6 ms·

Apple’s Covid-19 Response

71 points by Austin_Conlon 7y ago

chadd 7y ago
"We will be closing all of our retail stores outside of Greater China until March 27" - Does this mean all stores globally closed, except inside China, which are back open?
- briandear 7y ago
  Yes. And all retail employees will continue to be paid.
  - keidjfks 7y ago
    At least in Europe, they need to continue paying wages, unless they established some (potentially illegal) freelancing scheme over employment.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
antonzabirko 7y ago
Nice! Everyone make sure you get your coronavirus response papers ready! Wouldnt want to be the only person on the planet not talking about how they're handling it!
- stickfigure 7y ago
  This really is an underrated comment. In the last 24 hours I've received more than a dozen emails from random businesses that have my email address - many of which I have not interacted with in years - letting me know that my health and safety is their top priority. It's like someone in the marketing department realized "hey, here's an opportunity to send some spam without looking sleazy". It's opportunistic and gross.
  - blowski 7y ago
    Perhaps their support teams are receiving a lot of questions, and they decided to cover them in an email. On the scale of sleazy things companies do, this is on the low end for me.
  - jbverschoor 7y ago
    Well. At the same time Apple will continue to pay. Other companies use the moment to fire people.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - antonzabirko 7y ago
    Thank you for your support here. I want you to know that I deeply care about everyone who responds to my post. You'll be glad to know that you can keep writing responses from home for the next week. After that the coast should be clear, so I expect you to come in. -sent from nuclear bunker
    - Austin_Conlon 7y ago
      The nuclear bunker is their industrial design lab in Cupertino.
jodrellblank 7y ago
Apple’s committed donations to the global COVID-19 response — both to help treat those who are sick and to help lessen the economic and community impacts of the pandemic — today reached $15 million worldwide. Not that it's Apple's job to fix COVID-19, but this is the equivalent of an average US houshold income family crowing about donating $1.80 of their yearly $63k income. Using Apple's annual profit, not revenue. [Edit: correction $18]
- dteiml 7y ago
  Wouldn't it be more like $15? Apple's operating income in 2019 was 63k M, so if you remove the M's you get $15.
  - Too 7y ago
    I wonder how many average people that have donated $15 for this cause, or even $1.80... (disclaimer: not myself either)
  - jodrellblank 7y ago
    You're right, that's ten times more generous than I accused them of being. I understand the downvotes now.
- jonknee 7y ago
  And then the next part: > We’re also announcing that we are matching our employee donations two-to-one to support COVID-19 response efforts locally, nationally and internationally. Plus everyone is still getting paid: > All of our hourly workers will continue to receive pay in alignment with business as usual operations. We have expanded our leave policies to accommodate personal or family health circumstances created by COVID-19 — including recovering from an illness, caring for a sick loved one, mandatory quarantining, or childcare challenges due to school closures.
  - jodrellblank 7y ago
    I don't know whether to be happy that a major American company has publically said such things, or carry on being disgusted that such a thing is not normal and is worth a PR announcement. Seriously, Apple's leave policy didn't include "recovering from an illness"??
debaserab2 7y ago
For a company that literally owns a significant chunk of all the money available in the world, this response seems tepid at best.
- kbenson 7y ago
  More money doesn't always make something happen faster or better. Governments are likely spending hundreds of millions to billions. Even if Apple had committed a billion dollars, would that result in better training, more personnel, more useful medication, medication where it needs to be, better tests, or more testing in the short term? I suspect the answer is no, because I think those are likely all constrained on the supply side right now and money is not currently the problem. It's sort of like a disaster happening in the area close to you. Maybe you go to try to donate your time to help others affected by the disaster. Maybe when you get there you see 50 other people standing around twiddling their thumbs because there's more people than they have useful tasks for at the moment. Do you stick around all day with nothing to do so you can say you helped, or do you leave after 30 minutes and promise you'll check back tomorrow to see if they have more use for you then?
  - jodrellblank 7y ago
    > More money doesn't always make something happen faster or better. Elon Musk tweeted "Coronavirus panic is dumb"[1]. When there were school kids stuck in a cave, he sent a team of engineers halfway round the world to try and build a submarine rescue effort. Instead of tweeting that, he could have tried to build cheap CPAP/respirators in bulk, on short notice and deliver them to hospitals. I'm not saying he should have, but SpaceX dropped the price of rocketry a lot by trying and using off the shelf components; manufacturing is something which effort and money could plausibly move the needle on quickly, where research into speculative medication might not have any results, and that is something we can imagine him doing where we can't imagine a large company with big manufacturing experience pivoting to doing unexpectedly. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1236029449042198528?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1236029449042198528?ref_...
