> Amazon, for instance, hired about 780,000 people during the pandemic. Meta, too, had more than doubled its staff in this period, going from about 40,000 to 87,000. Even Microsoft had hired about 77,000 people just before the pandemic.
> Apple, in comparison, is believed to have hired under 20,000 people during the period of the pandemic.
Can't layoff people you didn't hire.
Besides, if they lay anyone off, it'll be through retail (already happening in their third-party channel sales staff, who are employed by Apple but work in stores like Best Buy) and eventually retail closures when/if they can do it without being accused of more union-busting.
Cook has made several decisions in the past handful of years that seem to show an ability to resist the group think that exists among the large tech companies leadership.
No scandals, no twitter addiction, no sexual assault cases. No bullshit. All this guy does is wake up at 4, work till 10, and sleep. Cuts his own pay voluntarily. Didn’t double his headcount while revenues fell like so many. Tim Cook is such a beast. Jobs left one last blessing for Apple shareholders in his decision to elevate Cook.
Stripe, as an example, drastically slowed down hiring when the pandemic hit expecting an economic slowdown. It then turned out that so much commerce moved to online—rather than stopped—so they ramped up hiring to meet demand.
The bet that companies like Shopify and Stripe [1] made was that COVID created a “new normal”; much of the economic activity that went online would stay there. They were wrong, so there were layoffs to correct it.
In Italy whole industry verticals that were traditionally resistant to change where digitalized, kicking and screaming, from general practice to luxury wholesales
Check zoom user growth graph, something like 300% growth was common for the software supporting this transition. Not everything was positioned as good that, but the pull was there.
For Amazon, sure - warehouse workers and drivers. They built a lot of new warehouses, brought a lot of delivery in-house, etc. For the others? Maybe a bit; more remote work, general cloud growth, but yah they overhired.
The pandemic shifted business from brick and mortar stores to online, along with all the services you need for an online store (payment, logistics) and made people work from home, where they needed devices like a decent computer and webcam and services like Zoom.
Those businesses boomed during the pandemic and deflated once it was over.
of course not, it's just a bullshit excuse. Just like currently none of the faangs businesses are hurting to the point where they just have to get that couch cushion money from layoffs.
Let's be real - Apple outsources the dirty work of hiring/firing loads of workers to Foxconn. If the demand for iPhones slips, there will still be people out of a job, it will simply be factory workers in China/India who likely have far less savings to fall back on.
I don't recall whether this was ever stated explicitly, but I always had the impression that this is one of the elements of Apple's strategy that is still driven by the tribal memory of the late 1990s turmoil. Both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook were there at the time, and especially the former (who also had witnessed a 1980s bust) was determined to never be in this position again.
So as a consequence:
* Apple is hoarding cash to an extent that business analysts dislike (although Tim has reduced this to some extent)
* Teams are being run leaner than they'd like to be (not nearly as much so as in the pre-iOS times, admittedly)
* Conversely, since the company builds good reserves and not too much bloat in good times, it can and will avoid overreacting to bad times.
> not nearly as much so as in the pre-iOS times, admittedly
deserves better than a parenthetical. Zoom out, and Apple's been on a serious hiring binge for the last decade, from 72,800 employees in 2012 to 164,000 in 2022.
(Both numbers include retail; in 2012, 58% were retail, and they don't seem to break it down anymore in 2022.)
The market cap has grown by ~10x in that time and the number of products that the company makes/maintains has also increased a lot in that time (both number of products and total unit volume). Doubling the staff does not seem unreasonable given the obvious increase business.
So their staffing has increased by a factor of about 2.25 while their revenue has increased by a factor of 2.5 - doesn’t sound so much like a binge as the company steadily scaling up.
On the other hand, Facebook went from about 4,000 employees to over 70,000 in the same time period, so given how much Apple's business has grown in the last decade (when they released the iPhone 5) it seems pretty impressive that they grew only ~2x.
