Growing too fast is damaging to both culture and productivity. You have a bunch of people starting that are still learning. Depending on the job and the person it can take a full year to be fully competent in a job.
Apple was smart to move slower. They are probably one of the best run companies in the world.
And if you aren't promoted out of your competent zone, you will need to job hop out of your competent zone in order to obtain an actually competitive salary.
This is why I turn down promotions. A promotion (especially to a management position) means another step toward the sort of work I don't enjoy and don't want to do.
You have to be careful how you do it. I was punished for turning it down.
I was told that all I needed to do was work one extra hour per day (in addition to normal support, elevation, etc). Why would I take a position with higher expectations for a 7% raise and a 13% increase in hours - a rate cut? Plus, if I'm a high performer in my current role I should be getting bigger bonuses.
I have a skip level where the department head asked what my career goals were. And my answer was to stay in my role. After all, I worked as a tech lead for a year and a senior dev the year after, with no talk of advancement until what I previously mentioned (which would be a rate cut).
My manager got me from my desk the next work day and you could tell he was pissed. He asked me why I would say that sort of stuff and said that was "stupid". I generally tell the truth and am pretty honest - I guess I'm stupid that way.
I heard through a friend thst they wanted to get rid of me for those comments and I managed to switch teams in time. My career has been in a downward spiral since.
I can empathise. Telling them that you didn’t want a management-style position was probably the right move given all the reasons you laid out, but it’s also an implicit rejection of everything that the people around you are striving for. They equate management with productivity and respect. You’re thinking of it like the difference between a pilot and an air traffic controller. Jobs with vastly different purposes. But still, your decision called their value system into question in a very profound way. It’s not like saying that you don’t want that kind of job, it’s more like you didn’t want to work with them more closely. And most people, myself included, don’t have the emotional intelligence to handle rejection maturely. It all gets very petty.
I think (would hope?) that you can say this kind of thing is most companies, in the right way if you first ensure that your current level is the level at which "up and out" stops. In many companies that may be at Senior or above (or whatever they call the equivalent.
So if you say you want to stay at "intermediate", that's an "out" you're voting for. If you say it (in the politically correct way) at senior (or whatever is the correct level for it at your company), you can stay.
But taking the description of your situation at face value, I would have quit that company. Its values are so different from mine that I'd feel I have no business being there.
I didn't feel like I was burning bridges. I obviously worded it more gently and stuff.
It's consistently ranked as a best place to work. The written policies are great, but they don't matter because there are unwritten backroom policies. They are also one of the largest employers in the area and I can't move due to family issues. I was screwed, but sure, if one has other options, one should take them.
> You have to be careful how you do it. I was punished for turning it down.
Not only that - you may be perceived as a threat to anyone who takes the post that was offered to you and, since you turned it down, you have no actual power to control what happens.
I think I have the same type of brain as you. I say things all the time which to me are just obvious logic. And the reaction sometimes has been extremely bad.
I realized my “logic” brain scares the crap out of normies. I learned to ask other people for help with complex negotiations involving politics and emotion.
I realized I don’t process information the same as most people and this has been at the root of numerous career mistakes. Some of those mistakes were extremely damaging.
I recommend learning to run your decision making past people who are better in these areas than you. When it is a political issue especially. If you know you are not great at politics, you need to improve your decision making and avoid this problem in the future.
I learned after YEARS of stepping on landmines accidentally to be far more careful navigating internal politics. The costs of getting it wrong are devastating.
For example. If you indeed did the math and calculated (logically and truthfully) that management was a +7% increase in pay for a +13% increase in work that’s fine.
But if you used those exact words and numbers to a superior; they will view that as arrogant, selfish and entitled. Because their view is you should want to be the best you can be for the company and make a personal sacrifice to show you want the company to do well. That is basic “salary man 101” and doing the opposite of that (analyzing the exact math) is putting a target on your back as a “free thinking non team player individualist.” It’s career lethal to get that label
I suspect you may have a lot more Aspergers than you realize. Or maybe it’s a generational culture thing. And the most irritating thing about people who are on the spectrum is the refusal to introspect and self reflect about it.
I tried to coach a co worker who was similar. Dude was angering everyone. All the time. He didn’t want to hear that he had a problem.