    - 7y ago
blowski 7y ago
I wonder which companies will benefit from this pandemic, long-term. If there’s a surge in remote working, for example, seems like that could be good for FAANG, bad for transport companies, commercial real estate, public events. Is there any analysis out there about this?
- ehsankia 7y ago
  Streaming sites like Netflix, maybe?
  - unlinked_dll 7y ago
    Maybe Disney, more likely. Hollywood has essentially frozen production and from what I'm hearing they're really not setup for working remote in pre/post (especially the latter). Combine with delayed releases, cancellation of film festivals (which are marketplaces as much as exhibitions for content) and the new releases this year appear to be on a giant delay. Disney is interesting because they have the deepest bench, so to speak in terms of catalog. They also have the kids stuff, and all the kids are at home. They also had their stock dip below $100 with the crash this week, had to shutdown their parks, and quite recently reorganized the entire direct to consumer business. I'd put some money on Disney coming out on top there. Netflix relies on new content to reduce churn. If production is halted I don't know how that looks for them. However if you take out their capex on production, they suddenly become stupidly profitable. So who knows.
    - jonknee 7y ago
      Disney is also hemorrhaging cash with their parks closed. Along with resorts and cruises. And their TV advertising just vanished with losing all live sports. The next earnings season is going to be insane.
    - ehsankia 7y ago
      Even with it's deep catalog, Disney+ still has far less content than Netflix. I do agree that Netflix relies on new content to reduce churn, but my argument wasn't so much about existing users (churn), but about millions of new people who never had Netflix deciding to sign up because they have nothing else to do at home. As for the rest of people, I agree that when you're competing with hundreds of other sources of entertainment and ways to spend your days, Netflix's catalog may not be amazing, but when most of the population is stuck at home, I'm sure there are plenty of stuff people will find and enjoy on Netflix. Disney is definitely a runner up too. They've started moving releases closers. They just released Frozen 2 and the new Starwars movie digitally.
caymanjim 7y ago
Bragging about unrelated topics in the first paragraph, and touting a $15M donation while sitting on $200B in cash. So magnanimous. By the way, get back to work.
- klohto 7y ago
  Is there a guide on how much are you supposed to give? Would $200B be good enough? Why criticize how much is one giving
  - exclusiv 7y ago
    We have tipping guidelines so yes someone should create one. They probably got 15m in earned media from the PR alone.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- busymom0 7y ago
  Seems like you missed the next part where he’s talking about matching two-to-one and also everyone getting paid even when closed. That’s more than enough they are doing. Also I dislike when people comment on why so and so is only donating X amount of money.
  - caymanjim 7y ago
    I would never criticize how or whether an individual donated. Apple is fair game. The entire announcement is self-congratulatory PR. Yeah, it's good that they're donating some money and matching some employee donations. They could have just done that. They turned it into a PR item, fluffed it up with other self-aggrandizing anecdotes, and announced what, to them, amounts to a token gesture. I don't go around town bragging when I drop $20 in the veterans' bucket at Walmart.
    - busymom0 7y ago
tbrock 7y ago
Great, at least this one was more interesting than the critical response my dry cleaner or 10 minute oil change place is taking.
totalZero 7y ago
My intuition is that this is a supply chain / inventory management closure, not a virus risk closure. They have 509 stores in 25 countries (incl China). I don't believe that they would close over 90% of those stores simultaneously due simply to generalized viral transmission risk. I find it guileful that they announced the closure in the middle of the night at the end of the week, a day after having announced the opening of their four remaining China stores to great fanfare from the equity market.
- jonknee 7y ago
  They are providing inventory to a bunch of other retailers and are continuing online sales, this really sounds like they don't want people coming in and touching the same piece of glass.
  - totalZero 7y ago
    Inventory is a lot easier to manage when you don't have to send it to 500 different sites and predict demand. If you're coming up short on inventory, the reasonable choice is to put it into one central repository and ship from there. There are several different configurations for each type of device, varying based on color, memory, and carrier. If they were only concerned about the virus, they would take the display models out of the showroom and continue to process pick-up orders. And they wouldn't shut down stores worldwide (ex-China). No health body has recommended worldwide retail shutdowns, and no competing device vendor has closed all of its stores worldwide (ex-China). This is a ramification of the factory shutdowns we saw in China several weeks ago.
bramkrom 7y ago
Good to read they're doing what they can. In the meantime, there's business like ours (in travel, 70-ish people, not profitable) that are fighting to survive this crisis. Would've liked to see an extension of the deadline for the apple sign-up requirement. I know we're late, but this means we need to spend valuable time redesigning our sign-up whereas what we currently need to do is redesign our entire business model to stay alive. Curious how others in the market feel about this