The pile of cash just reminds me of Carl Icahn and others. It's "fortunate" that Apple is so highly valued that a corporate raider can't purchase a controlling interest and pay out to investors.
Apple is a real company. Amazon, Twitter, even Microsoft to some extent are not.
Apple makes things. The software side works with it, but it's a hardware company. They aren't entirely dependent on conjuring up value out of thin air, they have supply chains and manufacturing and whatnot.
Even Amazon, which deals with physical objects, doesn't really make anything.
I get what you’re saying, but I think what you’re describing as the “realness” of a company is just the sustainability of its competitive advantage. Which is a good metric to understand their long term financial position and susceptibility to market changes and layoffs. Others are pointing out that yes MS and Amazon make physical things, but we all know those aren’t their core business - that’s beside the point.
Tech companies are largely “interface” providers - they simplify the interface between a human and some other thing. Twitter simplifies the interface between one human and all other humans on Twitter. Microsoft enhances the interface between one human and other humans within a company. Amazon simplifies the interface between humans and retail goods, and AWS simplifies the interface between humans and scalable compute and storage.
Apple simplifies the interface between humans and personal compute, which is the entry point to all of the above (although the relationship with Microsoft is obviously more complex than that). So Apple is just further up the tech value chain, where transient effects are softened and delayed, and where competitive advantage is less easily displaced. Twitter is really only protected by network effects. Microsoft is protected by lots of UI/UX implementation moat and strong vendor lock in. Amazon is protected by others’ ability to scale physical logistics, AWS by backend and interface development and also lock-in. Apple is protected by all of the above plus hardware engineering, and the hardware is an especially difficult one to catch up with or copy.
I believe you are undervaluing the demand for cloud, e.g. AWS and azure. Companies that "make things" use these services extensively. AWS and Azure are the quintessential shovels during the gold rush.
But even by your flawed definition of "making things" Amazon counts, because of Kuiper, Fire Devices, and Echo alone.
Maybe I am missing a point, but both Amazon and Microsoft have devices that they manufacture and distribute. While they may not be profitable at the price they are sold they provide value to customers that isn't conjured from air. Additionally they also sell access to data services, while the data may not by physical, the data centers are physical objects that are designed and built by both AWS and Microsoft.
By that logic Amazon is a vastly superior company because they make more products than Apple. Amazon makes its own hardware and products: Alexa, Kindle, Ring, etc. They have ground and air fleets. Amazon holds majority marketshare with online web services...
I don't think this 'real' sentiment is best used to describe Amazon.
I had a moment of enstartlement (note to auto-correct: I made up the word, okay?) the other day. I get a lot of vintage/retro computing videos in my YouTube feed — I realized how odd it was that Apple was one of the few (only?) 8-bit computer companies still around. And around in an impossible-to-ignore kind of way.
But only just barely missed going under back in the late 1990's.
Why does apple hoard cash instead of buy back their stock? 5 years ago they had 90 billion cash in hand. If they put that into their stock then, It would be up at least 260% by now even with the losses last year, then if they need cash they could just take a loan against the stock.
Looks like they spent a lot more than that on buybacks in the past decade:
> Since 2012, Apple has been buying back its own shares at an extraordinary rate -- Apple is known for spending more on share repurchases than similar tech giants like Meta or Alphabet. Apple's total share repurchases have totaled $274.5 billion, with just $20.4 billion in the December quarter.
> Apple spent $85.5 billion to repurchase shares in 2021, and issued $14.5 billion in dividends.
Apple's buyback program probably has no equal, it's a sight to behold which demonstrates the power of sustained share repurchases. Sure, there are the Teledyne stories, but to do it at this scale is something else.
Setting aside the fact (pointed out by several siblings) that they do buy back stock...
Why should they? Who does it benefit? Not their customers. Not their products. Not their future prospects. Not their employees, for the most part.
...Oh, the shareholders? You mean they should throw massive amounts of money—their hedge against future problems—into enriching people who are, for the most part, already vastly wealthy?
