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Apple is now an antifragile company

184 points by alwillis 5y ago

alisonkisk 5y ago
As is common, the article uses "antifragile" to mean "robust", despite claiming not to. > it’s antifragile thanks to a diverse mix of strong products.
- zackkrida 5y ago
  exactly. if anti-fragility is only achieved through robustness, what is the point of the distinction?
  - chongli 5y ago
    The point of the distinction is to signal oneself as a fan of Taleb.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  Just quoting that line is confusing. The thesis in those paragraphs is that COVID benefitted major lines of their business more than it hurt others and that was due to characteristics of the supply chain. I agree anti-fragile is often misused but the author takes care to define robustness first and contrasts his antifragility thesis to the robustness of the overall sound business. That said, I would look at other companies for examples of “true antifragility” although it’s interesting to try to analyze how a top global company can still raise the limit of its performance in situations that hurt its competitors.
  - harry8 5y ago
    The external shocks to a process benefit the process and make it stronger. Eg your immune system gets stronger by exposed to some amount of bugs that it needs to fight, despite your getting sick while it's fighting them. The distinction is whether it's "This is fine, we did ok through this" which is robust vs "This is something where we are now in a stronger position from being knocked about a bit." A well made double brick wall may be robust and survive the cyclone looking good but is not anti-fragile.
    - 1123581321 5y ago
      Yes, I understand. I think they were trying hard to make that distinction in the article with the long section about robustness and the long section about antifragility, as well as the definitions up front that match yours.
      - harry8 5y ago
        I may have hit reply on the wrong comment there. Sorry.
- snowwrestler 5y ago
  Because the concept of antifragile is nonsense. People don’t get stronger by lifting kettle bells, they get stronger from the rest and nutrition they take after lifting kettle bells. If you put the human body under constant stress, it just breaks down—like anything else under constant stress. Apple showed excellent robustness under the stress from the impact of COVID. It did so via strong capital reserves and diverse lines of business. Which is great, but it’s bog-standard corporate strategy. Very hard to execute well, though.
smoldesu 5y ago
Apple isn't "antifragile", they're just monstrously big. Since they have an iron grip on their supply chain, it makes sense that they'd benefit right now while their competitors struggle.
- dralley 5y ago
  Having 200 billion dollars in liquid cash sitting in the bank helps too.
  - orangepanda 5y ago
    And 100 billion in debt helps less
    - dralley 5y ago
      100 billion dollars in cash is more than the entire market cap of many of the companies they're competing against. And that's assuming those competitors have no debt, which is false.
aninteger 5y ago
Their devices are still fragile though.
- abc_lisper 5y ago
  Please explain. Apple devices last longer than any Android device, or for that matter 95% of all electronics sold
  - salamandersauce 5y ago
    They build glass phones with glass on both sides. Glass. You know that super durable material that is broken by kids with baseballs and breaks easy when dropped? iPhones get more updates sure. More durable? No. I'm pretty sure a Samsung Active can withstand more abuse. I'm pretty confident that my plastic backed with only a glass screen average Android phone could too.
    - edmundsauto 5y ago
      I’m not a person who is gentle with their tech - it’s a tool, not a fetish - and in 14 years of owning an iPhone, I have only broken the glass once. This is tough stuff - it’s not like it’s the single pane my dad installed in the garage door that I promptly broke by looking sideways at it. Yes, it could be sturdier. But that would require other trade offs. Just because you don’t value those decisions doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong. It just means your values were not the primary use case. Diversity is good because people value different sets of trade offs!
      - simfree 5y ago
        You must not have kids that demand to play with games on your phone then. I have witnessed many iPhones get smashed when said kids drop the phone (almost always by accident). One person I know went through 3 iPhones in a year due to this :(
        zimpenfish 5y ago
retskrad 5y ago
I just read the Apple earnings and they reported a 50% year-over-year jump in iPhone sales. That’s absolutely bonkers. I like Apple and their products. I own an iPad, MacBook, iPhone and AirPods but I don’t understand why so many regular people who aren’t this deep in the Apple ecosystem buy iPhones in such large quantities in 2021. Go to a carrier store and these are so many modern looking Android devices that rival the iPhone 12. How are Apple still selling so many iPhones when the competition has caught up dramatically?
- matchbok 5y ago
  Have you used an Android phone lately? There's just no comparison.
  - hugey010 5y ago
    Yes, iOS and Android developer here. Switched my daily driver from iPhone to a Pixel 3a. Difference is negligible in everything except for cost.
    - alexeldeib 5y ago
      I’ve switched back and forth several times. Nexus, Pixel, OnePlus, Galaxy, multiple generations for all but OnePlus. iPhones 3G and later (on the latest generation). The polish of the experience on iOS still beats android for me, although the last time I tried a pixel I think it was the closest it’s ever been. Google has some cool tricks, but apples integration with the rest of their ecosystem pushes it over the edge for me, and I do have other Google products like home/nest WiFi.
      - ojbyrne 5y ago
        Similar. I mostly got tired of switching back and forth.
  - TheFreim 5y ago
    I haven't use an apple product since 2015/2016. I switched to android (some junky Chinese phone) because of price, was a downgrade. Now I recently updated to a newer and nicer android device and the whole experience is much nicer than my old Apple product was. What has changed to make there be "no comparison" in your mind? I'm interested.
isamuel 5y ago