I strongly recommend developing friends you can run these decisions by. It was literally a life saver for me. I realized I was like a blind person wandering around with a cane when it came to navigating politics and needed watch dogs who could analyze the situation for me so I didn’t blow my leg off.
In terms of this situation. It sounds like you did not prepare well for a long term career discussion. That is an extreme red flag. And didn’t take it seriously that a higher level authority was asking you for your plan.
You were being checked on whether you have a future at the organization. You failed.
I have failed these tests myself. I was late to a critical call with a VP. It ended my career. It showed lack of care or preparation and a lack of respect.
One late meeting ended my career.
I can’t blame you. If you are hyper logical in your mind you we’re probably just telling them that “2+2=4.”
The entire political career metagame that normies play does not have anything to do with logic. I personally don’t like it either.
It may also be generational. A GenZ who plans to coast and just get a paycheck while turning in a solid 30% effort might have given the same answer you did.
Some Aspergers dude wouldn’t know that this is career ending as an impression to give: “my plan is to do the minimum ser.” Is what your skip level hears.
It wasn’t what you said it was what they heard.
“I love the company and support you and want to grow into doing more, I’m so optimistic of the future.” That’s what they want to hear.
If you want to coast, at least say what I just said and give that impression. And you can probably carve out a way to mostly get left alone and negotiate your wants and workload. Or negotiate a project that allows you to coast. But holy shit don’t start doing comparative math on working hours versus pay.
Your company might not be doing well. If you don’t know that (they might not even tell you), they may really have needed you to do more.
I recommend working on your likability also.
Suspect your delivery and demeanor are just labeling you as an Aspergers robot.
Companies will tolerate incompetent, lazy, shiftless, unambitious workers who are positive, pleasant, non threatening, supportive, not “too smart,” keep their mouths shut, not crafty or aggressive. They will tolerate that forever. In fact they love it.
I suspect your demeanor and likability are bad. It starts with how you enter every discussion. Keep things light and funny. Never criticize, complain, bicker over hours or workloads.
Negotiate for what you want and have a clear plan and do it lightly and in a gentle way and watch the demeanor of those around you.
Doing Aspergers math on how much work they want you to do versus how much work you feel like doing: Holy shit. Don’t make that mistake again. That was me. Get a clue, learn to softened and likable. Don’t be logical. They hate that and they will hate you.
Possibly the family needs thing (which is true for me now, but wasn't then). I'm not sure it would have even worked though. Once they bring up the prospect of a promotion, they've already used a bunch of political capital to open that spot for you and it's an insult to say no. I get is different for other companies or even just other departments, but that's how it was for that one.
The other thing is, my company measures your engagement and potential by how ambitious you are. The reason they wanted to get rid of me is because they thought with an answer like that I would be disengaged and didn't have any potential.
I don't know if it helps, but what I've done when turning down promotions is to be sure they know that I'm pleased and honored by the offer and value it. And that the reason I'm turning it down is because I feel I can provide the greatest value to the company in the position I'm currently in.
All of which is true, and phrases things so they know you're not turning your nose up at anything and that you have the company's best interests in your mind.
Seems like a good idea, but with the risk that if you say you're choosing to stay "for the company" then the company can insist that actually it's better for them if you go to the new role. If you say it's about your family situation, then it's harder for them to insist.
Well, that's the sort of risk assessment that only you can make. My experience has been that a company won't do that, but you know yours better than I do.
But if I were to work at a place where I felt similarly, I would absolutely be looking for a job elsewhere.
I haven't necessarily turned down promotions, but I've been at my job for over 2.5 years and have no desire to make the jump from "developer" to "senior developer" like most do, because while I'm sure you get a nice pay bump, I know firsthand it just means you're in way more meetings (of which I already think I'm in too many of) and writing less code.
I don't even know what the extra pay would be, but it's probably not enough to be worth making my job less enjoyable.
It depends on what "senior developer" means, though. With my last 4 jobs, I was hired with the title "senior developer" -- but what it indicated was my pay grade, not my responsibilities. I was just a regular developer in them all.
For example, teaching new hires to do the job you just stopped doing in order to teach them - only for them to take over teaching the next batch as soon as they become somewhat competent.
