What’s mid performance about an iPhone?

> Cause in healthy capitalism, a competitor could step in and sell it for $999 and Apple would lose market share quickly.

No they can't. You're neglecting the various moats that an entity like Apple enjoys with the iPhone.

First you have to be able to actually build a similar or superior product. You can't do it. Elite of elite tech engineering companies like Samsung can just barely keep up generation after generation. The investment required to build your $999 competing phone is comically enormous. You won't even be able to get access to enough chips to do it, much less have the manufacturing capacity to deliver at any meaningful scale given the components.

Do you have tens of billions of USD in cash ready?

You need to build a brand that consumers desire, such that they'll even want to spend $899 or $999 instead of picking up the iPhone at $1000.

Do you have another block of tens of billions of USD in cash ready, for marketing, brand building, advertising?

You need an extraordinary logistics system globally.

Do you have another block of tens of billions of USD in cash ready to build, deploy, refine your global logistics network?

Apple has ~$114 billion in annual operating income, most of it (including its ecosystem) is riding on the back of the iPhone. If it could be done, somebody would take that giant pot of gold from them. Even if a competitor could take 1/4 or 1/2 of that pot of gold, they'd move on it in a heartbeat. They can't do it, not even remotely close.

And then time. It'll take you a decade to get there, absolute best case scenario.

What Apple is reaping, is decades in the making, and required hundreds of billions of dollars in capital to be deployed over that span of time. Good luck.

One of the problems is that journalism just doesn't pay very well in general.

So news organizations may look for people with more experience in specific tech/science but I expect most people here would laugh at the comp and most aren't interested in paying for that news/writing themselves.

I do know tech journalists who are really good, but most of the people who write on deep technical topics either don't need the money or are doing it as a sideshow of their day jobs.

(Which, if they write for independent news organizations can be an issue. The WSJ reporter who basically uncovered the Theranos scandal quit because he couldn't give public speaking engagements.)

It goes a lot deeper than this in Miami. A big chunk of suburban miami is populated by white Cuban exiles and their descendants. Growing up we spoke in Spanglish, which involves switching back and forth between English and Spanish, often multiple times within the same sentence. The switch between languages isn’t random, though. There are rules that govern which words you should say in which language, when to switch, etc. I’ve never heard anyone investigating how these rules work, but there are millions of Americans of Cuban descent in Miami for whom Spanglish is their true native language.

What? Millions of people have personal laptops that are M1+ Macbooks. For people who can afford it and aren't Linux people, why would you buy anything else?

(well some people have issues with buying things from Apple and I don't blame them but Microsoft is busy making Windows as unappealing as possible so Apple wins for me)

Worse than that:

> the swan mark would have to be purchased at the price of six shillings - swans not included. This was about the same amount as a year’s wages for a household servant.

One pound would be over three years wages for a household servant.

> Punishment: a fine of one pound, ten shillings, and four pence

Why those weird numbers and not just round it to "four pounds"?

> While it may seem impossible to drive a $500 billion company into the ground, I firmly believe he’s the man for the job

It may be a controversial take, but, like... if he does that's fine. It's his prerogative and risk to take.

He built that $500B company. Its existence is primarily due to him. He still owns the majority of it. He calls the shots on what that company does, that is the end of it.

At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?

There were no doubt quite a few nail makers pre-industrial revolution that took pride in making consistent, quality nails. That work was utterly and completely obliterated by the industrial revolution. There may be a few remaining nail makers, producing nails with an extremely niche design, but not many. So goes those jobs our lifetime as well

As a person helping my mother from far ahead I understand why.

The hard part is not using the card. It's setting it up: set up the bank application on mobile phone, setting up second factor, looking at notifications when they disappear after a few seconds (older people have slower reflexes).

All the flat UI means that my mother can't tell me the difference between a button and a text.

There's no button to see notifications, she has to use swiping, which is again much harder for older people, as all the timings were optimized for young people with young people reflexes.

Without all this how does she know how much money she has? (with cash she can just count it).