The article argues that Apple is "antifragile" > thanks to a diverse mix of strong products. That is not quite correct. That is robustness: it means the company can endure stressors in a variety of ways. (Other commenters have pointed this out, and I agree with them.) But the article does hint at a real argument for antifragility: cash. Apple's cash position, plus their diverse mix of revenue categories, means that in bad times they will be relatively advantaged over competitors. For example, the company spends $40 billion per quarter or so on advance purchases from chip suppliers---meaning that, when supply shocks happen, they will be better off, because they will continue to have what they need but competitors suddenly will not. What allows them to do that? Money. A giant pile of money. That money contributes to robustness, yes, but when sector- or global-scale stressors occur, it will mean that they can actually improve their competitive position. I can think of counterarguments, but I think that's the strongest case.
- cronix 5y ago
  For the sake of argument, let's just say that tomorrow Taiwan is suddenly taken over by another country and TSMC is no longer an option. Everything flowing from Taiwan just stops, despite agreements or money spent. That becomes null and void. I'm not sure what good cash on hand will do them within x years of that event happening, should it. It seems Apple is putting more and more of their eggs in TSMC's basket and it seems TSMC is the only company who can get Apple where it wants/needs to be. At least currently. From what I can tell Apple is totally coupled and reliant on TSMC at this point. Only a few of the upper end product lines are still using Intel processors and you know they'll soon be gone, but they are a very small part of Apples total market share by revenue at this point anyway.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    > I'm not sure what good cash on hand will do them within x years of that event happening Extradite key people from Taiwan? Buy up ASML's inventory and next N months' production at an exorbitant premium? Or, just weather the storm. Apple would be hit. But so would everyone else. I'd wager that hit could take out some of their competition.
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InternetPerson 5y ago
The best part about these kinds of stories is that we all get to share our feelings about Apple! Tell us why you prefer iOS or Android -- I can't wait to find out!!
- jsjohnst 5y ago
  > I can't wait to find out! I know, right!? It’s not like we haven’t heard the same opinions 1,000x before on each and every single previous Apple article.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Then why would you possibly bother reading the comments? Just to troll and say lololol stupid platform wars!
    - jsjohnst 5y ago
      Because of the same reason I read the comments in any HN thread. Often times you will find additional links or insights that are more useful than the source article itself. That's the awesome thing about HN to me. The problem with anything Apple related is that you have to sift through a ton of heavily regurgitated "religious" beliefs to find that nugget of useful knowledge in the comments.
robertwt7 5y ago
I think apple has growing to be more reliable and seamless since Tim Cook took over? Although many complaints that apple has less innovation compared to the Steve's era, however the ecosystem that Tim has built between apple's product has been awesome. You can just feel it when you use your mac, apple watch, iphone, airpods. It ONLY happens between apple products though. Then when I go back to my windows PC and try to use apple music, or even try to transfer videos / photos, I started cursing apple again.
- bussierem 5y ago
  As someone who owns an iPad, airpods, and a MBP (just to state some non-apple-hater credentials) I was just commenting yesterday to someone that despite owning all 3 of these products I have no way to plug in either of the first two into the third one. I have zero cords that connect them because of decisions that have been made about them. And despite them being on the same "ecosystem" I have never needed any kind of syncing or wireless connection between my iPad and my MBP. I wish Apple would focus more on strengthening the quality of their PRODUCTS rather than their "ecosystem".
  - Tagbert 5y ago
    Unclear why you would connect these devices via a cord. The AirPods are inherently wireless but do easily switch between the iPad and the MBP. You could connect the iPad to the MBP using either a lightning cable or USB-C depending on which iPad you have but I don’t see what benefit that would give you though you could use that to charge the iPad. The products seem to work fine.
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - etaioinshrdlu 5y ago
    Those devices actually do have the capability of connecting to each other.
  - Tsiklon 5y ago
    I’m doing a distance learning course with my local university and recently availed of the student discount to buy a new iPad Pro, and it came with a pair of AirPods Pro. The iPad Pro came with a USB-C cable, the AirPods a Lightning to USB-C cable, and all macs since 2016 have usb-c/thunderbolt ports. This was a valid critique a couple of years ago, but not now.
ojbyrne 5y ago
I had trouble getting past: "Imagine a heavy, cast-iron kettlebell. If you put it on top of a paper cup, it crushes the cup. Put it on top of a concrete block and the concrete block supports it just fine. But if you lift that kettlebell repeatedly (with good form), you will get stronger. The paper cup is fragile, the concrete block is robust, and your body is antifragile (even if it doesn’t always feel that way)." If you put (for some value of "put" - i.e. drop from 6 inches) a kettlebell on the human head, you will discover that the human body isn't all that antifragile. Honestly the word I think the author is looking for is "diversified."
- tacitusarc 5y ago
  Taleb would call that “ruin risk”. Even in anti-fragile systems, if the stressor overburdens the system, you create ruin.
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Animats 5y ago
One could have made many of the same claims for General Motors or General Electric at various times.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  yes, and those companies were big and dominant for long periods of time and endured lots of problems before starting to get really hurt. Antifragility or robustness is not the same as impervious and immortal.