Ideally it takes a full year for them to realize that you're not competent, at which point you hit your 1 year cliff and can snag 25% of your options or RSUs before you get PIP'ed out.
I mean, not quite. My performance at the same level went from high performer to low performer. So I was doing the role very well for a while, even getting good reviews for filling the role above mine (intermediate dev filling tech lead role). Performance gradually atrophied following my disenchantment and mistreatment.
Things that changed: subdivisions/teams, tech stacks, managers, areas of the business, enterprise procedures/processes. Basically everything. They even outsourced my job, then laid off my entire old department to ship that entire business unit to another contract company.
Then at home, kids and multiple family health issues. I guess my age plays a role too.
Comp is meant to stay stable at the agreed upon target for the first two years. There is a cash bonus for years 1 and 2 used to offset the vesting schedule. The final 2 years are really dependent on stock performance. For example, I basically will need AMZN stock to get increase by 25% from todays value by Jan 2025 to be making what I did for the first two years.
From what I've heard, yes they size their Y1 and Y2 cash bonuses such that your TC will be stable over the first 4 years as long as AMZN stock goes up 15%/year.
This is misleading. You get a prorated sign up bonus for the first two years that makes up for the back heavy vesting schedule. With all of the tech sectors stock price dropping, this has been a preferable outcome over the last two years.
Plus the cash sign on bonus worth as much as 50% of your stock. You actually come out ahead if you work at Amazon for only two years, that's why a lot of people duck out after two years.
That has always been a concern to me about being laid off in one of these massive layoffs efforts. If it is pretty much understood that in these moves the companies are removing dead weight, does that stigma get attached to you as you search for a new job.
It’s pretty hard to be choosy at that scale. I don’t get the impression that these large scale layoffs were targeting individual low performers, but are rather slashing entire business units. (I might be mistaken, but that’s the impression I’ve got)
Low-performers are not relevant to this discussion.
The accusation is that the companies hired more people than they knew what to do with / could apply productively in their business.
If such a basic task is beyond the capability of decisionmakers, who is to say that they are capable of collecting the feedback from rank-and-file employees required to assess who needs firing?
Mangers have many concerns apart from Performance, suppose we have Steve and Bob, and Bob is 50% more productive than Steve, but Steve is in the middle of delivering a critical project, millions of dollars are on the line. Meanwhile Bob is in between projects, and today they decided they must fire some staff, who do you think will get fired?
Also, is performance one metric? Suppose Steve writes worse code, but the business folks love his presentations, he is really good at explaining the issues facing the team. They can put Steve in front of a corporate client and win business. They never see much of Bob, even thought he is doing most of the 'real' work, so who is more valuable?
Unless you are dealing with someone totally incompetent, these questions are usually 'which skillset do we need most' and they are not so simple.
This is not as true as you think, but it does depend on the specific company. When I've been part of the hiring process at various companies, I've never seen anyone penalized for having been laid off.
My experience is in cloud and I can give some insight on what we were thinking at this time. In cloud, infrastructure is key and our theory was that we needed to beat the other companies in terms of scale and capability. So we were aggressively trying to scale to get ahead of the competition. The environment was highly competitive all the way down to even the PCBA manufacturers. As an example, at one company, to get their "A teams" you need to be their top customer in terms of volume.
So while it looks odd by comparison, cloud providers were in a bit of a different environment than Apple.
there is a cultural mindset especially among startups that it's better to be alive and having to make layoffs than to move conservatively, have a faster mover overtake you and push you out of the market, and be dead. "The graveyards are full of businesses that moved appropriately for the market conditions", to warp a saying.
apple is an enormously stable company in ways that (to be very honest) even most other tech blue-chips are not. even microsoft or google have the sword of damocles hanging over them - given a sufficiently long and severe position of mismanagement it is possible that even google or MS could be unseated or even go under. arguably that is the trajectory MS was on in the 00s, and google could be similarly unseated by AI.
intel would be a great real-world example of that. Even 10 years ago the thought of big blue losing control was unthinkable, un-thinkable. And here we are, they're circling the drain right now and need to make very deep cuts and refocus on the essentials or they're going to be in bankruptcy in 5-10 years, during a down market in general and a specific market that they glutted during the pandemic (a lot of customers have enough PCs/laptops/servers for quite a while). And in contrast Apple is still making money hand-over-fist despite the market conditions - now that's stability.