> then if they need cash they could just take a loan against the stock.
When companies buy back stock, they typically cancel it. That's why the price goes up so much of the remaining stock held by shareholders.
So they wouldn't be able to "just take a loan against the stock". It no longer existed. All they'd be able to do is to ask ask their investers for more money.
This is such a weird topic. The comparison is between companies that didn't exist 20 years ago like Meta and the 50 year old industry veteran Apple. Of course Apple didn't hire as fast, they were established. That's like saying a 20 year old college student grew more over the past decade than a 40 year old engineer. Yea, that's how life works.
What does the age of the corporations have to do with how responsibly they staff their business(es)? Also, I'd suggest that the assertion that corporations somehow all move towards responsibly managing staffing numbers warrants some supporting documentation. The article we're talking about already indicates a pretty significant example that directly contradicts what you're suggesting: Microsoft -- actually an older business than Apple, for that matter.
With age comes experience, although the variety of experiences may differ.
The "near death" variety that Apple experienced during the 90s led to a conservative fiscal culture (among the top level executives at least) compared with the rest of the tech industry.
> Also, I'd suggest that the assertion that corporations somehow all move towards responsibly managing staffing numbers warrants some supporting documentation.
Definitely. Though it might be difficult to test properly. I expect a lot of survivor bias, with companies having a reasonable long-term strategy faring significantly better in the long run (Microsoft notwithstanding, in this case).
Their business is under severe attack / pressure. From a customer, regulatory, and competition perspective. So they can’t juts coast along or juts optimize what they’ve got.
With the latest direction (metaverse), they’re hoping to pave a new future, even if it leverages their current power to bootstrap.
The answer is rather pedestrian: Apple is mostly a hardware company.
Apple isn't primarily in e-commerce, streaming or online ads and did not get as big a boost from millions of people suddenly trapped in their homes as other tech companies. Apple was never tempted to overhire, I suspect Apple had the opposite pressure during lockdowns due to its many retail workers seeing fewer customers, while Amazon's warehouses were brisk.
Apple is the only one that doesn’t seem to start up hundreds of obviously useless projects.
Google will hire thousands to work on an obviously doomed streaming service, to build a new OS, and so many other obviously bad ideas and then just fire them all later.
Vanishingly few Apple products seem to be discontinued. Usually after a long life like the iPod.
You wouldn't know about Apple's failed projects. Like other big tech companies, Apple has teams working on R&D and new products. Unlike the other big tech companies, the bar for publicly releasing a new product is extremely high at Apple, and unreleased products are kept secret.
While I respect Apple as a whole, "they didn't start up hundreds of obv useless projects" is an empty claim. Not only they sank so much money into subpar offerings like iCloud/iWork, not pay attention to some of their competitive advantages like Automator, they ran some of their once-great stuff into ground as well (Finalcut pro).
I prefer Google's method of open sourcing their work. it benefits humanity in the long term, where Apples software generally benefits Apple and is only allowed to run on their "blessed" hardware.
Thanks to Google we have patent-free codecs, an open source mobile OS, and they contribute significantly to the Linux kernel, among other projects that are "available to the public".
I can't think of a company more blatantly engaged in anti-competitive practices than Apple, but I'm glad to see all that unfairly amassed wealth benefitting even the lowest rungs of its corporate hierarchy through the unusual benefit of not being terminated at the drop of a hat. Bravo!
I've thought about this, and I agree, and I'm no lover of any of the FAANGs. It makes Apple look like they know what they're doing, whilst the others are just following others and going in and out with the tide. I think it all boils down to Tim Cook. Tim always seemed analytical and strategic in his thinking, and Apple's behaviour in this matter only serves to underscore that. As an operational guy, I think Tim is the best that any company has ever seen.
You make them sound like saints. They are not, and they have a history of being less scrupulous than some of these other companies. Here's just a small example of what they're capable of when their obsession for secrecy and control makes them flex their corporate muscle: http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/mobile/09/07/iphone.5.probe/ind...