dumindaxsb 5y ago
Yes, the indicators are very strong. However, we thought similarly about Nokia, Intel, SpaceX competitors, etc.
hsn915 5y ago
That is not at all what antifragile is. To be antifragile you need to always have top talent and have them work on deep projects and produce top notch products. Apple had that with Steve Jobs. I don't think it has that now. I haven't seen anything really interesting from Apple after Steve Jobs passed away. Their macbook offerings keep getting worse: the touch bar is a UX disaster. The desktop keeps getting slower. The UI keeps getting flatter and worse. Apple used to be a market leader: they would release a new product every few years and everyone would soon follow suit: iPhone, iPad. Now Apple is just trying to mimick other companies: producing various sizes and version of iPhone and iPad. Having a strong supply chain is not antifragile.
- fmax30 5y ago
  Why do you think that the M1 chip isn't interesting enough? Other than that, their apple watches also have some very novel technologies. Also, their newer iPads with the M1 chip are processing power houses.
  - hsn915 5y ago
    M1 chip is not a product. It's a component in a product. It doesn't really do that much for the end user. Software runs faster now but in a few years everything will become slower again, as always happens.
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      No, the M1 is not a product. A Macbook with an M1 chip is, though, and a Macbook with an M1 chip is an amazing product, right now. Nothing else gets close.
      - stjohnswarts 5y ago
        It really is, it's so buttery smooth and the battery life and how quiet it is is quite slick. I don't own one but I did borrow one from a friend for a day trip and it was really nice. Not nice enough for me to not wait until I run my current battery hog linux daily driver into the ground but it was really nice and did a decent job compiling my rust projects.
plorntus 5y ago
> Have you tried to buy a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series X? Good luck, they’re still hard to get. No one can produce enough chips. The same goes for automobiles. Automakers have had to choose between producing cars with fewer features or not making them at all. > Apple hasn’t had this problem. You can walk into an Apple store right now and pick up an iPhone 12 or an M1-based Mac. I feel like this is only true right now because Apple already had this problem last year. I recall trying every store around me to get an iPad Pro, they were always out of stock with no indicator when they will get them. It was only possible to get one a month before the new one came out.
- sneak 5y ago
  Apple currently seems to be bottlenecked on staff; you can't simply walk in to a store and immediately buy an iPhone right now either, you have to make an appointment in advance. (I tried twice in the last 30 days and failed both times.)
  - nojito 5y ago
    They don’t want you buying things from the store. They have been pushing people to buy and pickup for the past few years.
    - novok 5y ago
      So bottlenecked on purpose :p
  - ThePowerOfFuet 5y ago
    If you're shopping for an iPhone, why not simply buy one online instead of going into a store where you know an appointment is required?
    - sneak 5y ago
      You can't buy online with cash, or with any method not linked to strong identity in the USA thanks to BSA and PATRIOT. Any method other than cash (with a mask - Apple stores use face recognition cameras) links your phone serial number to the payment card forever.
quelsolaar 5y ago
Apple has fought so hard to not be fragile by trying to control its own destiny. Dont depend on Microsoft for a browser or office, dont depend on Intel, or before that Motorola for CPUs, and so on. The problem now is that they do everything so, now they have to be best at everything. If you want to run graphics or ML on the Mac, you have to use Apple hardware and APIS, you cant use nVidia hardware or a lot of industry standard APIs, so apple is at a disadvantage. If you want to develop on Mac, you have to use Xcode, you cant use any other tools. So Apple is at a disadvantage. Try connecting a variable refresh rate screen to a mac, or a VR headset, or Thundebolt device, or just a USB device in to one of their mobile devices. Try playing the latest hot AAA game everyone is talking about. Try installing a better voice assistant, store, browser or music player and you will find that Apple has made it hard or impossible. Everything that Apple itself isn't heavily invested in and market leader at sucks. Apple isn't leveraging the industry to its advantage. Apple is fine now, because its great at a few things and good enough at the rest of the things it needs to find a large market. How long can a company not fail at one of so many things?
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  Nvidia wants you to use CUDA instead of OpenCL..
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Thankfully, otherwise we would be stuck with compiling C on the fly without any kind of debugging experience other than GPU printfs.
- adventured 5y ago
  > Apple isn't leveraging the industry to its advantage. Apple is the industry. When you're the industry, you don't leverage it, everybody else attempts to leverage you. If for some reason they find themselves needing to eg switch back to CPUs supplied by someone else because they can no longer be great at that - given their scale, Intel or AMD (or whomever) will get on their knees and crawl begging for the business. None of what you're claiming are disadvantages are actual disadvantages unless they lose the iPhone's position. Unless that happens, they are the industry, they are the (increasingly) dominant ecosystem, the advantage is theirs to press. They're winning.
nudpiedo 5y ago
As other people is saying, the arguments from the article point Apple to be robust, not antifragile. As it still has many single points of failure in its design the whole thing may still break by a hardware bug, or the lack of software or whatever. In order to be antifragile it should become stronger after each stressor is applied, but we can only see it becoming stronger by the stressors over the competitors not onto itself. Still apples strategy is very good, but not as antifragile as something like a Linux OS which by not having hardware and being crossplatform may still grow market and show strength from such lack of hardware vendors.
