't change facts?
You mean the company that is usually the champion on patents per year, owns a large portion of Linux, GNOME and GCC development, is the 2nd major Java vendor, and has had quite a good fiscal year, including growth in mainframe and micro sales?
A behemoth indeed, only HN isn't paying attention where it matters.
QuickTime wasn’t a failure. It was the basis of their entire media playback API for over two decades. WebObjects came in with the acquisition of NeXT and from what I gather is still the basis of the backend of iTunes and the App Store. Most of the rest were pre 1997.
While I respect Apple as a whole, "they didn't start up hundreds of obv useless projects" is an empty claim. Not only they sank so much money into subpar offerings like iCloud/iWork, not pay attention to some of their competitive advantages like Automator, they ran some of their once-great stuff into ground as well (Finalcut pro).
I prefer Google's method of open sourcing their work. it benefits humanity in the long term, where Apples software generally benefits Apple and is only allowed to run on their "blessed" hardware.
Thanks to Google we have patent-free codecs, an open source mobile OS, and they contribute significantly to the Linux kernel, among other projects that are "available to the public".
Not saying that's necessarily always a bad thing for the end user, but they do play the long game.
Chrome was great at the start, did a lot to drive the web forward, and is now suffocating those advancements with Manifest V3 etc (including delaying removal of third party cookies).
It almost feels like embrace, extend, extinguish..
I can't think of a company more blatantly engaged in anti-competitive practices than Apple, but I'm glad to see all that unfairly amassed wealth benefitting even the lowest rungs of its corporate hierarchy through the unusual benefit of not being terminated at the drop of a hat. Bravo!
Amazon, Meta, Google are most certainly cut from the same cloth, only slightly smaller. For Wal-Mart I can't think of anything strictly anit-competitive, but its practice of paying sub-subsistance wages and counting on government relief programs to make up the difference is so disgusting I don't know how to describe. Time-Warner, Comcast I'm not too familiar with, but as I understand they are under regulations that prohibit them from dropping your connection when e.g. they find you visiting ycombinatior.com, a site where their business is frequently ridiculed, which is certainly a step in the right direction and the model that should be applied broadly and forcefully to all of the above.
These companies you mention, at least the tech ones, are all way more open to third parties interfacing with whatever products they have or data they produce.
They are more like big city gangsters willing to do business with whomever as long as you pay them protection money, while Apple's ecosystem is like a gated community where you get shot at the door if you even so much as look like you can't afford to get in.
Do you have any examples of that? Facebook and Google seems open more in the roach motel sense - they get your customer volume but continually adjust the terms so you get less of the ad revenue (pivot to video, ad words’ declining payout, the need to pay for placement in search or adopt proprietary tools like AMP not to be pushed down the page, etc.).
Yes, I am not OP but obviously they are more anti-competitive if ONLY for their killing off support for progressive web apps over the last 3 or 17 releases of iOS/Safari
I'm a big fan of PWAs, but this really seems like small fries compared to something like Walmart which has an internal planned economy many times larger than the Soviet Union ever achieved.
If you sell your product in Walmart they basically own everything about it. They deem how you make your product, the supply chain, the prices you charge, everything
And they use this incredibly granular level of control to run out any possible competition
In a world where when Apple puts a dialogue on your phone, that when they try track you with ads, they ask "allow us to enhance your experience?" whereas when other companies try to track you, they ask "allow <company> to track you across apps and websites?"
In a world when you can't even hint at the existence of a payment mechanism outside the App Store to get subscriptions?
It's not the most anticompetitive but it's definitely competing for the title in big tech.
I've thought about this, and I agree, and I'm no lover of any of the FAANGs. It makes Apple look like they know what they're doing, whilst the others are just following others and going in and out with the tide. I think it all boils down to Tim Cook. Tim always seemed analytical and strategic in his thinking, and Apple's behaviour in this matter only serves to underscore that. As an operational guy, I think Tim is the best that any company has ever seen.
You make them sound like saints. They are not, and they have a history of being less scrupulous than some of these other companies. Here's just a small example of what they're capable of when their obsession for secrecy and control makes them flex their corporate muscle: http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/mobile/09/07/iphone.5.probe/ind...
And we didn't even talk about their sweatshops in China which has always had persistent labor-abuse issues[0], the Chinese government boosting iPhone production with child slave labor, and all the many other scandals they've been involved with.
I really have no idea how anyone would get the notion that they are any better than the rest of the pack. Perhaps their upbeat pristine presentations, live from Cupertino. They should broadcast one from their sweatshops in Shenzhen. Some of the highschool kids they pressed into 11 hour shifts to assemble their iPhones could sing the praise of Tim Cook: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/21/apple-iphone-x-reportedly-as...
> And we didn't even talk about their sweatshops in China where employees kill themselves an awful lot, the Chinese government boosting iPhone production with child slave labor, and all the many other scandals they've been involved with.
This tired argument again.
Apple has always led the industry in their auditing of their supply chain and taking proactive steps to address illegal and unethical behaviour. There will always be mistakes but it's how you deal with them that counts.
If you're going to call Foxconn a sweatshop then arguably Amazon, Tesla etc should be called them as well.
5 years ago it was the massive child-slave-labor scandal, which I suppose is what you refer to as "mistakes happen". Apple chose to continue to use Foxconn for production, even though they had similar scandals before and after the child-slave-labor one, until our present day.
That's not a "mistake". Apple is deliberately choosing to use a producer which has had persistent issues with labor abuse, some of which were as serious as pressing schoolchildren into 11 hour shifts of slave labor.