I'm not going to say that google or MS doubling their size on a short-term timescale sounds like a good idea but it's a ride-or-die industry, you're pretty much either getting bigger or getting smaller, and mere homeostasis is a rare luxury.
This is kind of a west coast SV/social/adtech type of startup mentality.
Working east coast in more traditional tech companies this has never really been a thing. It's always been conservative, staying profitable, etc.. It is the older way.
Apple, MS, etc.. were built this way too of course.
Well, of course, how many of the east coast minicomputer companies are still around? That said, I agree in general, there's probably a general difference in approach between east coast and west coast. (And the mix of companies--and government--is generally different and reflects that.)
I use "Eternal September" for the cultural effect on businesses that suddenly gorge themselves on new hires that have no exposure to the existing culture or context. The negative effects are loosely parallel to what happens when a social medium breaks out of being a subculture and goes mainstream.
Apple does a lot right. However, I find their insistence on keeping their teams in an office to be strange. My experience with Apple internally was an overly positive and optimistic culture, to the point where they had a hard time identifying, or discussing, what did not work well.
Aside from all the talk about the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, etc. I found Apple to be very conservative and buttoned up, which I found very reassuring. I've never worked anywhere else in the FAANG-sphere, but it seemed like the polar opposite of "Googley".
Apple built one of the most expensive office complexes in the world. They are going to want people in the office.
Additionally they deal a lot with hardware design. Being in the office is going to be easier for certain things, particularly when you are as secretive as Apple.
This comes directly from Steve Jobs legacy. He talked a lot about the value of small teams and how they self regulate but can breakup if they grow too quickly.
Not that I have a rigorous source, but I feel we can generally agree the following:
New hires take anywhere from 3 months to 8 months or more depending on the position to ramp up
During ramp up period, there’s a productivity toll taken on the team via teaching the new hire
Thus during this time, productivity is hampered
——
For culture, I think it’s a bit more subjective. But if you have a team of 5 who then gets 1 new hire to teach over 6 months, generally it allows them to “mesh” better in the culture.
Both in terms of team mates learning about the new hire, and the new hire having room to fit in within the culture, and bring their own value to the team (assuming an already existing good culture.
Now say you have 3 new hires on a team of 5. If we further presume productivity is also hampered more as more people are onboarded at once, that creates additional stress on the team to teach them.
Further, it could be harder to have the new hires feel part of the team if less time is spent getting to know each one. But assume this isn’t the case:
Business will most likely expect at least the same productivity from the team. Now they’re stressed from teaching, higher expectations on their output (onboarding a team member is tiring work), and the business is going to soon expect productivity to increase further after headcount is upped by over 50% in this example.
Now take that, and add on new teams created to interact with, additional communication layers, and it’s pretty straightforward to assume growing too fast can be negative
Cash flow solves everything, or profit solves everything are perhaps better phrases, since apparently people forgot that the purpose of a company is to make profit, not just revenue.
You can have run a company for zero profit and it can still be a benefit to society, so no the "purpose of a company is to make profit" is not necessarily true.
"If we want to know what a business is, we have to start with its purpose. And the purpose must lie outside the business itself. In fact, it must lie in society, since a business enterprise is an organ of society. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. The customer is a foundation of a business and keeps it in existence. The customer alone gives employment. And it is to supply the customer that society entrusts wealth-producing resources to the business enterprise.
Because it is the purpose to create a customer, any business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. These are the entrepreneurial functions. Marketing is the distinguishing, the unique function of the business."
> You can have run a company for zero profit and it can still be a benefit to society, so no the "purpose of a company is to make profit" is not necessarily true.
On one hand, fair. Technically correct.
On the other hand basically all laymen use the word "company" to mean for-profit corporation, and pretty much everyone who wants to talk about corporations that are designed not to make a profit use the term "non-profit".
I think you've ignored the context in which the comment was made.
> I think you've ignored the context in which the comment was made.