throwaway4good 5y ago
Anti-fragile is not the correct word here. One big danger for Apple is a further escalation of the US-China tech war. If China starts retaliating for the US sanctions against Huawei, Xiaomi etc by going after big US companies then Apple can be seriously hurt, even though they are probably not first in line.
cromwellian 5y ago
They are still coupled to manufacturing in China. If you look at the capricious nature of CCP regulation just in the past year, with Didi, Ant, Ed Tech, etc or even the government news apparatus sicking mobs on to Tesla triggering a decline in Tesla sales over what looks to be a staged protest over brakes, it is not good situation to be in. TSMC is building tons of a fabs, including two in Arizona right now, so they will have some protection from the CCP starting an invasion, but such a conflict would undoubtedly draw the US into it, if only by proxy, and set off a major split in diplomatic/economic relations, which would threaten pretty much any US company with significant manufacturing base in China. Tim Cook should be looking to shift more production to India, Southeast Asia, Brazil, etc. That way, he doesn't have to engage in major acting performances at Chinese conferences, like saying that Apple shares China's vision of an "open" internet.
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v_london 5y ago
The main point of fragility I see with Apple that their profits mostly come from a relatively small group of people who live on the Apple ecosystem. Apple may have many product lines, but these products and services are mostly sold to the same group of people. If quality starts to degrade across the product line, or another company releases a killer product that's incompatible with the iWares, it's not inconceivable that Apple would start losing their loyal customers, thus lowering sales in all categories. I don't see this happening in the near future since arguably Apple has never made better products than today, but you must understand that most of Apple's growth prospects come from them selling more wares to their existing customers than from Apple winning over new customers. In fact, I recently changed to an iPhone from Android, and the change was quite painful. The Apple store even called me back after sending out the order, wondering if me buying an iPhone as a new customer was a mistake (seems like that doesn't happen very often).
nathias 5y ago
All dominant market share companies are antifragile, all rich people are antifragile, each economic crisis makes the rich richer and most of the poor poorer.
max_ 5y ago
This is a big misunderstanding of Nassim Taleb's "Antifragile" heuristic. "Blue chip" corporations like Apple fall more into the "Turkey Problem" i.e people expecting the big, to continue being big.
klelatti 5y ago
Hmmm. Apple may have benefited from lockdown - people working from home and so using and consuming more on their devices but I think that's a fairly weak case for being Antifragile. By that measure Google, MS, FB, Zoom etc are all Antifragile. To be truly Antifragile a firm has to be able to benefit from a whole range of stressors. I actually think FB may be the most Antifragile of the big tech firms. They have been stressed in a number of key ways already (eg shift to mobile, Google+) and seem to come out stronger.
ksec 5y ago
>Analyst Ben Bajarin said it’s due to Apple locking in its chip supply. ( Takes a Deep Breath ) Why is it Chip supply again? Why is it TSMC again? This is very very tiring. No wonder why people stop reading any sort of media once they are pass certain age. How about locking in all component supply? From OLED, NAND, DRAM, Modem to everything else down to speaker piece. The 26% YoY increase is exactly inlined with the current projection of 90M new iPhone in 2021. X: But these are just rumours, we dont know for a fact....... Look, You dont move 90 Million of leading edge / high quality / high premium components within a single quarter without pretty much anyone in the supply chains knows what you are doing. I mean, you dont even need to be inside the supply chain or connection with supply chain. Even if you work or have connection with logistics like DHL. Moving 90M smartphone without a short period of time is no small feat. And the whole Antifragile thesis is based on Apple making record quarter, or specifically making Record quarter under supposedly market stress. This analysis is about as bad as the Apple is doomed narrative for the past ten years or Apple is doomed in 2019 because of a drip in sales in Greater China. [1] And it is the same thing happening again. Greater China manage to pull in huge increase of iPhone sales YoY. And it is now Antifragile? Not to mention that remote learning and Staying at Home drove sales of iPad and Mac to new height along with M1. Services Revenue because more people are staying at home with digital spending. ( Look at the Disney+ numbers ). 5G is driving Smartphone sales, whether you like it or not. But most ( if not all ) tech forums are still in 5G denial. I see Apple as a Robust company. But Anti-fragility was not a results of Apple's doing within the pandemic period. It was preparation of product line and services that just happen to hit home during it. This Anti Apple is Doomed thesis has now turned into Apple is Booned. ( Sorry People I know Boon is not a verb, cant think of a better word though. ) [1] Which is the single biggest problem with Analysing truly Global multinational companies. None of those analyst understand a single thing about China. Zero. And yet China is representing 26% of Apple's total revenue.
nikkinana 5y ago
Timmy Cook is fragile
JohnHaugeland 5y ago
The author of this post does not appear to have actually read the book "antifragile," and seems to think it just means "company that has reduced its weak spots." Nothing in this post has anything to do with anti-fragility. This author also doesn't seem to understand basic economics. They seem to be confusing that PS5 is unavailable and Mac isn't as an issue of Apple doing better with supply, when the actual issue is that there's far more demand for the PlayStation. This is not a person to learn from.
njoubert 5y ago
There’s a pandemic that forced everyone inside and remote. Computer companies does great. End of story.
zeckalpha 5y ago
Isn’t it still Q3? Are these forecasted numbers or are they Q2 numbers reported in Q3?

