Apple Reports First Quarter Results
apple.com25.1% Mac growth. For professionals and enthusiasts, you either just got your M1, you’re saving for one, or waiting on the Pro Desktops.
I’m curious to see if there’s any change to the replacement rate of Macs. It seems normal for people to use the same laptop for four or more years — a far sight longer than the two-year life expectancy of laptops twenty years ago, but about half of the replacement rate of smartphones.
There's one benefit of these DIY designs that seems under-reported: Apple can now develop stuff like the "neural engine". Chips that aren't just faster or more efficient than Intel offerings, but also do different things.
I think there's almost no chance that I'll be upgrading to an M2 Pro next year or the following, but there's every possibility that the M3 Pro won't just be a faster Apple Silicon chip. If future Macbooks are more than just "the same thing but faster," dorks like me will be retiring our computers a lot faster.
> you either just got your M1
Yeah, and hold off for now. I'm the guy making sure that new onboards don't get blocked by M1 (as you can't but Intel anymore). Segfaults in docker/qemu (amd64 and arm64) are numerous: I can't build our otherwise boring (and recent) docker images locally - it has to go to a Linux ARM server. What truly bends my mind is that I am getting framerate/audio/input hitching on the desktop when one of the broken containers pegs 3 of the cores at 100% (and it's not just my machine).
It's a circus, wait for M2 or M3 unless your workload is influencing, blogging, and checking email.
It's weird seeing someone imply that work is either Docker or blogging. Feels a bit too on the nose HN parody to be real.
“Influencing, blogging, email” wtf?
I mostly do React/web dev and some dabbling with SwiftUI. I spent most of 2021 doing that on an M1 Air and it was a joy.
((The only kink I’ve run into was trying to deploy a serverless app; Docker did indeed make that a nonstarter. So I just accomplished it the old fashioned way (a dippy little VM running in a cloud server). Not a deal-breaker.))
Most of my friends are graphic designers who use Adobe apps (nearly all ported to ARM). The only reason most of them haven’t upgraded is because they want 27” iMacs.
What on earth do you think most people do with computers?
That quote is a textbook example of how to ruin a comment with some unnecessary and inaccurate flamebait.
As someone who’s been around for a minute, I’m jadedly amused that your argument is that M2 or M3 will fix these things.
What they will do is be faster and more widely adopted. Docker (and everyone else) will do the heavy lifting to fix those, including any that are specifically Apple bugs.
Assuming that the average person in this thread "enjoys Apple products," holding back on the M1 is a reasonable piece of advice. If you're not an Apple fan, then now is definitely not the time to dip your toes in.
This experience has done nothing but prove my previously unsubstantiated beliefs. I am pushing for Linux laptops at work.
The Docker Desktop app for macOS being a pile of crap has nothing to do with Apple silicon. It's always been like that..
Have you played with Rancher Desktop at all? They just hit 1.0.0 and it’s a replacement for docker desktop on macOS/Windows. Beware, it says kubernetes all over their site but it provides the docker cli and works pretty much the same way.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'm also planning on giving Lima a whirl, but that's tricky for the same reason I'm stuck with Apple (finance, MDM, the Apple privacy/encryption dominance).
Yeah, don't rely on docker's quemu x86 emulation - it doesn't work.
Everything else has been an absolute breeze though (and so fast!).
Yeah, 27" iMac owner here, desperately waiting for an upgrade. If Apple had been a bit more open about the road map, I might have bought an air around the release date to bridge the time till the iMac update. Wouldn't say no to a (smaller) Mac Pro with an external display (if Apple offered that) either.
This. I want an M1 Max in a Mac mini, and especially an Apple-branded display or three that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
>and especially an Apple-branded display or three that doesn't cost an arm and a leg
I think you are going to be out of luck there.
I'm hoping for a pro desktop with something more advanced than the current M1s - e.g not just an M1 with more cores. I want a Nvidia/amd class gpu, etc.
Does your hope have any foundation in reality?
The same guy who called the chips in the recent two MacBook Pro models made a prediction for the Mac Pro at the same time.
>Gurman claims that Apple has developed two SoCs for the new Mac Pro, codenamed 'Jade 2C-Die' and 'Jade 4C-Die'. These SoCs would have 20 or 40 CPUs cores, which would be significantly more than anything Apple has planned for its MacBook range. Both have performance and power-saving clusters though, split 16/4 and 32/6. Gurman also expects 'Jade 2C-Die' and 'Jade 4C-Die' to feature 64 or 128 GPU cores, a huge uplift on the GPUs found in the current Mac Pro.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-is-reputedly-developing-...
Absolutely. Rumors that have been correct so far (and correctly predicted the M1 Pro and M1 Max 16 and 32 GPU core configurations) say that Apple is planning a 2 and 4 M1 Max multi-die design in the future. The M1 Max already has a die-to-die interconnect bus that is unused. Also, according to reverse engineer Hector Martin, the interrupt controller on the M1 Max theoretically allows for up to 8 M1 Max dies (though whether Apple is planning such an insane layout is unknown and unlikely.)
If the (very likely) 2-die version is released, that'll be 64 Apple GPU cores. If the (likely) 4-die version is released, that'll be 128 Apple GPU cores. Coupled alongside that would be up to 32 Performance cores and 8 efficiency cores. That should be good competition for anything NVIDIA and Intel Xeon.