And we didn't even talk about their sweatshops in China which has always had persistent labor-abuse issues[0], the Chinese government boosting iPhone production with child slave labor, and all the many other scandals they've been involved with.
I really have no idea how anyone would get the notion that they are any better than the rest of the pack. Perhaps their upbeat pristine presentations, live from Cupertino. They should broadcast one from their sweatshops in Shenzhen. Some of the highschool kids they pressed into 11 hour shifts to assemble their iPhones could sing the praise of Tim Cook: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/21/apple-iphone-x-reportedly-as...
> And we didn't even talk about their sweatshops in China where employees kill themselves an awful lot, the Chinese government boosting iPhone production with child slave labor, and all the many other scandals they've been involved with.
This tired argument again.
Apple has always led the industry in their auditing of their supply chain and taking proactive steps to address illegal and unethical behaviour. There will always be mistakes but it's how you deal with them that counts.
If you're going to call Foxconn a sweatshop then arguably Amazon, Tesla etc should be called them as well.
Yup its just that they have become the largest seller of status signalling veblan goods in history, in times where inequality is at its highest.
It would be nice instead, if they used their cash hoard to stop wasting time upgrading the iphone with more superficial shit. Bring prices of the phones down to 50 bucks. Put it in the hands of everyone. And kill the toxic advertising supported attention economy that has caused chaos all over the world.
Now its just another group of unimaginative optimizing corporate robots, with no actual compass heading beyond hoarding cash.
>Bring prices of the phones down to 50 bucks. Put it in the hands of everyone.
60% of Americans already have them, and are perfectly happy to spend $1300 on them every few years, even if it means not paying rent or having to starve themselves. Why would they want to bring the price down?
> Bring prices of the phones down to 50 bucks. Put it in the hands of everyone.
A $50 reduction on a $1000 price tag won’t “put it in the hands of everyone”. People who cannot afford it still won’t and it won’t change anything to people who can. $50 over the life of a device is nothing.
Besides, that’s what previous generations are for: usability is pretty much identical to the latest and greatest, and the discount is much more than $50.
> Yup its just that they have become the largest seller of status signalling veblan goods in history, in times where inequality is at its highest.
This assertion falls apart under even basic sober analysis. It may sound tautological but entire point of status signaling is that other people notice it. iPhones look very similar to the equivalents and most people aren't going to be able to tell which model or year you have without a close examination – contrast with a luxury sports car which is audibly and visibly distinct from a fair distance. If you look at what actual rich people do, you can really understand the point: there's no better phone available at any price due to how the product segment works so they buy the same phone as everyone else but they get things like high-ended designer cases because that's where there's room to demonstrate how much money you have. Tim Cook has essentially the same phone as half the people in line at your local coffee shop; that's decidedly not true of actual luxury goods.
It also has two other fundamental flaws: the first is the assertion that there's a substantial price difference when even a bit of research would show that equivalent phones cost roughly the same amount even before you adjust for the extra years of service an iPhone will provide. These comparisons can also be complicated because, for example, if you care about battery life or CPU performance the comparison for a Pixel 7 isn't the iPhone 14 but a much cheaper iPhone 11 but the same probably isn't true if your primary buying criteria is camera quality.
The second is trying to look at this in isolation: the price differential between one phone and another just isn't that much compared to other things people spend money on — a phone costs significantly less than what most people will spend on cell service over the same timeframe, and for perspective the total lifetime cost for that phone is likely to be 1-2 months worth of rent. For something which people derive heavy value from throughout the day, that's definitely not conspicuous consumption.
The U.S. median income is something like $50k so even if you're buying the most expensive model sold you're looking less than one percent of median income over the average 40 months that Americans keep their phones. Contrast that with, say, cars where the average new vehicle buyer is spending the equivalent of that purchase price _every month_ on something they use on average less than one hour per day and most of them are paying significant premiums for models which aren't more useful for the things they actually do just to present an aesthetic style. If you want to talk about Veblen goods, ask why so many people are commuting to office jobs in $60-90k trucks in showroom condition.