184 points by alwillis 5y ago

As is common, the article uses "antifragile" to mean "robust", despite claiming not to. > it’s antifragile thanks to a diverse mix of strong products.

zackkrida 5y ago
exactly. if anti-fragility is only achieved through robustness, what is the point of the distinction?
- chongli 5y ago
  The point of the distinction is to signal oneself as a fan of Taleb.
1123581321 5y ago
Just quoting that line is confusing. The thesis in those paragraphs is that COVID benefitted major lines of their business more than it hurt others and that was due to characteristics of the supply chain. I agree anti-fragile is often misused but the author takes care to define robustness first and contrasts his antifragility thesis to the robustness of the overall sound business. That said, I would look at other companies for examples of “true antifragility” although it’s interesting to try to analyze how a top global company can still raise the limit of its performance in situations that hurt its competitors.
- harry8 5y ago
  The external shocks to a process benefit the process and make it stronger. Eg your immune system gets stronger by exposed to some amount of bugs that it needs to fight, despite your getting sick while it's fighting them. The distinction is whether it's "This is fine, we did ok through this" which is robust vs "This is something where we are now in a stronger position from being knocked about a bit." A well made double brick wall may be robust and survive the cyclone looking good but is not anti-fragile.
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    Yes, I understand. I think they were trying hard to make that distinction in the article with the long section about robustness and the long section about antifragility, as well as the definitions up front that match yours.
    - harry8 5y ago
      I may have hit reply on the wrong comment there. Sorry.
snowwrestler 5y ago
Because the concept of antifragile is nonsense. People don’t get stronger by lifting kettle bells, they get stronger from the rest and nutrition they take after lifting kettle bells. If you put the human body under constant stress, it just breaks down—like anything else under constant stress. Apple showed excellent robustness under the stress from the impact of COVID. It did so via strong capital reserves and diverse lines of business. Which is great, but it’s bog-standard corporate strategy. Very hard to execute well, though.

smoldesu 5y ago

Apple isn't "antifragile", they're just monstrously big. Since they have an iron grip on their supply chain, it makes sense that they'd benefit right now while their competitors struggle.

dralley 5y ago
Having 200 billion dollars in liquid cash sitting in the bank helps too.
- orangepanda 5y ago
  And 100 billion in debt helps less
  - dralley 5y ago
    100 billion dollars in cash is more than the entire market cap of many of the companies they're competing against. And that's assuming those competitors have no debt, which is false.

aninteger 5y ago

Their devices are still fragile though.

abc_lisper 5y ago
Please explain. Apple devices last longer than any Android device, or for that matter 95% of all electronics sold
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  They build glass phones with glass on both sides. Glass. You know that super durable material that is broken by kids with baseballs and breaks easy when dropped? iPhones get more updates sure. More durable? No. I'm pretty sure a Samsung Active can withstand more abuse. I'm pretty confident that my plastic backed with only a glass screen average Android phone could too.
  - edmundsauto 5y ago
    I’m not a person who is gentle with their tech - it’s a tool, not a fetish - and in 14 years of owning an iPhone, I have only broken the glass once. This is tough stuff - it’s not like it’s the single pane my dad installed in the garage door that I promptly broke by looking sideways at it. Yes, it could be sturdier. But that would require other trade offs. Just because you don’t value those decisions doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong. It just means your values were not the primary use case. Diversity is good because people value different sets of trade offs!
    - simfree 5y ago
      You must not have kids that demand to play with games on your phone then. I have witnessed many iPhones get smashed when said kids drop the phone (almost always by accident). One person I know went through 3 iPhones in a year due to this :(
      - zimpenfish 5y ago

retskrad 5y ago

I just read the Apple earnings and they reported a 50% year-over-year jump in iPhone sales. That’s absolutely bonkers. I like Apple and their products. I own an iPad, MacBook, iPhone and AirPods but I don’t understand why so many regular people who aren’t this deep in the Apple ecosystem buy iPhones in such large quantities in 2021. Go to a carrier store and these are so many modern looking Android devices that rival the iPhone 12. How are Apple still selling so many iPhones when the competition has caught up dramatically?

matchbok 5y ago
Have you used an Android phone lately? There's just no comparison.
- hugey010 5y ago
  Yes, iOS and Android developer here. Switched my daily driver from iPhone to a Pixel 3a. Difference is negligible in everything except for cost.
  - alexeldeib 5y ago
    I’ve switched back and forth several times. Nexus, Pixel, OnePlus, Galaxy, multiple generations for all but OnePlus. iPhones 3G and later (on the latest generation). The polish of the experience on iOS still beats android for me, although the last time I tried a pixel I think it was the closest it’s ever been. Google has some cool tricks, but apples integration with the rest of their ecosystem pushes it over the edge for me, and I do have other Google products like home/nest WiFi.
    - ojbyrne 5y ago
      Similar. I mostly got tired of switching back and forth.
- TheFreim 5y ago
  I haven't use an apple product since 2015/2016. I switched to android (some junky Chinese phone) because of price, was a downgrade. Now I recently updated to a newer and nicer android device and the whole experience is much nicer than my old Apple product was. What has changed to make there be "no comparison" in your mind? I'm interested.