> That should be good competition for ... Intel Xeon.
Poor Xeons with meager TBs of RAM.
Even if you managed to strap 4 M1 Max together, you'd only have enough memory lanes to drive 256gb of RAM.
No, that’s why I said that I hope … :)
> It seems normal for people to use the same laptop for four or more years — a far sight longer than the two-year life expectancy of laptops twenty years ago, but about half of the replacement rate of smartphones.
Are people really still replacing their phones every two years? Mine always last for 4+
Their huge China derived revenue is an increasing problem for Apple from a company stance perspective. They have to increasingly walk a tightrope between servicing that market, kowtowing to the Chinese government, and upholding the values of a California based US Company.
This is the case for all companies in the world eventually. China will overtake the US economy in the next 5 years.
Paul Samuelson the Nobel Memorial Prize laureate repeatedly predicted the USSR economy will overtake the US within X years. Predictions are hard!
The USSR was closeish to the US population. China has 4x the US population. That roughly means they only need to reach 1/4 the living standards of the US to have a larger economy. Seems pretty doable.
China also has a massive, modern industry as far as I can tell.
People bought far fewer goods from the USSR than we do from China.
The current prediction in terms of GDP is 8 years: https://www.voanews.com/amp/chinas-economy-could-overtake-us...
There is no serious analysis that presents this scenario with any certainty.
Let’s not miss the forest for the trees. China will continue to grow and get very close to the size of the American economy.
China is already the worlds largest economy in terms of raw output (PPP terms).
China is already the worlds largest consumer market.
There’s a reasonable chance it exceeds USA in nominal GDP it if it grows at 5+% till 2030. This year they grew at 8.5 %
> China will continue to grow and get very close to the size of the American economy.
Given that they are hitting a demographic cliff in a few years, it is not so guaranteed anymore. It will be an interesting next couple of decades for China.
> This year they grew at 8.5 %
A lot of that is real estate, the same real estate that speculators are banking on will sell to poor farmers for a million dollars when they re-locate to cities (and the same farmers who aren't having that many kids anymore...).
Sure and that slows GDP growth by 40-50%. They’re still growing by a lot. It just moves the date by a few years.
Demographic doom is frequently cited for China but I rarely hear about the doom of Europe which has worse demographics. Demographics can be topped up using immigration. Without immigration the US would also be in demographic decline.
> They’re still growing by a lot. It just moves the date by a few years.
The problem is that their average age moves up, and productivity decreases as people hit or near retirement. Unless China starts opening up to immigration (not impossible), they are going to be Japan without being rich yet.
> I rarely hear about the doom of Europe which has worse demographics.
Europe has immigration. China does not. If China is willing to embrace e.g. the African aspiring immigrants who have come to Guangzhou in recent years, things could change quickly, but I'm not really seeing. Japan did not, and that's why you can get a house for a reasonable price in Tokyo these days.
I find exactly one house (a 1BR house ?) under 100 million JPY (866k USD) in the outskirts of Tokyo.
Is there a better website to search for these reasonably priced houses?
[0] https://housingjapan.com/buy/search/#c={%22p[h]%22:%22100000...
This might be outdated given that it is from 2020:
https://resources.realestate.co.jp/news/how-much-does-it-cos...
I only mention it because someone brought it up a few days ago when there was a debate on why real estate prices were so high in the USA.
I live in Japan and this is the site I use to browse for houses: https://www.athome.co.jp/kodate/chuko/tokyo/map/list/?LAT=35...
On the left in price range you can select max 10,000万円 to see houses under 100 million. Zoom out on the map to start seeing some dots.
> Demographics can be topped up using immigration. Without immigration the US would also be in demographic decline.
There is a reason people move to the US. Good luck to the CCP attempting to reproduce that.
Most people from third world countries who move to the USA do so because of the infrastructure and quality of life, not because they read 'Bill of Rights'.
Also machines are coming for your jobs, you wont need that many people anyway.
Who said anything about the third world?
Highly qualified workers from Europe still come to the US too.
Western/Northern Europe have somewhat better demographics, thanks to immigration. Eastern Europe is in a deep demographic pit but is still recovering from poverty so it has a lot of room for economic growth still (and buoys up Western Europe).
Doom of Southern Europe, however, is talked about quite a lot.
> There’s a reasonable chance it exceeds USA in nominal GDP it if it grows at 5+% till 2030.
The US GDP grew 5.7% last year.
> China is already the worlds largest consumer market.
No it isn’t.
>The US GDP grew 5.7% last year.
To be fair that's only because it bounced back from the covid impacts in the previous year.It had been hovering around the 2.5% mark for the previous decade.
On the other hand no economist believes the figures that come out of China, they are far too consistent.
>China will overtake the US economy in the next 5 years.
Not with their current demographic trends.
While I don't disagree so you have specific things to read on this topic?
It seems that everyone forgets that approximately 100% of Apple's manufacturing is in China.
There are some scattered final assembly here and there, like screwing together the Mac Pro in Texas, and I think the iPhone production in India is non-trivial, but for all intents and purposes the vast, vast majority of Apple's production happens in China, performed by Chinese nationals, who are themselves subject to Chinese law, in facilities wholly inside of Chinese jurisdiction.