Google has the focus of a crack addled flea and has products that aren’t profitable and people working on them - including probably 4 new messaging apps simultaneously.
Facebook predicted that it would lose billions in potential revenue because of Apple making tracking optional.
Microsoft is basically just cutting employees that are on products that it doesn’t care about anymore.
You can say what you will about Apple. But no one can accuse Apple of a lack of focus on profitable product lines.
>Microsoft, Google, Apple all have enormous amounts of cash stored thanks to their fantastic earnings for so many years.
Your earnings are fantastic until they suddenly aren't and then by that time, it's too late to turn the ship around on all the mistakes that lead to it. Just ask Nokia or Kodak.
And is managed by a CEO who is choosing not to lay off workers. Are you saying that Apple is wrong to not do layoffs? You can go express that with your votes in the investor meeting, that you don’t want Apple to be the star in these PR pieces about being a great employer who doesn’t lay off employees.
The recent push by Apple to promote privacy controls has attracted and renewed trust in the brand. That's my theory as a partial explanation of recent success.
They correctly identified privacy controls as something people actually want for real, even just knowing it's there is a nice feeling. Knowing my front door is reinforced with 7 optional locks, is much better than a fly-screen door with a privacy policy attached.
Meanwhile, MS and Google and Facebook remove options and rely on the opposite of privacy: over-sharing by default. Telemetry by default. Ads, suggestions, ads pretending to be suggestions, bloatware.
Apple is the one commercial entity that could completely disrupt surveillance capitalism and reboot the digital space to an era reminiscent of the Microsoft monopoly - but now with their huge attached and interoperable mobile user base.
What they simply need to do is make self-hosting (using Mac devices) trivially easy and support a number of new/updated protocols for decentralized online interactions (messaging, blogs, search, social etc).
Monopolies are never optimal, but given the dismal moral basis of the other "big tech" I'd take it any day...
> make self-hosting (using Mac devices) trivially easy
They did this for years: every Mac starting with the first release of Mac OS X had a built-in Apache webserver, and activating it was just the click of a button in the Sharing preference pane.
Problem is, the segment of people who a) are willing and able to create web content, and b) only want the very basics as provided by Apple (including whatever versions of Perl and other server-side languages happened to ship with the OS) is a fairly slim one.
The other problem is, almost no one has an ISP that's friendly to self-hosting from your home.
I believe Apple removed Web Sharing from the Sharing preference pane a few years ago now.
Don't they simply need the people to actually get stuff out the door? Almost every other year teams are being shoved into another department to the detriment of a product, so they can get something else out because otherwise it won't happen. Sounds like they actually need more people, not less. To me, Apple always sounds like it's spread way too thin or running on the absolute minimum.
Meanwhile I'm still looking at bugs in my OS that have survived a decade.
The Apple brand has some serious cachet. They can attract top-shelf people, and keep the salaries reasonable.
I worked for a company that had similar "cachet," and they were cheap bastards, but they did keep people, and their posture resulted in remarkably few "non-serious" applicants. The people who applied really wanted to work there.
As a hiring manager, I appreciated not having to sort through a pile of totally unsuited résumés, and, as a bonus, the ones that were unsuited, on paper, were often the high-achieving, ambitious "diamond in the rough" types that I looked for.
Readit News
> Amazon, for instance, hired about 780,000 people during the pandemic. Meta, too, had more than doubled its staff in this period, going from about 40,000 to 87,000. Even Microsoft had hired about 77,000 people just before the pandemic.
> Apple, in comparison, is believed to have hired under 20,000 people during the period of the pandemic.
Can't layoff people you didn't hire.
Besides, if they lay anyone off, it'll be through retail (already happening in their third-party channel sales staff, who are employed by Apple but work in stores like Best Buy) and eventually retail closures when/if they can do it without being accused of more union-busting.