71 points by Austin_Conlon 7y ago

"We will be closing all of our retail stores outside of Greater China until March 27" - Does this mean all stores globally closed, except inside China, which are back open?

briandear 7y ago
Yes. And all retail employees will continue to be paid.
- keidjfks 7y ago
  At least in Europe, they need to continue paying wages, unless they established some (potentially illegal) freelancing scheme over employment.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

antonzabirko 7y ago

Nice! Everyone make sure you get your coronavirus response papers ready! Wouldnt want to be the only person on the planet not talking about how they're handling it!

stickfigure 7y ago
This really is an underrated comment. In the last 24 hours I've received more than a dozen emails from random businesses that have my email address - many of which I have not interacted with in years - letting me know that my health and safety is their top priority. It's like someone in the marketing department realized "hey, here's an opportunity to send some spam without looking sleazy". It's opportunistic and gross.
- blowski 7y ago
  Perhaps their support teams are receiving a lot of questions, and they decided to cover them in an email. On the scale of sleazy things companies do, this is on the low end for me.
- jbverschoor 7y ago
  Well. At the same time Apple will continue to pay. Other companies use the moment to fire people.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- antonzabirko 7y ago
  Thank you for your support here. I want you to know that I deeply care about everyone who responds to my post. You'll be glad to know that you can keep writing responses from home for the next week. After that the coast should be clear, so I expect you to come in. -sent from nuclear bunker
  - Austin_Conlon 7y ago
    The nuclear bunker is their industrial design lab in Cupertino.

jodrellblank 7y ago

Apple’s committed donations to the global COVID-19 response — both to help treat those who are sick and to help lessen the economic and community impacts of the pandemic — today reached $15 million worldwide. Not that it's Apple's job to fix COVID-19, but this is the equivalent of an average US houshold income family crowing about donating $1.80 of their yearly $63k income. Using Apple's annual profit, not revenue. [Edit: correction $18]

dteiml 7y ago
Wouldn't it be more like $15? Apple's operating income in 2019 was 63k M, so if you remove the M's you get $15.
- Too 7y ago
  I wonder how many average people that have donated $15 for this cause, or even $1.80... (disclaimer: not myself either)
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  You're right, that's ten times more generous than I accused them of being. I understand the downvotes now.
jonknee 7y ago
And then the next part: > We’re also announcing that we are matching our employee donations two-to-one to support COVID-19 response efforts locally, nationally and internationally. Plus everyone is still getting paid: > All of our hourly workers will continue to receive pay in alignment with business as usual operations. We have expanded our leave policies to accommodate personal or family health circumstances created by COVID-19 — including recovering from an illness, caring for a sick loved one, mandatory quarantining, or childcare challenges due to school closures.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  I don't know whether to be happy that a major American company has publically said such things, or carry on being disgusted that such a thing is not normal and is worth a PR announcement. Seriously, Apple's leave policy didn't include "recovering from an illness"??

debaserab2 7y ago

For a company that literally owns a significant chunk of all the money available in the world, this response seems tepid at best.

kbenson 7y ago
More money doesn't always make something happen faster or better. Governments are likely spending hundreds of millions to billions. Even if Apple had committed a billion dollars, would that result in better training, more personnel, more useful medication, medication where it needs to be, better tests, or more testing in the short term? I suspect the answer is no, because I think those are likely all constrained on the supply side right now and money is not currently the problem. It's sort of like a disaster happening in the area close to you. Maybe you go to try to donate your time to help others affected by the disaster. Maybe when you get there you see 50 other people standing around twiddling their thumbs because there's more people than they have useful tasks for at the moment. Do you stick around all day with nothing to do so you can say you helped, or do you leave after 30 minutes and promise you'll check back tomorrow to see if they have more use for you then?
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  > More money doesn't always make something happen faster or better. Elon Musk tweeted "Coronavirus panic is dumb"[1]. When there were school kids stuck in a cave, he sent a team of engineers halfway round the world to try and build a submarine rescue effort. Instead of tweeting that, he could have tried to build cheap CPAP/respirators in bulk, on short notice and deliver them to hospitals. I'm not saying he should have, but SpaceX dropped the price of rocketry a lot by trying and using off the shelf components; manufacturing is something which effort and money could plausibly move the needle on quickly, where research into speculative medication might not have any results, and that is something we can imagine him doing where we can't imagine a large company with big manufacturing experience pivoting to doing unexpectedly. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1236029449042198528?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1236029449042198528?ref_...
  - 7y ago

blowski 7y ago

I wonder which companies will benefit from this pandemic, long-term. If there’s a surge in remote working, for example, seems like that could be good for FAANG, bad for transport companies, commercial real estate, public events. Is there any analysis out there about this?