It doesn't matter much if Apple sells a single unit in China, from a "kowtowing to the Chinese government" perspective: China controls Apple fully as without China's consent and permission, Apple cannot produce anything for sale in significant quantity.
Last time I checked TSMC is in Taiwan and Taiwan is not a part of China..
TSMC only makes one out of multiple components. I don't see how this is a counterpoint to his comment.
Services, which include iCloud, Apple Music, search licensing and App Store fees, continued growing strongly, rising 25% annually to $19.52 billion.
Keeps blowing my mind how consistently services keep growing. Highest margins too. Just printing money!
I feel like I get great value for my Apple One Premier subscription. I already was paying for the largest available iCloud storage. Paying a bit more and being able to host email addresses for private domains, plus having iCloud Private Relay, plus a music service (and my library in the cloud), plus Apple TV+, plus Fitness (use it occasionally but would never pay for it on its own) is a no-brainer for me.
I have to give huge props to Apple for not shoving ads for these features down my throat. I have an iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods, a personal MBP (which I rarely use because it’s old), and a 2019 MBP for work. I don’t recall ever seeing a pop up prompting me to use these things, and if I did, it must have only happened once and I just mindlessly disabled it. I had not even heard of Apple One premier until now.
I have a windows desktop for gaming and Microsoft seems to constantly try to push their bullshit. Whether it’s opening edge at start/changing my default browser, making me use the Microsoft Store or Microsoft accounts (they do this for Minecraft now, and the install experience through downloading minecraft from the web is now hilariously broken), or even shilling something at the log in screen, Microsoft just does not give a fuck about making their UX seem cheap to push their bloat.
Yeah this. I’ve got three kids, my mother and (spit) my ex wife on my Apple One sub. Couple of domains and two apple fitness users, storage and Apple Music for all is a bargain.
> Paying a bit more and being able to host email addresses for private domains
Woah I had no idea this was a thing! Since Google is forcing the old free workspace users into paid accounts this year, this will be a great replacement. Thanks, I'll have to look into this.
I Before Apple One I was paying for iCloud Drive, Apple Music family, and Apple Arcade separately which added up to $30 per month. With all the extra stuff thrown in, Apple One was a no brained for me.
I've on the other hand yet to find one Apple service that I'd actually want to pay for. Apple Music might be the closest one, but I'm probably not subscribing after my free trial ends. I had the free Apple TV+ trial when it launched for like 9 months and I barely watched it.
Just their services revenue alone is bigger than annual revenues of several large tech companies (non-FAANGM). It's incredible how huge Apple is!
Apple is the ‘Personal IBM’: a premium systems integrator where ‘you never blame yourself for buying Apple’ in the era when everyone has a handheld computer.
Edit - just to add that IBM dominated computing for a long time with this model. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Apple has become so big in what is a much bigger market.
> you never blame yourself for buying Apple
How quickly we forget that Apple just had 2 generations of complete dogshit laptops.
It was more than that, pretty much everything between late 2014 and late 2018 is just... not really usable as a daily driver. Luckily they fixed the keyboard and quit stringing Intel along under the pretense that they could "make things work" by modifying ACPI tables, but I don't think I'll ever be truly comfortable using a Mac until I can drop one at waist-height and not be down $2000. Different strokes for different folks though, of course.
I carried my MacBook in my motorcycle luggage for over 40,000km, and I dropped it from waist height at the airport. It's still running smoothly.
The only issue is the keyboard, which is now on its third replacement. The extended replacement program ran out last year, but they still replace keys for free.
This is a 2017 MacBook. They upgraded my 2012 model for the price of a battery swap because the 2012 parts were out of stock. In other words, I've been going for 10 years on the same laptop purchase.
They're not perfect laptops, but they're still the best ROI I've had on a laptop, and far better than any laptop I've had before.
>It was more than that, pretty much everything between late 2014 and late 2018
I don't know, the 2015 MacBook Pro was well regarded.
> you never blame yourself for buying Apple
I do, latest macs have terrible linux compatibility for now, with apple not doing much to help in providing support for it (M1)
They keep fixing and breaking their keyboards, the latest macs are better in this aspect but until even 2 yrs ago, they used to break quite frequently
Apple making it so hard to develop ios apps on a non apple device, definitely brings additional pain, I don’t want to use apple for my computer.
Saying it as someone who really enjoys using the iphone.
I get why people like macbooks so much, but saying “You never blame yourself for buying Apple” is untrue
For me, that would stand for thinkpads and even then primarily for the older ones.
> apple not doing much to help in providing support for it (M1)
marcan (lead dev of Asahi Linux) seems to disagree:
https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994Looks like Apple changed the requirements for Mach-O kernel files in 12.1, breaking our existing installation process... and they *also* added a raw image mode that will never break again and doesn't require Mach-Os. And people said they wouldn't help. This is intended for us.It's funny how people come out to celebrate in droves when Apple does the bare minimum to not break their own tooling. Another equally likely scenario is that their changes broke internal tooling, and so they added the raw image mode to give Mac engineers a more reliable entry point for prototyping and testing on the new devices.