The Amazon layoffs numbers represent corporate roles.
Someone is comparing Apples and Oranges
any source for that claim?
Deleted Comment
Meta (and Amazon) weren't with the hiring boom.
Stripe, as an example, drastically slowed down hiring when the pandemic hit expecting an economic slowdown. It then turned out that so much commerce moved to online—rather than stopped—so they ramped up hiring to meet demand.
The bet that companies like Shopify and Stripe [1] made was that COVID created a “new normal”; much of the economic activity that went online would stay there. They were wrong, so there were layoffs to correct it.
[0]: https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team
[1]: https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/ceo-patrick-collisons-email...
Check zoom user growth graph, something like 300% growth was common for the software supporting this transition. Not everything was positioned as good that, but the pull was there.
In business management, financial markets, hiring, investment, real estate patterns etc etc.
There have been some lasting effects, but it was always clearly a temporary, if not prolonged situation.
And now that it's 2023, the stock market expects them to do layoffs.
Exec compensation is closely tied to share price.
Those businesses boomed during the pandemic and deflated once it was over.
Dead Comment
So as a consequence:
* Apple is hoarding cash to an extent that business analysts dislike (although Tim has reduced this to some extent)
* Teams are being run leaner than they'd like to be (not nearly as much so as in the pre-iOS times, admittedly)
* Conversely, since the company builds good reserves and not too much bloat in good times, it can and will avoid overreacting to bad times.
> not nearly as much so as in the pre-iOS times, admittedly
deserves better than a parenthetical. Zoom out, and Apple's been on a serious hiring binge for the last decade, from 72,800 employees in 2012 to 164,000 in 2022.
(Both numbers include retail; in 2012, 58% were retail, and they don't seem to break it down anymore in 2022.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_stripping
Apple makes things. The software side works with it, but it's a hardware company. They aren't entirely dependent on conjuring up value out of thin air, they have supply chains and manufacturing and whatnot.
Even Amazon, which deals with physical objects, doesn't really make anything.
Tech companies are largely “interface” providers - they simplify the interface between a human and some other thing. Twitter simplifies the interface between one human and all other humans on Twitter. Microsoft enhances the interface between one human and other humans within a company. Amazon simplifies the interface between humans and retail goods, and AWS simplifies the interface between humans and scalable compute and storage.
Apple simplifies the interface between humans and personal compute, which is the entry point to all of the above (although the relationship with Microsoft is obviously more complex than that). So Apple is just further up the tech value chain, where transient effects are softened and delayed, and where competitive advantage is less easily displaced. Twitter is really only protected by network effects. Microsoft is protected by lots of UI/UX implementation moat and strong vendor lock in. Amazon is protected by others’ ability to scale physical logistics, AWS by backend and interface development and also lock-in. Apple is protected by all of the above plus hardware engineering, and the hardware is an especially difficult one to catch up with or copy.
But even by your flawed definition of "making things" Amazon counts, because of Kuiper, Fire Devices, and Echo alone.
Echo, Kindle, Blink and Fire TV product lines would beg to disagree.
I don't think this 'real' sentiment is best used to describe Amazon.
But only just barely missed going under back in the late 1990's.
What a strange timeline.
I can’t imagine you seriously believe that.
> Since 2012, Apple has been buying back its own shares at an extraordinary rate -- Apple is known for spending more on share repurchases than similar tech giants like Meta or Alphabet. Apple's total share repurchases have totaled $274.5 billion, with just $20.4 billion in the December quarter.
> Apple spent $85.5 billion to repurchase shares in 2021, and issued $14.5 billion in dividends.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/04/28/apple-extends-sha...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/shares-...
Why should they? Who does it benefit? Not their customers. Not their products. Not their future prospects. Not their employees, for the most part.
...Oh, the shareholders? You mean they should throw massive amounts of money—their hedge against future problems—into enriching people who are, for the most part, already vastly wealthy?