isamuel 5y ago

The article argues that Apple is "antifragile" > thanks to a diverse mix of strong products. That is not quite correct. That is robustness: it means the company can endure stressors in a variety of ways. (Other commenters have pointed this out, and I agree with them.) But the article does hint at a real argument for antifragility: cash. Apple's cash position, plus their diverse mix of revenue categories, means that in bad times they will be relatively advantaged over competitors. For example, the company spends $40 billion per quarter or so on advance purchases from chip suppliers---meaning that, when supply shocks happen, they will be better off, because they will continue to have what they need but competitors suddenly will not. What allows them to do that? Money. A giant pile of money. That money contributes to robustness, yes, but when sector- or global-scale stressors occur, it will mean that they can actually improve their competitive position. I can think of counterarguments, but I think that's the strongest case.

cronix 5y ago
For the sake of argument, let's just say that tomorrow Taiwan is suddenly taken over by another country and TSMC is no longer an option. Everything flowing from Taiwan just stops, despite agreements or money spent. That becomes null and void. I'm not sure what good cash on hand will do them within x years of that event happening, should it. It seems Apple is putting more and more of their eggs in TSMC's basket and it seems TSMC is the only company who can get Apple where it wants/needs to be. At least currently. From what I can tell Apple is totally coupled and reliant on TSMC at this point. Only a few of the upper end product lines are still using Intel processors and you know they'll soon be gone, but they are a very small part of Apples total market share by revenue at this point anyway.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > I'm not sure what good cash on hand will do them within x years of that event happening Extradite key people from Taiwan? Buy up ASML's inventory and next N months' production at an exorbitant premium? Or, just weather the storm. Apple would be hit. But so would everyone else. I'd wager that hit could take out some of their competition.

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InternetPerson 5y ago

The best part about these kinds of stories is that we all get to share our feelings about Apple! Tell us why you prefer iOS or Android -- I can't wait to find out!!

jsjohnst 5y ago
> I can't wait to find out! I know, right!? It’s not like we haven’t heard the same opinions 1,000x before on each and every single previous Apple article.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Then why would you possibly bother reading the comments? Just to troll and say lololol stupid platform wars!
  - jsjohnst 5y ago
    Because of the same reason I read the comments in any HN thread. Often times you will find additional links or insights that are more useful than the source article itself. That's the awesome thing about HN to me. The problem with anything Apple related is that you have to sift through a ton of heavily regurgitated "religious" beliefs to find that nugget of useful knowledge in the comments.

robertwt7 5y ago

I think apple has growing to be more reliable and seamless since Tim Cook took over? Although many complaints that apple has less innovation compared to the Steve's era, however the ecosystem that Tim has built between apple's product has been awesome. You can just feel it when you use your mac, apple watch, iphone, airpods. It ONLY happens between apple products though. Then when I go back to my windows PC and try to use apple music, or even try to transfer videos / photos, I started cursing apple again.

bussierem 5y ago
As someone who owns an iPad, airpods, and a MBP (just to state some non-apple-hater credentials) I was just commenting yesterday to someone that despite owning all 3 of these products I have no way to plug in either of the first two into the third one. I have zero cords that connect them because of decisions that have been made about them. And despite them being on the same "ecosystem" I have never needed any kind of syncing or wireless connection between my iPad and my MBP. I wish Apple would focus more on strengthening the quality of their PRODUCTS rather than their "ecosystem".
- Tagbert 5y ago
  Unclear why you would connect these devices via a cord. The AirPods are inherently wireless but do easily switch between the iPad and the MBP. You could connect the iPad to the MBP using either a lightning cable or USB-C depending on which iPad you have but I don’t see what benefit that would give you though you could use that to charge the iPad. The products seem to work fine.
- deleted 5y ago
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- etaioinshrdlu 5y ago
  Those devices actually do have the capability of connecting to each other.
- Tsiklon 5y ago
  I’m doing a distance learning course with my local university and recently availed of the student discount to buy a new iPad Pro, and it came with a pair of AirPods Pro. The iPad Pro came with a USB-C cable, the AirPods a Lightning to USB-C cable, and all macs since 2016 have usb-c/thunderbolt ports. This was a valid critique a couple of years ago, but not now.

ojbyrne 5y ago

I had trouble getting past: "Imagine a heavy, cast-iron kettlebell. If you put it on top of a paper cup, it crushes the cup. Put it on top of a concrete block and the concrete block supports it just fine. But if you lift that kettlebell repeatedly (with good form), you will get stronger. The paper cup is fragile, the concrete block is robust, and your body is antifragile (even if it doesn’t always feel that way)." If you put (for some value of "put" - i.e. drop from 6 inches) a kettlebell on the human head, you will discover that the human body isn't all that antifragile. Honestly the word I think the author is looking for is "diversified."

tacitusarc 5y ago
Taleb would call that “ruin risk”. Even in anti-fragile systems, if the stressor overburdens the system, you create ruin.