Regardless, when my mail carrier changes their route to get to my house 30 minutes faster I don't take it as some sort of sign that the UPS cares about me more than the others. It seems more likely to me that Apple saw the logistical value in not breaking their own kernel requirements with every release, and that happens to be serendipitous with the greater development community as a whole. If Apple wanted to help the Linux community, we would know because they'd be releasing UNIX kernel blobs so people wouldn't be forced to spend years re-writing code that already exists. But of course, that's not how their industry works. If Torvalds gave Nvidia just one middle finger for their treatment of Linux, it's hard to imagine how many he'd like to give Apple these days.
> Another equally likely scenario is that their changes broke internal tooling, and so they added the raw image mode to give Mac engineers a more reliable entry point
The second tweet in the thread reads:
https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799767068188672Seriously, I can't think of a single reason why they'd add that for themselves. They build real Mach-Os with their own process. They have no use for raw images. They are saying "hey, use this, it's easier and we won't break it in the future". This is for Asahi.MacOS has no use for it, I'll buy that much. But what about the automated calibration tools or QA software for displays and peripherals? I have a hard time believing that Apple doesn't have some level of internal testing firmware, because it certainly doesn't show up in MacOS. Much smaller companies do this regularly to test batches of production units for defects, it's part of the reason why custom firmware is possible to load on the Nintendo Switch. And Nintendo certainly didn't say "hey, use this", so I really, really have a hard time believing Apple did.
I think a lot of people are seriously overestimating the amount of work non-apple hardware manufacturers put into linux support, and have also become far too accustomed to 30+ years of IBM PC backwards compatibility.
Also, people are underestimating how much Microsoft and Intel keep doing to break core features of their platforms. They've shipped some truly awful breakage in storage interfaces and power management in recent years: poorly thought-out incompatible changes with little or no public documentation, shipped by OEMs in a state that doesn't even work well enough with Windows to justify all the trouble.
I was making a general point about an analogy with ‘never get fired for buying IBM’ - which of course wasn’t 100% true either. I get it that Apple products aren’t perfect but in general for most consumers it’s a safe bet.
And IBM lost that status after they decided to tank the relative quality of their product. I presume Apple will suffer the same fate.
IBM lost their status because the centre of gravity of the computing world moved on, not because of any product quality issues.
Not selling what people want is a better way to phrase it.
Right and the think it’s very likely that Apple will remain a very big player in smartphones for a long time - even today IBM dominates mainframes even if no one really cares.
People have been presuming this very loudly for basically Apple's entire lifetime.
I'm not saying I think they'll keep going forever, but I really don't think you should hold your breath.
Yes, I did not mean to imply that Apple is or will be on a downward trajectory soon, just that as IBM was once seem infallible and now not, Apple will be too.
> I presume Apple will suffer the same fate.
Why? Has there been any trend to indicate they're headed in this direction?
The quality of ios has been reducing a lot recently,
Sure it has been getting a whole lot of very nice features, but ios has been visibly buggy recently to the point where if I don’t reboot my phone atleast once every 5-6 weeks, bugs start appearing constantly,
From glitching of settings app to outright daily crashes of the settings app , to safari acting weirdly, to the home screen’s app drawer vanishing suddenly or the search function vanishing.
Etc, etc.
(I’m on a stable modern ios version)
I didn’t write that properly. I meant I expect Apple to eventually get dethroned, just like IBM was. Not that it is currently on a downward trajectory.
Their software quality has kinda been tanking over the past few years. Pretty much everything after Mojave has started to slide in the "please don't do this" direction (at least for me), and with Apple Silicon I really no longer have any need for a Mac.
I do get where the parent comment is coming from. Commodification of technology can only go so far, and Apple is walking down the same path IBM (or even Microsoft, for that matter) did to learn that lesson.
Man, I wish Steve Jobs were alive to witness the total domination. I imagine he knew but perhaps not to this extent.
Funny - I was thinking the same this morning. But more along the lines of "I hope his spirit is watching this"
That sounds like a different Steve Jobs. For starters, the Mac has a notch now.
IIRC, he was also adamant against a bigger iPhone and a smaller iPad, both which ended up being hit products.
Also adamant against iTunes for Windows
Also adamant against App Store!
Those happened while he was alive though no? Whereas the iPhone6 and iPad Mini came after his death.
Well, big difference is that Jobs was playing company with the shareholders money, while Cook is doing something else, like returning shareholders money.
Finally some good news in this bloodbath of a market
Yeah Apple are definitely not on the table for more anti-trust action as they have been squeezing out other major companies with large revenue streams based on information coming from Apple devices.
> revenue streams based on information coming from Apple devices.
Indeed. There is no evidence of them abusing streams of user information.
As Apple continues to dominate, we can’t forget that the iPhone is approaching >90% utilization by the youth: https://www.howtogeek.com/778355/new-study-says-87-of-us-tee...
This means we will soon enough have a situation where a corporation controls the primary medium of communication of the citizens. At this point a smart society would consider how to regulate this situation to safely prevent domination abuse, but I doubt it will happen.
> we can’t forget that the iPhone is approaching >90% utilization by the youth
In the US.
And while I agree that anything nearing a de facto monopoly should be strictly regulated, I think any effort should be directed at any messaging app with a large user base, e.g. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger.