When companies buy back stock, they typically cancel it. That's why the price goes up so much of the remaining stock held by shareholders.
So they wouldn't be able to "just take a loan against the stock". It no longer existed. All they'd be able to do is to ask ask their investers for more money.
Deleted Comment
The "near death" variety that Apple experienced during the 90s led to a conservative fiscal culture (among the top level executives at least) compared with the rest of the tech industry.
Definitely. Though it might be difficult to test properly. I expect a lot of survivor bias, with companies having a reasonable long-term strategy faring significantly better in the long run (Microsoft notwithstanding, in this case).
The age of the company isn't relevant imo.
With the latest direction (metaverse), they’re hoping to pave a new future, even if it leverages their current power to bootstrap.
Apple isn't primarily in e-commerce, streaming or online ads and did not get as big a boost from millions of people suddenly trapped in their homes as other tech companies. Apple was never tempted to overhire, I suspect Apple had the opposite pressure during lockdowns due to its many retail workers seeing fewer customers, while Amazon's warehouses were brisk.
Google will hire thousands to work on an obviously doomed streaming service, to build a new OS, and so many other obviously bad ideas and then just fire them all later.
Vanishingly few Apple products seem to be discontinued. Usually after a long life like the iPod.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/apple-is-allegedly-work...
We don't know more due to the secrecy.
EDIT: A few more I just remembered, MacRuby, OpenCL, WebObjects, Quicktime
Thanks to Google we have patent-free codecs, an open source mobile OS, and they contribute significantly to the Linux kernel, among other projects that are "available to the public".
Fixed it for you!
In a world where Amazon, Meta, Google, Wal-Mart, Time-Warner, Comcast, etc exist, you think Apple is the most anti-competitive?
And we didn't even talk about their sweatshops in China which has always had persistent labor-abuse issues[0], the Chinese government boosting iPhone production with child slave labor, and all the many other scandals they've been involved with.
I really have no idea how anyone would get the notion that they are any better than the rest of the pack. Perhaps their upbeat pristine presentations, live from Cupertino. They should broadcast one from their sweatshops in Shenzhen. Some of the highschool kids they pressed into 11 hour shifts to assemble their iPhones could sing the praise of Tim Cook: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/21/apple-iphone-x-reportedly-as...
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/business/dealbook/foxconn...
EDIT: clarified some comments and added better sources.
This tired argument again.
Apple has always led the industry in their auditing of their supply chain and taking proactive steps to address illegal and unethical behaviour. There will always be mistakes but it's how you deal with them that counts.
If you're going to call Foxconn a sweatshop then arguably Amazon, Tesla etc should be called them as well.
Is that true? Last I read[0] "the suicide rate was comparable to its host country’s".
0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-l...
Ah yes. Foxconn. The company that only produces products for Apple.
And Amazon
And Google
And Sony
And Google
And Microsoft
And Intel
And Fiat Chrysler
And ...
And yet, only Apple is held accountable, and only Apple publishes regular audit reports on worker conditions etc.
Deleted Comment
It would be nice instead, if they used their cash hoard to stop wasting time upgrading the iphone with more superficial shit. Bring prices of the phones down to 50 bucks. Put it in the hands of everyone. And kill the toxic advertising supported attention economy that has caused chaos all over the world.
Now its just another group of unimaginative optimizing corporate robots, with no actual compass heading beyond hoarding cash.
60% of Americans already have them, and are perfectly happy to spend $1300 on them every few years, even if it means not paying rent or having to starve themselves. Why would they want to bring the price down?
A $50 reduction on a $1000 price tag won’t “put it in the hands of everyone”. People who cannot afford it still won’t and it won’t change anything to people who can. $50 over the life of a device is nothing.
Besides, that’s what previous generations are for: usability is pretty much identical to the latest and greatest, and the discount is much more than $50.
