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Quarter after quarter Tim Cook just mic drops these earnings. Remember all the “Apple is doomed, Tim is a bean counter” comments when Jobs handed over the reig

Quarter after quarter Tim Cook just mic drops these earnings. Remember all the “Apple is doomed, Tim is a bean counter” comments when Jobs handed over the reigns? Yea. Ok.

thewarrior 5y ago
Nobody uses Facebook anymore. Apple is doomed. Google search results are terrible. Amazon is terrible. And every cycle of quarterly results there’s surprise on HN.
chunkyguy 5y ago
Who is surprized by these numbers? Since Cook took over from Jobs earnings are the only thing they're focused on. The product quality, developer experience, user experience,.. everything that made Apple great is declining.
- thewarrior 5y ago
  And yet competitor products are still worse.
  - chunkyguy 5y ago
    I find that as the biggest difference between Jobs and Cook vision for Apple. Jobs wanted Apple to deliver the best of the technology that mankind has to offer whereas Cook wants Apple to deliver the best in the market.
    - ksec 5y ago
      Yes. I will add Steve's Apple made new product and services, and "hopes" the market will buy it. Tim's Apple look at which market has potential profits and tries to enter it. It is a product based strategy vs a market based strategy.
    - thewarrior 5y ago
      Apples moat is simply enormous. From SoC design to camera design to manufacturing to software and compiler engineering. Competitors could spend 10 years catching up. Cook simply needs to keep the machine going till he retires.
- zerkten 5y ago
  It seems they have arrested some of the decline since Jony Ive left. The newest MacBook Pro has gone back to a formula that works well with processors that blow away the competition. Things are less rosy on the software side though.
  - sharikous 5y ago
    They had an exodus of top engineers lately. I suspect the hardware gap will shrink in a few years and the software is, as you say, not rosy. The decline for pro users will continue, I think. Of course a behemoth of 2 T$ won't fail tomorrow
    - e4e78a06 5y ago
      They also poached the head architect from Arm. Now that M1/M1 Pro/Max are out I think a lot of top engineers have seen their project to completion and are moving on to new interesting things. No amount of money is going to bring them back but you can be sure they'll be back in 3-4 years if Apple has a compelling project (like say, their AR/VR headset).
- nice_byte 5y ago
  developer experience was never a strong suite of apple tbh.
- tedunangst 5y ago
  Everyone who said they only care about short term profits three, six, nine... months ago.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
What percent of revenue is from iPhone? This is what makes me nervous. They struck absolute gold with the iPhone, what happens if they don't catch the next wave?
- dwaite 5y ago
  Apple typically tries to enter an existing product category that they think they can execute better on or otherwise disrupt. Depending on your viewpoint these can be highly disruptive plays - smart phones were going no place for many demographics until the iPhone came out. Android was going to be a cheaper blackberry clone until they saw what iPhone was doing. But another view of the iPad famously was the Slashdot single-line review, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." Phones were a bit of a blind spot in the market. There should have been a lot more investment going on. Phones are expensive devices that people update often (with "often" really being a function of the demographic), where the price was disguised in many markets via carrier subsidies and cellular contracts. The carriers were often trying to figure out how to get more customers and get them to pay for more services, so charging for data tiers on top of minutes and messaging was attractive. Nokia had teams that understood this and obviously the company in general was capitalizing on how much money was going into phones, but they were highly dysfunctional in terms of massive amounts of duplicated work (e.g. little commonalities between hardware or OS on dozens of phones released every year). An example of Nokia trying to leverage cellphones to go into a new market would be the N-Gage. In terms of markets they tend to go after, VR would be the one where I might worry they missed the wave. Some of that is not knowing if VR actually has broad demographic appeal though - there are technology leaps still needed for many people to tolerate longer headset usage, and most computer applications aren't really VR as much as they are 'large virtual monitor' - you don't see N-dimensional word processing as much as games and experiences. Their money is obviously on AR having much broader appeal. There are certainly cases where market disruption attempts have failed, such as the HomeKit ecosystem. The more open (and cheaper) ecosystems that Google and Amazon have had managed to get significantly more adoption by manufacturers. For that reason they now seem to be aligning much more with and driving new industry standards instead, such as Matter. All the rumors about them investing toward a full self-driving car product is really odd, because it goes against so much of their formula for incremental evolution of product lines - seems about as likely as them releasing a television or refrigerator.