I have a de facto monopoly on comments posted on HN by users named “thephyber” (I am playing with the granularity of the definition of industry). That does not constitute anti-trust violations.
So long as there is a near substitute for Apple smartphones, I fail to see what that is sufficient grounds for anti-trust action.
The messaging apps are not a good example of monopoly violations. They are all market options which have many many solutions. WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Signal, iOS Messages, SMS, Discord, Slack, Google Hangouts, MS Teams, Zoom, Skype, and a thousand web forums have similar capabilities. The comms market is remarkably healthy. What most people complain about is the contract they agree to which has lots of restrictive clauses (some which are very vague). Those general contract terms in SaaS services is what I would aim to regulate, rather than the biggest incumbents in the disparate comms apps.
Microsoft is probably 90% of computers already for everyone.
Going off Wikipedia, Windows is approximately 75%, macOS is 15%, and other OS's (ChromeOS, Linux) make up the remaining 10% [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
~20 years ago this was true (for the US at least, and they had run into antitrust problems as a result) but nowadays it's more like 75%. ChromeOS is very popular in K-12 and macOS is decently common in University/Tech and not unheard of for the average consumer either. Traditional Linux is still marginal. This is only counting traditional desktop computing.
You can write an OS on Windows, the same is not true on iOS.
Is this just a knee-jerk thing to say because it seems like it must be true, and it's fashionable to take an alarmist position about any big company? Is there any critical thought behind such a statement?
Apple has not (in my recollection) sought to exert control over content of what is being said or shared among users. In fact, they seem to keep quite a distance from wanting to know or be responsible for that.
And you're claiming that iMessage is the "primary medium of communication of the citizens"? That is just a little overblown, don't you think?
I would argue, if you have that position, maybe you should spend your energy or concern on cable TV news and other media outlets, who do far worse, with far less share of their markets.
>Apple has not (in my recollection) sought to exert control over content of what is being said or shared among users. In fact, they seem to keep quite a distance from wanting to know or be responsible for that.
You may want to search for Telegram and Apple.
They did remove Parler from the App Store, then reinstated it months later.
Gab is not allowed on the App Store.
Gab and Parler both had issues with lack of content moderation.
You can't expect Apple to allow apps which wilfully tolerate illegal content.
Is Apple the arbiter of illegal content(adult content is not allowed in the App store)?
Is that because Gab has a specific type of political content (IMO unlikely) or because Gab fails to keep illegal content or Apple’s minimum level of moderation (the reason Apple removed Parler)? I would bet money on the latter based on the coverage I have seen of Gab’s content.
Well, they decided all of their phones are going to analyze your locally-stored photographs for child photography, and upload questionable photos to the cloud for human review...
They also block apps that involve politically controversial content, or content that they disagree with (e.g. pornography).
> Well, they decided all of their phones
Announced but not (yet) implemented.
> analyze your locally-stored photographs for child photography
Nope. Only the ones on iCloud.
> and upload questionable photos to the cloud for human review
Also a misrepresentation.
> or content that they disagree with (e.g. pornography).
True. And yes, I should have a wank to whatever I please. Legality permitting.
It is so easy to criticise Apple. So many angles to attack them on. So don't misconstrue facts. There's really no need.
> > analyze your locally-stored photographs for child photography
> Nope. Only the ones on iCloud.
Nope. Only the ones your device intends to send to iCloud.
They’re already scanned on iCloud, this was on device scanning before upload. Likely it was a requirement for them to add encryption on the files they store and not have the unsealing keys.
Sort of a pre-emotive avoidance of certain political conversations.
> Only the ones your device intends to send to iCloud.
From a practical perspective, for most everyone, "intending to send" and "on iCloud" is probably a 300ms delta in time.
It’s a capability problem. Once they scan files that are due to be uploaded it’s not very difficult to just.. scan all files.
It’s the motte and bailey.
I don't understand "capability". Surely you realize the capability is already there. Scanning an image and sending a "bad detected" message is absolutely trivial. The image classification algorithms that run locally, used for categorical search (like "dogs") are already there.
When I say capability I mean the functionality currently exists to do that, it’s implemented and functioning, and the evidence for it existing is not a surprise.
If WhatsApp has the function for Facebook to read messages, then it’s not going to be a surprise when reversing the program to see that code; but if they claim that there is no capability to do that and you discover it then it’s much more damning.
Also; if functionality exists it’s easier to argue for a scope change… much easier than arguing for new functionality to exist.
Well, 900ms now that we have to start up a process to scan it before it's sent off.
> They’re already scanned on iCloud
They are not. Other file and photo hosting platforms do not encrypt the data, so they are able to scan server-side. The content is encrypted for iCloud, and the encryption keys are not known by the hosting infrastructure.
This means as an example that shared iCloud albums could be used as a distribution mechanism for child pornography, operating silently until one of the members' accounts gets subpoenaed or they confess and share the list.
Apple uses AES encryption for iCloud Photos: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
Underlying cloud providers that Apple uses e.g. AWS may not have the key but Apple definitely does. And that key could be embedded in a CSAM detection app.
So unless you work for Apple and have definitive proof that they do not have such an app I think we should assume they do.
