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Sad to see "services" as a headline on Apple's earnings beat. I'm sure it is gratifying for Tim Cook, but this is going to be the thing that brings on much hard
by tims33 4y ago
Sad to see "services" as a headline on Apple's earnings beat. I'm sure it is gratifying for Tim Cook, but this is going to be the thing that brings on much harder regulation for Apple.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoWhen you've reached all the people that are going to buy iPhones, "services" is where you still have growth. Cloud storage, music, video streaming... To be sure it is not the hardware company of the 20th Century any longer.
- BearOso 4y agoProfit can't grow forever. At some point your company is so saturated you have to wring water from stone, literally nickel-and-diming people.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sneak 4y agoThe best is when you buy a new $1400 phone and it starts panhandling you for $4.99 to upgrade your iCloud Backup storage.
- boplicity 4y agoThey're not asking for $4.99 -- from their perspective, once you sign up, you'll likely stay for years. $4.99 a month for ten years is $600. And you'll likely need to upgrade your iCloud storage at some point, because you'll run out of space, increasing your value even further. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the people paying for iCloud now will remain iCloud customers for the next 20 years, or even longer.
- skyyler 4y agoIs there nothing that can be done about this? Must profit continue to grow forever for a company to be "good"?
- Gigachad 4y agoPlenty of companies don’t have much if any growth, utilities for example. It’s just Apple is no where near the end of the line for growth and new opportunities.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoYour company transitions to dividends. And Apple (AAPL) has already begun that.
- jxramos 4y agowhat's the connection here between growth and dividends? Come to think about it it's something that's carved out in investment products huh: growth stocks, rising dividend stocks, etc. Are growth and dividend payouts semi mutually exclusive or something?
- tedunangst 4y agoA growing company reinvests profits into further growth, developing new products, building new factories, whatever. When you can no longer grow, you return profits to shareholders.
- jxramos 4y agoWow is that so, is this the case because of some fiduciary responsibility or some regulation or is it good will to those invested in the company?
- adastra22 4y agoThen you invent the next iPad. Or Watch. Or stop carrying about growth. There are plenty of well respected dividend investments, even in tech.
- gurumeditations 4y agoAR glasses aren’t ready until the 30s.
- adastra22 4y agoSomething which I will never, ever wear. Apple is about supporting healthy lifestyles, not escaping from them. I see value in an Apple version of the HoloLens, but not as a consumer device.
- signatoremo 4y agoFirst of all they haven’t stopped looking for the next next big thing. At least I hope they haven’t. More importantly, services, or really software, can be very exciting too, no less than hardware. Apple isn’t a hardware company, they’re a company that integrate hardware and software into packages that users desire. Services are just the extension of device’s software.
- ChildOfChaos 4y agoYes, but are any of Apple's services really that exciting? There all just 'me too' products levelling the ego system. Apple TV+ is an odd one for example, it's not needed, there are plenty of streaming services around and they all work fine on apple devices. They have not tried to do anything interesting or exciting with there services, they've just attached them in the most basic way and watched the cash flow in.
- wbsss4412 4y ago> all just 'me too' products levelling the ego system Apple created what was pretty much the first real platform for selling music online with iTunes. You could call Apple Music a “me too” move, but they really pivoted an existing business that had been threatened with disruption.
- dmitriid 4y ago> "services" is where you still have growth. Cloud storage, music, video streaming Too bad Apple is still so, so very bad at this. Their services are barely functioning, at best, with multiple WTFs daily. When they work, they are not even magic. They are the bare minimum of what you expect them to do (like, for example, to quickly and correctly sync photos between me and my family).
- WJW 4y agoWell, seems like it would be relatively easy to make growth happen then. Imagine if Apple properly applied itself and brought the magic from the early iPhone to its cloud services.
- BearOso 4y agoTim Cook said under oath that they don't need to differentiate themselves because they don't have to compete.
- ladyanita22 4y agoSorry to bother you, but I read this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31101384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31101384) and I was wondering myself: how did XP managed to have the transparent rounded corners? AFAIK, it doesn't use any compositing, yet the system is able to tell what should be "behind" the window to whatever that was in the transparent regions of the corners. The same thing applies (I guess) to the shadows of the right-click menus.