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Animats 5y ago

One could have made many of the same claims for General Motors or General Electric at various times.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
yes, and those companies were big and dominant for long periods of time and endured lots of problems before starting to get really hurt. Antifragility or robustness is not the same as impervious and immortal.

dumindaxsb 5y ago

Yes, the indicators are very strong. However, we thought similarly about Nokia, Intel, SpaceX competitors, etc.

hsn915 5y ago

That is not at all what antifragile is. To be antifragile you need to always have top talent and have them work on deep projects and produce top notch products. Apple had that with Steve Jobs. I don't think it has that now. I haven't seen anything really interesting from Apple after Steve Jobs passed away. Their macbook offerings keep getting worse: the touch bar is a UX disaster. The desktop keeps getting slower. The UI keeps getting flatter and worse. Apple used to be a market leader: they would release a new product every few years and everyone would soon follow suit: iPhone, iPad. Now Apple is just trying to mimick other companies: producing various sizes and version of iPhone and iPad. Having a strong supply chain is not antifragile.

fmax30 5y ago
Why do you think that the M1 chip isn't interesting enough? Other than that, their apple watches also have some very novel technologies. Also, their newer iPads with the M1 chip are processing power houses.
- hsn915 5y ago
  M1 chip is not a product. It's a component in a product. It doesn't really do that much for the end user. Software runs faster now but in a few years everything will become slower again, as always happens.
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    No, the M1 is not a product. A Macbook with an M1 chip is, though, and a Macbook with an M1 chip is an amazing product, right now. Nothing else gets close.
    - stjohnswarts 5y ago
      It really is, it's so buttery smooth and the battery life and how quiet it is is quite slick. I don't own one but I did borrow one from a friend for a day trip and it was really nice. Not nice enough for me to not wait until I run my current battery hog linux daily driver into the ground but it was really nice and did a decent job compiling my rust projects.

plorntus 5y ago

> Have you tried to buy a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series X? Good luck, they’re still hard to get. No one can produce enough chips. The same goes for automobiles. Automakers have had to choose between producing cars with fewer features or not making them at all. > Apple hasn’t had this problem. You can walk into an Apple store right now and pick up an iPhone 12 or an M1-based Mac. I feel like this is only true right now because Apple already had this problem last year. I recall trying every store around me to get an iPad Pro, they were always out of stock with no indicator when they will get them. It was only possible to get one a month before the new one came out.

sneak 5y ago
Apple currently seems to be bottlenecked on staff; you can't simply walk in to a store and immediately buy an iPhone right now either, you have to make an appointment in advance. (I tried twice in the last 30 days and failed both times.)
- nojito 5y ago
  They don’t want you buying things from the store. They have been pushing people to buy and pickup for the past few years.
  - novok 5y ago
    So bottlenecked on purpose :p
- ThePowerOfFuet 5y ago
  If you're shopping for an iPhone, why not simply buy one online instead of going into a store where you know an appointment is required?
  - sneak 5y ago
    You can't buy online with cash, or with any method not linked to strong identity in the USA thanks to BSA and PATRIOT. Any method other than cash (with a mask - Apple stores use face recognition cameras) links your phone serial number to the payment card forever.

quelsolaar 5y ago

Apple has fought so hard to not be fragile by trying to control its own destiny. Dont depend on Microsoft for a browser or office, dont depend on Intel, or before that Motorola for CPUs, and so on. The problem now is that they do everything so, now they have to be best at everything. If you want to run graphics or ML on the Mac, you have to use Apple hardware and APIS, you cant use nVidia hardware or a lot of industry standard APIs, so apple is at a disadvantage. If you want to develop on Mac, you have to use Xcode, you cant use any other tools. So Apple is at a disadvantage. Try connecting a variable refresh rate screen to a mac, or a VR headset, or Thundebolt device, or just a USB device in to one of their mobile devices. Try playing the latest hot AAA game everyone is talking about. Try installing a better voice assistant, store, browser or music player and you will find that Apple has made it hard or impossible. Everything that Apple itself isn't heavily invested in and market leader at sucks. Apple isn't leveraging the industry to its advantage. Apple is fine now, because its great at a few things and good enough at the rest of the things it needs to find a large market. How long can a company not fail at one of so many things?

jbverschoor 5y ago
Nvidia wants you to use CUDA instead of OpenCL..
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Thankfully, otherwise we would be stuck with compiling C on the fly without any kind of debugging experience other than GPU printfs.
adventured 5y ago
> Apple isn't leveraging the industry to its advantage. Apple is the industry. When you're the industry, you don't leverage it, everybody else attempts to leverage you. If for some reason they find themselves needing to eg switch back to CPUs supplied by someone else because they can no longer be great at that - given their scale, Intel or AMD (or whomever) will get on their knees and crawl begging for the business. None of what you're claiming are disadvantages are actual disadvantages unless they lose the iPhone's position. Unless that happens, they are the industry, they are the (increasingly) dominant ecosystem, the advantage is theirs to press. They're winning.

nudpiedo 5y ago

As other people is saying, the arguments from the article point Apple to be robust, not antifragile. As it still has many single points of failure in its design the whole thing may still break by a hardware bug, or the lack of software or whatever. In order to be antifragile it should become stronger after each stressor is applied, but we can only see it becoming stronger by the stressors over the competitors not onto itself. Still apples strategy is very good, but not as antifragile as something like a Linux OS which by not having hardware and being crossplatform may still grow market and show strength from such lack of hardware vendors.