Correction: They /attempted/ to add an /optional/ feature for your /children's/ account(s).
Do you have kids? Daughters? Would you like better control over what they're exposed to? Being given the tools to track screen time, purchases and control where possible exposure to objectionable content for immature minds isn't a bad thing.. provided it is opt-in. Which the feature always was before the news cycle chose their own narrative.
Isn't Google Play Protect scanning everything on device looking for malware by default already?
In addition to Google scanning everything in your Google account looking for child pornography for the last decade?
>a man [was] arrested on child pornography charges, after Google tipped off authorities about illegal images found in the Houston suspect's Gmail account
https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/why-the-gmail-scan-that-le...
In addition to Google scanning your online account looking for copyright violations?
Well, factually incorrect. (although they didn't do a great job of explaining it). They are said to analyze the fingerprint of photos that have been stored in iCloud, and flag if any match the fingerprints of known suspected criminal child porn photos. Photos are not being "taken" from you and uploaded without your consent, or being looked at by other people. Anyway, side point.
And on the 2nd point, they like any company, have to obey the laws of the countries they operate in. Whether they should operate in countries that call for them to censor political content, that's a different question. I'm sure you would say that companies have to follow the local laws.
Doubly interesting because the root of the discussion was the claim that, “This means we will soon enough have a situation where a corporation controls the primary medium of communication of the citizens” yet the complaint is this corporation obeys the laws of the citizens’ government!
I think there are compelling arguments for making Apple open up which apps can access their SDKs natively, but I think most instances of its implementation will be driven by adversarial governments and bad for user freedoms.
I depend on WhatsApp for contacting family, college classes (teachers use it to communicate, and also for group projects), as well as contacting local businesses like pharmacies if I need something delivered.
How is that not a bigger monopoly?
> “87% of teens own an iPhone
Doesn't this imply that parents are the one purchasing it for them? Would be interesting to see how many stick with iPhone when they start earning for themselves.
Probably most. And not even primarily because of inertia: for the average person, even the technically inclined person, there's really not much of a reason at all to move away from an iPhone. It just works, it almost always just works, it has the best build quality and fit/finish/polish, it's supported for many years, and you always know you're basically getting the best hardware.
And it's not Google.
If it were "87% of teens own Samsung phones", wouldn't this still be true?
You don't want to be a lame-o green bubble, do you, loser?
Tell Google to make Android better.
That would require them to dump JavaVM and rewrite everything except the kernel (and whatever parts are theirs but are not on JavaVM). And invent a new static programming language that is not GC-based and is not Go.
Also please, that should probably be done by a company that is not Google.
Android has never used the JVM. Early versions of Android used Dalvik and later ones use ART.
Only 90 percent? Clearly not a monopoly. /s
If you care about communications platforms, Facebook what you should care about.
Future concerns about what Apple might do in future are nothing by comparison.
Give me a break. Those teens can choose between Twitter, Youtube, Discord, iMessage, Signal, Telegram, TikTok, Reddit, Twitch, along with, you know, the rest of the public internet.
But 90% of them will still be doing all of this on an Apple device. Yet you think Facebook is the company to worry about, not Apple?
> Those teens can choose between Twitter, Youtube, Discord, iMessage, Signal, Telegram, TikTok, Reddit, Twitch, along with, you know, the rest of the public internet.
So you just demonstrated that teens have so much choice. Why are you concerned that they're doing it on an Apple device then, if an iPhone is just the hardware on which all these apps operate, and has nothing to do with what's said within the apps?
Because regardless of which service they choose to use, Apple controls the platform they’re running on in every case. They actually don’t have a meaningful choice in that area.
Imagine it was Amazon in this situation. Or Microsoft. Or Google. Or, gasp, Facebook. Where 90% of teens were using a hardware and software platform made by one company. Seems like a problem, right?
Imagine how much people would be freaking out if Facebook came out with a phone and OS and had 90% of teens using it. The wailing and gnashing of teeth could be heard from the Moon.
It doesn’t seem like a problem at all. You seem to be just saying that without explaining it.
The communication is not being done using software that Apple provides.
People have a vast array of choices for communications and Apple isn’t harming that.
In addition, there is nothing preventing Google or Facebook from executing on what Apple does other than their own lack of focus.
It's being done using devices that only run software approved by Apple, and Apple already uses that power to dictate what communications are allowed. By their mandate, apps like Discord and Telegram are forced to hard-block users on iOS from joining or viewing servers and communities with adult content, and for some communities with a more, ah, relaxed attitude to sex this fundamentally affects how they communicate with their friends. It doesn't matter what communications software they use because the mandate comes from Apple and every single competing option is required to impose the same restrictions. Arguably this restriction is going to shape how our culture thinks in the long term too.
> Apple controls the platform they’re running on in every case. They actually don’t have a meaningful choice in that area.
Except they do. They can choose to use Android like many non-teens do.
Where all of those apps except for one is available.
That is like saying Microsoft Windows is not a monopoly in the 90s because they have a choice to choose Mac or Linux.
Given that Apple was able to outgrow Microsoft despite this so called monopoly, that seems quite reasonable.
A stupid society on the other hand will have a government that is exempt from oversight and seizes any and all power for its own misuse.