Quarter after quarter Tim Cook just mic drops these earnings. Remember all the “Apple is doomed, Tim is a bean counter” comments when Jobs handed over the reigns? Yea. Ok.

thewarrior 5y ago

Nobody uses Facebook anymore. Apple is doomed. Google search results are terrible. Amazon is terrible. And every cycle of quarterly results there’s surprise on HN.

chunkyguy 5y ago

Who is surprized by these numbers? Since Cook took over from Jobs earnings are the only thing they're focused on. The product quality, developer experience, user experience,.. everything that made Apple great is declining.

thewarrior 5y ago
And yet competitor products are still worse.
- chunkyguy 5y ago
  I find that as the biggest difference between Jobs and Cook vision for Apple. Jobs wanted Apple to deliver the best of the technology that mankind has to offer whereas Cook wants Apple to deliver the best in the market.
  - ksec 5y ago
    Yes. I will add Steve's Apple made new product and services, and "hopes" the market will buy it. Tim's Apple look at which market has potential profits and tries to enter it. It is a product based strategy vs a market based strategy.
  - thewarrior 5y ago
    Apples moat is simply enormous. From SoC design to camera design to manufacturing to software and compiler engineering. Competitors could spend 10 years catching up. Cook simply needs to keep the machine going till he retires.
zerkten 5y ago
It seems they have arrested some of the decline since Jony Ive left. The newest MacBook Pro has gone back to a formula that works well with processors that blow away the competition. Things are less rosy on the software side though.
- sharikous 5y ago
  They had an exodus of top engineers lately. I suspect the hardware gap will shrink in a few years and the software is, as you say, not rosy. The decline for pro users will continue, I think. Of course a behemoth of 2 T$ won't fail tomorrow
  - e4e78a06 5y ago
    They also poached the head architect from Arm. Now that M1/M1 Pro/Max are out I think a lot of top engineers have seen their project to completion and are moving on to new interesting things. No amount of money is going to bring them back but you can be sure they'll be back in 3-4 years if Apple has a compelling project (like say, their AR/VR headset).
nice_byte 5y ago
developer experience was never a strong suite of apple tbh.
tedunangst 5y ago
Everyone who said they only care about short term profits three, six, nine... months ago.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

What percent of revenue is from iPhone? This is what makes me nervous. They struck absolute gold with the iPhone, what happens if they don't catch the next wave?

dwaite 5y ago
Apple typically tries to enter an existing product category that they think they can execute better on or otherwise disrupt. Depending on your viewpoint these can be highly disruptive plays - smart phones were going no place for many demographics until the iPhone came out. Android was going to be a cheaper blackberry clone until they saw what iPhone was doing. But another view of the iPad famously was the Slashdot single-line review, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." Phones were a bit of a blind spot in the market. There should have been a lot more investment going on. Phones are expensive devices that people update often (with "often" really being a function of the demographic), where the price was disguised in many markets via carrier subsidies and cellular contracts. The carriers were often trying to figure out how to get more customers and get them to pay for more services, so charging for data tiers on top of minutes and messaging was attractive. Nokia had teams that understood this and obviously the company in general was capitalizing on how much money was going into phones, but they were highly dysfunctional in terms of massive amounts of duplicated work (e.g. little commonalities between hardware or OS on dozens of phones released every year). An example of Nokia trying to leverage cellphones to go into a new market would be the N-Gage. In terms of markets they tend to go after, VR would be the one where I might worry they missed the wave. Some of that is not knowing if VR actually has broad demographic appeal though - there are technology leaps still needed for many people to tolerate longer headset usage, and most computer applications aren't really VR as much as they are 'large virtual monitor' - you don't see N-dimensional word processing as much as games and experiences. Their money is obviously on AR having much broader appeal. There are certainly cases where market disruption attempts have failed, such as the HomeKit ecosystem. The more open (and cheaper) ecosystems that Google and Amazon have had managed to get significantly more adoption by manufacturers. For that reason they now seem to be aligning much more with and driving new industry standards instead, such as Matter. All the rumors about them investing toward a full self-driving car product is really odd, because it goes against so much of their formula for incremental evolution of product lines - seems about as likely as them releasing a television or refrigerator.