throwaway4good 5y ago

Anti-fragile is not the correct word here. One big danger for Apple is a further escalation of the US-China tech war. If China starts retaliating for the US sanctions against Huawei, Xiaomi etc by going after big US companies then Apple can be seriously hurt, even though they are probably not first in line.

cromwellian 5y ago

They are still coupled to manufacturing in China. If you look at the capricious nature of CCP regulation just in the past year, with Didi, Ant, Ed Tech, etc or even the government news apparatus sicking mobs on to Tesla triggering a decline in Tesla sales over what looks to be a staged protest over brakes, it is not good situation to be in. TSMC is building tons of a fabs, including two in Arizona right now, so they will have some protection from the CCP starting an invasion, but such a conflict would undoubtedly draw the US into it, if only by proxy, and set off a major split in diplomatic/economic relations, which would threaten pretty much any US company with significant manufacturing base in China. Tim Cook should be looking to shift more production to India, Southeast Asia, Brazil, etc. That way, he doesn't have to engage in major acting performances at Chinese conferences, like saying that Apple shares China's vision of an "open" internet.

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v_london 5y ago

The main point of fragility I see with Apple that their profits mostly come from a relatively small group of people who live on the Apple ecosystem. Apple may have many product lines, but these products and services are mostly sold to the same group of people. If quality starts to degrade across the product line, or another company releases a killer product that's incompatible with the iWares, it's not inconceivable that Apple would start losing their loyal customers, thus lowering sales in all categories. I don't see this happening in the near future since arguably Apple has never made better products than today, but you must understand that most of Apple's growth prospects come from them selling more wares to their existing customers than from Apple winning over new customers. In fact, I recently changed to an iPhone from Android, and the change was quite painful. The Apple store even called me back after sending out the order, wondering if me buying an iPhone as a new customer was a mistake (seems like that doesn't happen very often).

nathias 5y ago

All dominant market share companies are antifragile, all rich people are antifragile, each economic crisis makes the rich richer and most of the poor poorer.

max_ 5y ago

This is a big misunderstanding of Nassim Taleb's "Antifragile" heuristic. "Blue chip" corporations like Apple fall more into the "Turkey Problem" i.e people expecting the big, to continue being big.

klelatti 5y ago

Hmmm. Apple may have benefited from lockdown - people working from home and so using and consuming more on their devices but I think that's a fairly weak case for being Antifragile. By that measure Google, MS, FB, Zoom etc are all Antifragile. To be truly Antifragile a firm has to be able to benefit from a whole range of stressors. I actually think FB may be the most Antifragile of the big tech firms. They have been stressed in a number of key ways already (eg shift to mobile, Google+) and seem to come out stronger.

ksec 5y ago

>Analyst Ben Bajarin said it’s due to Apple locking in its chip supply. ( Takes a Deep Breath ) Why is it Chip supply again? Why is it TSMC again? This is very very tiring. No wonder why people stop reading any sort of media once they are pass certain age. How about locking in all component supply? From OLED, NAND, DRAM, Modem to everything else down to speaker piece. The 26% YoY increase is exactly inlined with the current projection of 90M new iPhone in 2021. X: But these are just rumours, we dont know for a fact....... Look, You dont move 90 Million of leading edge / high quality / high premium components within a single quarter without pretty much anyone in the supply chains knows what you are doing. I mean, you dont even need to be inside the supply chain or connection with supply chain. Even if you work or have connection with logistics like DHL. Moving 90M smartphone without a short period of time is no small feat. And the whole Antifragile thesis is based on Apple making record quarter, or specifically making Record quarter under supposedly market stress. This analysis is about as bad as the Apple is doomed narrative for the past ten years or Apple is doomed in 2019 because of a drip in sales in Greater China. [1] And it is the same thing happening again. Greater China manage to pull in huge increase of iPhone sales YoY. And it is now Antifragile? Not to mention that remote learning and Staying at Home drove sales of iPad and Mac to new height along with M1. Services Revenue because more people are staying at home with digital spending. ( Look at the Disney+ numbers ). 5G is driving Smartphone sales, whether you like it or not. But most ( if not all ) tech forums are still in 5G denial. I see Apple as a Robust company. But Anti-fragility was not a results of Apple's doing within the pandemic period. It was preparation of product line and services that just happen to hit home during it. This Anti Apple is Doomed thesis has now turned into Apple is Booned. ( Sorry People I know Boon is not a verb, cant think of a better word though. ) [1] Which is the single biggest problem with Analysing truly Global multinational companies. None of those analyst understand a single thing about China. Zero. And yet China is representing 26% of Apple's total revenue.

nikkinana 5y ago

Timmy Cook is fragile

JohnHaugeland 5y ago

The author of this post does not appear to have actually read the book "antifragile," and seems to think it just means "company that has reduced its weak spots." Nothing in this post has anything to do with anti-fragility. This author also doesn't seem to understand basic economics. They seem to be confusing that PS5 is unavailable and Mac isn't as an issue of Apple doing better with supply, when the actual issue is that there's far more demand for the PlayStation. This is not a person to learn from.

njoubert 5y ago

There’s a pandemic that forced everyone inside and remote. Computer companies does great. End of story.

zeckalpha 5y ago

Isn’t it still Q3? Are these forecasted numbers or are they Q2 numbers reported in Q3?