How does Apple control communication on an iPhone? And the only thing this "regulation" will do is shift control over to the government, which is worse in every way.
> How does Apple control communication on an iPhone?
They control what messaging apps you are allowed to install on your iPhone.
And what browser engine you're allowed to use and, thereby, the extent to which you can control your web experience.
Then there's the App Store being both a point of control, a burden on developers, and highway robbery with Apple's 30% cut.
Easily avoided if you care, by simply buying Android. Apple can’t stop that.
Apple's cut is 15% for all developers making up to $1m/year.
And if you think the App Store is a burden you should try implementing customer acquisition and go-to market strategies which is what the store gives you for free.
If you think putting an app in the store is all you need to do to market your software then you are in for a shock. You would be better off taking your investment to the local casino.
> you should try implementing customer acquisition and go-to market strategies
I'd try but Apple doesn't let its customers willingly install my app from me or any other open-source repository they might choose.
If the only option is the App Store, it's not very surprising that the App Store is good for customer acquisition. You literally cannot acquire them any other way, you are artificially prevented by Apple's anti-competitive measures.
Apple doesn't stop you from installing open source iOS applications.
I do it all the time without having to go through the App Store.
How?
The exact same way developers run their own code on devices.
And their policies around communications apps clearly aren’t abusive.
That's a little bit of an exaggerated / intentionally misconstrue-able way to say the truth, isn't it?
They approve apps to be sold/distributed on their platform based on rules about what those apps do or are allowed to do, and whether they comply with local laws.
You're leaning towards making it sound like they decide what messaging apps you're allowed to use based on what you plan to say (content wise) on them.
> This means we will soon enough have a situation where a corporation controls the primary medium of communication of the citizens.
Wow. Crazy! This has literally never happened before.
The Bell System comes to mind, which had a monopoly on telephone service for nearly a century & tightly controlled which devices could run on their network (so they were kind of more analogous to something like "Apple+{Verizon+ATT+TMobile}"). Toward the end of that telephones were definitely the primary medium of communication.
I might describe as an Apple product enjoyer; certainly not a hater and everyone seems so polarised.
But objectively: monopoly is a bad thing. We’re still recovering from Microsoft’s dominance of desktop computing.
Once you have a near monopoly it’s practically impregnable to disintegrate. As you have a wealthy company which is actively harming those efforts.
Objectivity, monopoly is not a bad thing. Even the law doesn’t consider monopoly a problem in itself,
Abuse of monopoly is a problem.
> Under §2 of the Sherman Act 1890 every "person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize ... any part of the trade or commerce among the several States" commits an offence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Mo...
IANAL, and I'm assuming USA since that's where Apple has 90% market share on the young, but this seems to imply that monopoly in and on itself is illegal.
Why didn’t you include the next paragraph?
You seem to be ignoring 130 years of law that happened since what you are quoting.
Courts quickly began struggling with the Sherman Act's broad and vague language, recognizing that interpreting it literally might make even simple business entities like partnerships illegal.[9] Federal judges began trying to develop legal principles for distinguishing between "naked" trade restraints between rivals that suppressed competition and other restraints that were only "ancillary" to other cooperation agreements that promoted competition.[9]
Because, again, IANAL, and I don't really understand what that means. If the law is vague, so is this paragraph, at least to my unknowlegeable self. I am also not from the USA and have very little experience or awareness of their laws.
I assure you there was no malice.
That paragraph means that the law is not interpreted the way you are reading it.
Monopoly can be unintentionally abused, simple things like not providing a compiler in the box or trying to add security can be seen to crush competition (like in secureboot, and the current apple App Store distribution issues)
It also goes without saying that the law trails ethics and morality; not the inverse.
> simple things like not providing a compiler in the box or trying to add security can be seen to crush competition
Neither of these things crush competition in any way.
Security is not illegal, nor is anyone compelled by law to write compilers.
I could not possibly disagree more.
Being unable to use any other operating system on your PC was definitely seen as harming the user, and after lots of battles secureboot is optional on x86 windows PCs (but not arm)- in the same vain we managed to successfully argue that people other than Microsoft should have secureboot keys too, and thus redhat also have secureboot keys.
Not having a compiler though? That’s what put back computer science and education 10 years in the Microsoft era, the barrier to programming was a lot higher than it was prior to the late 90s and only recovered in the late 00s where we saw a resurgence of young people learning programming with the availability of WAMP and later django and rails.
You can thank Microsoft that less and less people each year understood native programming.
Microsoft hid their compiler suites behind complex systems, if they had been included or easy to access this would not be the case. But it was a choice on the side of Microsoft that only determined people really need a compiler anyway.
Apple is doing the same thing. But Apple at least ships with some interpreters of some languages like python or ruby. Windows didn’t even have those. Only vbscript (which is not a general purpose language)
Who was shipping a free compiler in the Microsoft era?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
And yet competitor products are still worse.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone who said they only care about short term profits three, six, nine... months ago.
developer experience was never a strong suite of apple tbh.
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?
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.
>All the rumors about them investing toward a full self-driving car product is really odd ...
I can see technology companies looking at the automotive industry and thinking those traditional manufacturers are struggling with the technology side and that maybe they can do a better job.
I'll be surprised if it ever sees the light of day though, the car side is hard as well.