ehsankia 7y ago
Streaming sites like Netflix, maybe?
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  Maybe Disney, more likely. Hollywood has essentially frozen production and from what I'm hearing they're really not setup for working remote in pre/post (especially the latter). Combine with delayed releases, cancellation of film festivals (which are marketplaces as much as exhibitions for content) and the new releases this year appear to be on a giant delay. Disney is interesting because they have the deepest bench, so to speak in terms of catalog. They also have the kids stuff, and all the kids are at home. They also had their stock dip below $100 with the crash this week, had to shutdown their parks, and quite recently reorganized the entire direct to consumer business. I'd put some money on Disney coming out on top there. Netflix relies on new content to reduce churn. If production is halted I don't know how that looks for them. However if you take out their capex on production, they suddenly become stupidly profitable. So who knows.
  - jonknee 7y ago
    Disney is also hemorrhaging cash with their parks closed. Along with resorts and cruises. And their TV advertising just vanished with losing all live sports. The next earnings season is going to be insane.
  - ehsankia 7y ago
    Even with it's deep catalog, Disney+ still has far less content than Netflix. I do agree that Netflix relies on new content to reduce churn, but my argument wasn't so much about existing users (churn), but about millions of new people who never had Netflix deciding to sign up because they have nothing else to do at home. As for the rest of people, I agree that when you're competing with hundreds of other sources of entertainment and ways to spend your days, Netflix's catalog may not be amazing, but when most of the population is stuck at home, I'm sure there are plenty of stuff people will find and enjoy on Netflix. Disney is definitely a runner up too. They've started moving releases closers. They just released Frozen 2 and the new Starwars movie digitally.

caymanjim 7y ago

Bragging about unrelated topics in the first paragraph, and touting a $15M donation while sitting on $200B in cash. So magnanimous. By the way, get back to work.

klohto 7y ago
Is there a guide on how much are you supposed to give? Would $200B be good enough? Why criticize how much is one giving
- exclusiv 7y ago
  We have tipping guidelines so yes someone should create one. They probably got 15m in earned media from the PR alone.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
busymom0 7y ago
Seems like you missed the next part where he’s talking about matching two-to-one and also everyone getting paid even when closed. That’s more than enough they are doing. Also I dislike when people comment on why so and so is only donating X amount of money.
- caymanjim 7y ago
  I would never criticize how or whether an individual donated. Apple is fair game. The entire announcement is self-congratulatory PR. Yeah, it's good that they're donating some money and matching some employee donations. They could have just done that. They turned it into a PR item, fluffed it up with other self-aggrandizing anecdotes, and announced what, to them, amounts to a token gesture. I don't go around town bragging when I drop $20 in the veterans' bucket at Walmart.
  - busymom0 7y ago

tbrock 7y ago

Great, at least this one was more interesting than the critical response my dry cleaner or 10 minute oil change place is taking.

totalZero 7y ago

My intuition is that this is a supply chain / inventory management closure, not a virus risk closure. They have 509 stores in 25 countries (incl China). I don't believe that they would close over 90% of those stores simultaneously due simply to generalized viral transmission risk. I find it guileful that they announced the closure in the middle of the night at the end of the week, a day after having announced the opening of their four remaining China stores to great fanfare from the equity market.

jonknee 7y ago
They are providing inventory to a bunch of other retailers and are continuing online sales, this really sounds like they don't want people coming in and touching the same piece of glass.
- totalZero 7y ago
  Inventory is a lot easier to manage when you don't have to send it to 500 different sites and predict demand. If you're coming up short on inventory, the reasonable choice is to put it into one central repository and ship from there. There are several different configurations for each type of device, varying based on color, memory, and carrier. If they were only concerned about the virus, they would take the display models out of the showroom and continue to process pick-up orders. And they wouldn't shut down stores worldwide (ex-China). No health body has recommended worldwide retail shutdowns, and no competing device vendor has closed all of its stores worldwide (ex-China). This is a ramification of the factory shutdowns we saw in China several weeks ago.

bramkrom 7y ago

Good to read they're doing what they can. In the meantime, there's business like ours (in travel, 70-ish people, not profitable) that are fighting to survive this crisis. Would've liked to see an extension of the deadline for the apple sign-up requirement. I know we're late, but this means we need to spend valuable time redesigning our sign-up whereas what we currently need to do is redesign our entire business model to stay alive. Curious how others in the market feel about this