- ProAm 4y agoIt's rent seeking. It's what turns a $1000 phone into a $1500-2000 phone over the lifetime of a device (2.5 years)
- dymk 4y ago"Rent seeking" is a weird euphemism for "provides a service that costs money to run" Here I am, enjoying my 4 year old iPhone, happily paying Apple $3/month for iCloud storage.
- ProAm 4y agoDo somethings provide value? Yes? If I want to write an app for my own phone (and provide it to no one else) I need to pay them $100 a year. That turns my $1000 phone into a $1100 phone the first year, 10% increase. Is it providing me value? Services are rent seeking because its MRR and ARR, some worth it, some definitely not (an SD card slot would crush and kill iCloud)
- dymk 4y agoYou haven't needed to pay Apple to write your own apps and load them on your device for years now. Since iOS 9. You have to pay them if you want to put it on their app store. iCloud increasing the effective storage of the phone is about 10% of the value prop. Your point is like "dropbox is just rsync + a VPS".
- ProAm 4y agoI dont believe you get access to all features and functionality if you do not pay for the developer subscription (maybe it has changed?) but things like push notifications, third party libraries....? Regardless their services strategy is rent seeking for one of the most profitable companies on the planet. (ex: making 5+ billion selling charger bricks after not including them when you buy a phone)
- dymk 4y ago
- orev 4y agoMy main issue with services is that they’re degrading the general experience in favor of pushing them. The Music app is barely functional for listening to your own music files, and they make it very difficult to find broadcast radio streams, instead promoting “Apple Radio Stations”. Setting up a new phone prompts you incessantly about Apple Wallet, iCloud, etc. and uses badges to make you think something is wrong until you begin the process for each (the badges go away if you cancel out of it).
- tims33 4y ago100% agree. It is clearly a compromise of their user experience values in exchange for revenue on some slight above mediocre services.
- boplicity 4y agoIt's been clear for a couple of years now (to me) that Apple devices have become a sales platform for Apple services. It first started when I was constantly getting notifications that I was "running out of space" and needed to sign up for paid iCloud services. This, in fact, when I had plenty of space on my Macbook. Such things have only continued. They're adding new products and paid services at a slow but steady pace, and regularly sending me notifications to sign up for those services. When you "upgrade" the OS, you're confronted with a whole slew of opportunities to sign up for more services, with no way to just ignore these prompts. I don't blame them for doing this, but it's become increasingly grating, and turned me off of Apple in general. Like a lot of companies, they're focused on growing their bottom line, and don't see how they're angering their locked-in customers.
- turdit 4y ago“they… don't see how they're angering their locked-in customers.“ yea those apple employees are so stupid they have no idea that nagging you constantly is annoying. no of course they just don’t care about other people including their customers. although to be fair sociopathy is essentially just another form of stupidity
- 4y ago
- throwawaylinux 4y agoCan you expand on that a bit more? Genuine question, I'm illiterate in matters of high-finance. What does services as a headline signify, why would it bring on regulation (and what kind of regulation), and why is that a bad thing?
- temende 4y agoApple's services benefit hugely from being built into the OS. If you're pro-Apple you would say that's just enjoying the benefits of vertical integration, and on the other hand if you're a regulator you would say that's illegal bundling (a la Microsoft w/ IE in the late 1990s).
- Jtsummers 4y agoThe antitrust case was only partially about the bundling, the fundamental issue was MS's abuse of their monopoly position in the US market. Apple still is nowhere near that 95+% threshold that MS achieved with Windows on desktop PCs in the 90s.
- scarface_74 4y agoThe "regulators" never did anything about Microsoft's bundling IE in the 90s. The only thing they got their wrists slapped over was forcing OEMs to buy licenses for each computer shipped whether or not it ran Windows. Do you really think that regulators in 2022 would force every platform vendor to remove all of their bundled software? They didn't do that in the 90s.
- eatbitseveryday 4y agoApple intentionally shifted to a service-based company some years ago. This is just the natural culmination of that choice.