> But another view of the iPad famously was the Slashdot single-line review, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
That was said about the first iPod in 2001, not the first iPad in 2010, and it was said by (editor in chief) CmdrTaco himself.
The iPhone is a once-in-a-generation product. Virtually no company ever creates a product this successful. Why are you treating that level of success as if it’s the new norm that Apple must repeatedly reach in order to keep up?
What happens if they don’t catch the next wave? In that case, they will still be wildly successful. They’ve already had the iPad, which is the clear winner in the tablet market. They’ve already had the Apple Watch, which is the clear winner in the smartwatch market. They’ve already had the AirPods, which is the clear winner in the earphone market. None of these are the one-in-a-generation products that the iPhone is, yet they are all massive successes that bring in tonnes of money.
Apple will probably never have a hit as big as the iPhone ever again… but that’s perfectly fine and not at all incompatible with massive success and huge profits.
Blackberry?
Nokia?
No, the BlackBerry wasn’t even close to being the same magnitude hit as the iPhone.
Nokia is a company not a product. They’ve released a tremendous number of products, none of which came close to the iPhone.
We’re talking about a product that captured greater than 100% of the profits for the entire smartphone market one year. That brought in more revenue than most countries. How often does that happen?
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I don't want to have to configure anything. I don't want to deal with setting things up. I don't want to deal with the mediocrity of every other company out there.
I just want a phone that works well, works with everything (virtually nobody builds serious apps just for Android and not iOS), and allows me to go about the rest of my day with ease.
Just wish the quality control was the same as in the Jobs era.
There were big quality issues in that era too, we just don't remember them so well. Antenna-gate, the PowerBooks that basically barbecued your legs,...
Except they were fixed and fixed quickly. The MobileMe team had a battering session with SJ once..
I don't think Steve Jobs would let a 'Your battery is under 10%', 'interruptive' notification stay this long on a phone.
If you took out a screenshot of system preferences from OS X tiger or something and compared it to today, see how easy it is to find things on that one. Even with simple things such as the wording of 'General' vs 'Appearance'.
> I don't think Steve Jobs would let a 'Your battery is under 10%', 'interruptive' notification stay this long on a phone.
Why not ? He was happy with the giant, interruptive volume overlay for all those years.
You're doing something to initiate that, vs the battery one that interrupts your workflow without an action taken on your part.
Don't forget MobileMe.
I have never bought an Apple device that so much as had a spec of dust in the box.
But I’ve never had a Dell or HP laptop come without a bezel scratch or something like that. So in my books, Apple are still a league ahead on quality, even.
> I have never bought an Apple device that so much as had a spec of dust in the box
Of course not! If there was dust it would immediately brick the keyboard.
I’m talking about myriad software bugs.
it blows my mind every day how they screwed up somewhat very good native mail client. once I've updated to iOS14, daily:
- my mail will disappear. I would open a folder and see emails from 2007 at the top... wait and see he is loading them again and more are popping up.. takes few minutes to catch up with 2021.
- my contacts will not work when I start typing email. literally sometimes the do sometimes they don't
- emails that previously were formatted well, would be crashing with odd CSS issues I never seen before
- I would click email.. start reading, then it would shift to the next email.. on its own!
- I had few emails automatically disappear for good... only to find them in trash folder.
Its a disaster. A classical situation where after a system update I'm banging my head against the wall "why the heck did I do that??"
I really hate promoting Steve Jobs as some kind of miracle worker - But I swear there is a correlation between his death and the hard to quantify decline of software quality at Apple since.
I clearly remember at the time all of the rampant speculation about the downfall of Apple and thinking it's all bullshit, that the people doing the real work are still there and still care and his absence would make little difference, which was true immediately, but gradually over the last decade? perhaps individual work ethic is not enough in a large megacorporate structure to overcome corporate pressures. Perhaps, in such a large structure you really do need someone pushy and particular enough at the top to get emotional and pissed at people when small details suck to prevent it adding up over time.
My 12" Macbook's keyboard basically never worked and then the battery decided it wasn't happy and decided to bloat out which pushed out the bottom panel of the laptop. Really put me off their laptops, though I'm still a fan of iOS devices.
This is nothing but revisionist history.
Many Apple products in particular OSX was pretty bad during Jobs era.
The tibooks whose paint rubbed off from wrist rubbing? With the flexy keyboards? And the dvd drive that would flex into the disk if your wrist was resting above it? The 1st gen intel MacBooks which had a heat pipe that would short out the system when it got warm? The 24” iMacs that would cook the hard drive after 2 years due to bad thermals? (And eventually, the backlight too).
I haven't had issues with hardware other than the butterfly keyboard, but I have been astounded at issues with first-party software. For the last 48 hours podcasts have just not worked on my iPhone 13 Pro Max, for instance. Apple Music is a disaster. This might not be a QA really but OS updates have introduced bugs and constant crashes for those products for me.
It's not like there weren't issues then as well - https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/steve-jobs-says...
Yeah but those were exceptions. I’m talking about constant new bugs in operating system or software.
Like every odd numbered version of OS X? Leopard in particular.
(I will say one thing about leopard, I iinstalled a boot disk of it on an intel machine and I was able to boot an old ppc mini. That was impressive at the time)