This assertion falls apart under even basic sober analysis. It may sound tautological but entire point of status signaling is that other people notice it. iPhones look very similar to the equivalents and most people aren't going to be able to tell which model or year you have without a close examination – contrast with a luxury sports car which is audibly and visibly distinct from a fair distance. If you look at what actual rich people do, you can really understand the point: there's no better phone available at any price due to how the product segment works so they buy the same phone as everyone else but they get things like high-ended designer cases because that's where there's room to demonstrate how much money you have. Tim Cook has essentially the same phone as half the people in line at your local coffee shop; that's decidedly not true of actual luxury goods.
It also has two other fundamental flaws: the first is the assertion that there's a substantial price difference when even a bit of research would show that equivalent phones cost roughly the same amount even before you adjust for the extra years of service an iPhone will provide. These comparisons can also be complicated because, for example, if you care about battery life or CPU performance the comparison for a Pixel 7 isn't the iPhone 14 but a much cheaper iPhone 11 but the same probably isn't true if your primary buying criteria is camera quality.
The second is trying to look at this in isolation: the price differential between one phone and another just isn't that much compared to other things people spend money on — a phone costs significantly less than what most people will spend on cell service over the same timeframe, and for perspective the total lifetime cost for that phone is likely to be 1-2 months worth of rent. For something which people derive heavy value from throughout the day, that's definitely not conspicuous consumption.
The U.S. median income is something like $50k so even if you're buying the most expensive model sold you're looking less than one percent of median income over the average 40 months that Americans keep their phones. Contrast that with, say, cars where the average new vehicle buyer is spending the equivalent of that purchase price _every month_ on something they use on average less than one hour per day and most of them are paying significant premiums for models which aren't more useful for the things they actually do just to present an aesthetic style. If you want to talk about Veblen goods, ask why so many people are commuting to office jobs in $60-90k trucks in showroom condition.
Facebook predicted that it would lose billions in potential revenue because of Apple making tracking optional.
Microsoft is basically just cutting employees that are on products that it doesn’t care about anymore.
You can say what you will about Apple. But no one can accuse Apple of a lack of focus on profitable product lines.
Microsoft, Google, Apple all have enormous amounts of cash stored thanks to their fantastic earnings for so many years.
Your earnings are fantastic until they suddenly aren't and then by that time, it's too late to turn the ship around on all the mistakes that lead to it. Just ask Nokia or Kodak.
Dead Comment
They correctly identified privacy controls as something people actually want for real, even just knowing it's there is a nice feeling. Knowing my front door is reinforced with 7 optional locks, is much better than a fly-screen door with a privacy policy attached.
Meanwhile, MS and Google and Facebook remove options and rely on the opposite of privacy: over-sharing by default. Telemetry by default. Ads, suggestions, ads pretending to be suggestions, bloatware.
What they simply need to do is make self-hosting (using Mac devices) trivially easy and support a number of new/updated protocols for decentralized online interactions (messaging, blogs, search, social etc).
Monopolies are never optimal, but given the dismal moral basis of the other "big tech" I'd take it any day...
They did this for years: every Mac starting with the first release of Mac OS X had a built-in Apache webserver, and activating it was just the click of a button in the Sharing preference pane.
Problem is, the segment of people who a) are willing and able to create web content, and b) only want the very basics as provided by Apple (including whatever versions of Perl and other server-side languages happened to ship with the OS) is a fairly slim one.
The other problem is, almost no one has an ISP that's friendly to self-hosting from your home.
I believe Apple removed Web Sharing from the Sharing preference pane a few years ago now.
Meanwhile I'm still looking at bugs in my OS that have survived a decade.
I worked for a company that had similar "cachet," and they were cheap bastards, but they did keep people, and their posture resulted in remarkably few "non-serious" applicants. The people who applied really wanted to work there.
As a hiring manager, I appreciated not having to sort through a pile of totally unsuited résumés, and, as a bonus, the ones that were unsuited, on paper, were often the high-achieving, ambitious "diamond in the rough" types that I looked for.