Let's face reality here: Apple is using Foxconn because they produce their products quickly and cheaply. They don't care about the abuse as long as it makes more cheap gadgets with fat profit margins. They aren't saints, nor better than other companies in their position.
> If you're going to call Foxconn a sweatshop then arguably Amazon, Tesla etc should be called them as well.
I never said Apple is worse than the rest of the industry. I refuted the notion that they are far better, and the overall halo of sainthood hung over them in this thread.
I clarified the comment, since suicide rates aren't the only factor by which to judge or point out the issues at Foxconn. Foxconn had a long list of labor abuse[0], and apparently they still do given large-scale worker protests last November[1].
Yup its just that they have become the largest seller of status signalling veblan goods in history, in times where inequality is at its highest.
It would be nice instead, if they used their cash hoard to stop wasting time upgrading the iphone with more superficial shit. Bring prices of the phones down to 50 bucks. Put it in the hands of everyone. And kill the toxic advertising supported attention economy that has caused chaos all over the world.
Now its just another group of unimaginative optimizing corporate robots, with no actual compass heading beyond hoarding cash.
>Bring prices of the phones down to 50 bucks. Put it in the hands of everyone.
60% of Americans already have them, and are perfectly happy to spend $1300 on them every few years, even if it means not paying rent or having to starve themselves. Why would they want to bring the price down?
I have an iPhone, but I'm not willing to spend $1300 on one. I bought my last one refurbished for about $250, an iPhone 7 Plus, about three years ago, and I still have no issues with it.
And Boost Mobile (where I got mine) is currently advertising a deal for an iPhone 8 for $80, or an iPhone 11 for $350.
Not all of that 60% are paying the full price for a brand new iPhone, probably not even the vast majority of them. iPhones tend to last (and continue to receive updates -- I'm still getting updates on mine) for quite a while.
That being said, I agree with you that they don't need to bring the price down. And I disagree with the parent, because there's already ways to get (older) iPhones pretty cheap, almost as cheap as they were calling for.
>60% of Americans already have them, and are perfectly happy to spend $1300 on them every few years, even if it means not paying rent or having to starve themselves. Why would they want to bring the price down?
Source? This comment sounds hyperbolic when many very capable iPhones versions are available for $700+ and 90% of people would not know the difference between a $700 and $1,300 iPhone.
In my family, we have an iPhone 6, X, XS, XR and 2020 SE still working.
They were never $1,300. And there has always been a perfectly viable non top of the line option for around $800, but still very future proof option.
Some people like to claim that everyone is buying a new maxed out iPhone every couple years, but that is nowhere near the truth. If you do not need the latest and greatest camera, people can and do buy the much cheaper models.
I didn’t say they were 1,300. I said they were very expensive for their time, relative to the competition. In fact, started at $649. Also, the specs are just not comparable to the latest. From battery life, to screen quality, to storage.
I disagree they were expensive relative to their competition, if you define competition as phones that have a decade+ long history of lasting at least 4 years (including software updates).
It has been many years since 90% of people need the “latest” specs. For the purposes of messaging, taking photos, browsing the internet, and watching media, an iPhone 13 serves just the purpose just as well as a 14 pro.
Even a $500 SE will do everything most require, except have a bad battery life, but that is fine for people who are not out in the field like retired people.
> Bring prices of the phones down to 50 bucks. Put it in the hands of everyone.
A $50 reduction on a $1000 price tag won’t “put it in the hands of everyone”. People who cannot afford it still won’t and it won’t change anything to people who can. $50 over the life of a device is nothing.
Besides, that’s what previous generations are for: usability is pretty much identical to the latest and greatest, and the discount is much more than $50.
> Yup its just that they have become the largest seller of status signalling veblan goods in history, in times where inequality is at its highest.
This assertion falls apart under even basic sober analysis. It may sound tautological but entire point of status signaling is that other people notice it. iPhones look very similar to the equivalents and most people aren't going to be able to tell which model or year you have without a close examination – contrast with a luxury sports car which is audibly and visibly distinct from a fair distance. If you look at what actual rich people do, you can really understand the point: there's no better phone available at any price due to how the product segment works so they buy the same phone as everyone else but they get things like high-ended designer cases because that's where there's room to demonstrate how much money you have. Tim Cook has essentially the same phone as half the people in line at your local coffee shop; that's decidedly not true of actual luxury goods.
It also has two other fundamental flaws: the first is the assertion that there's a substantial price difference when even a bit of research would show that equivalent phones cost roughly the same amount even before you adjust for the extra years of service an iPhone will provide. These comparisons can also be complicated because, for example, if you care about battery life or CPU performance the comparison for a Pixel 7 isn't the iPhone 14 but a much cheaper iPhone 11 but the same probably isn't true if your primary buying criteria is camera quality.
The second is trying to look at this in isolation: the price differential between one phone and another just isn't that much compared to other things people spend money on — a phone costs significantly less than what most people will spend on cell service over the same timeframe, and for perspective the total lifetime cost for that phone is likely to be 1-2 months worth of rent. For something which people derive heavy value from throughout the day, that's definitely not conspicuous consumption.
The U.S. median income is something like $50k so even if you're buying the most expensive model sold you're looking less than one percent of median income over the average 40 months that Americans keep their phones. Contrast that with, say, cars where the average new vehicle buyer is spending the equivalent of that purchase price _every month_ on something they use on average less than one hour per day and most of them are paying significant premiums for models which aren't more useful for the things they actually do just to present an aesthetic style. If you want to talk about Veblen goods, ask why so many people are commuting to office jobs in $60-90k trucks in showroom condition.