I would argue you did. The parent was being pedantic about the saying "revenue solves everything" and tried to make seem as if profit is the be-end-all. My overall point is still consistent with Drucker's "the purpose of a company is to create customers". If you're in a bull market and you hire like crazy to achieve the creation of customers, then hiring like crazy is NOT WRONG.
> On the other hand basically all laymen use the word "company" to mean for-profit corporation
P.S. - Amazon ran without profit for 10 years. Did we magically call them a non-profit for 10 years and then a company thereafter?
> and tried to make seem as if profit is the be-end-all
That statement was paired with a teleological statement about the purpose of a company. When paired with the common usage of the word "company", the statement becomes tautological. Admittedly, this isn't the most insightful realization ever, but the point from the comment was that people forget that a profit needs to be extracted.
> My overall point is still consistent with Drucker's "the purpose of a company is to create customers".
And, pray-tell, why do you think companies want customers, if not for eventual profit?
> Amazon ran without profit for 10 years. Did we magically call them a non-profit for 10 years and then a company thereafter?
Amazon made an intentional decision to re-invest profits, as a gamble that it would lead to greater profits later. That's not refraining from profit, but just operating on a time-scale that isn't quarter to quarter.
> [Apple is] probably one of the best run companies in the world.
I would argue that perhaps Apple's business side of things is arguably well-run. I personally disagree; I think that since Tim Cook has taken over, Apple's business focus is more on short-term gains instead of long-term quality.
But I would also strongly argue that their software side of things has been trending downward (especially in terms of quality) since Tim Cook took over.
>...more on short-term gains instead of long-term quality...
Considering that Tim has been CEO for 11 1/2 years now, and things are still going incredibly well for Apple...it seems pretty hard to argue that he is too focused on the short term.
(FWIW, I mostly agree about their software quality.)
I people tend to have a bit of rose tinted glasses on about Apple's software quality of yore. There have always been big stability issues with new features and apps. And they've simply never been good at the UX for anything that involves a network connection or has to sync across multiple systems (besides Safari). The big difference is that more and more computing requires syncing and networking, which is their traditional weak point.
> There have always been big stability issues with new features and apps.
But they got fixed. At times there were 2 full years between major Mac OS X releases. 2 years of bug fix updates. And that was when Apple only had 1 major operating system! Now with the relentless yearly schedule, there's never time to fix bugs before they start working on the next big thing and adding brand new bugs. The problems just keep piling up year after year. The software is now underwater in technical debt.
Part of OS stability is simply not shipping new major versions too often. The new major versions are always buggier than the previous major version with many minor patches. Not to mention, Apple now pushes everyone to install the latest OS immediately. In the old days, you had to go out to the store and buy a new Mac OS X version on disc, so everyone wasn't upgrading to 10.N.0 on day one. Slower adoption means that fewer consumers have to suffer the early growing pains of new software.
Been on macOS since 10.3. In general, the .1 or .2 patches were solid, and if one release seemed like a stinker the next one tick-tocked its way into stability/quality pretty reliably, and staying on N-1 version while N was out was a pretty good choice if you wanted to keep your setup as-is without falling TOO far behind.
Also, Safari was really bad, early on. It was rendered unusable for me when a runaway bookmark sync problem with iCloud turned the default set of bookmarks into 30+ thousand copies.
You're thinking of recent Apple. You have to consider the first half of Apple's lifetime too.
Especially in the second half of the 1990s Apple was in very very tough shape due to poor software and uncompetitive hardware. Their fans wouldn't admit it but the company definitely knew what they were up against.
There's pretty much been no point 2000-present where Apple quality has been worse than it was Pre-2000, and their prices have never been more competitive either.
Speaking of software quality, anyone notice in Apple Music how the categories all start with Apple? Apple Dance music, Apple Country, Apple Pop... like are they trying to make it intentionally difficult for me to use my eyes to find music? I know that I'm using Apple Music... why does every category need to remind me of that while simultaneously impeding my ability to locate things alphabetically? Of course, when I use Siri I can just say "play Dance music" and it works. Hmm.
It could be worse. If you were on Android, about half of Google's 1P apps start with "Google", and about half don't, even ones that probably should (like Google Home).
> anyone notice in Apple Music how the categories all start with Apple?
No-- where are you seeing this?
Almost nothing in the Apple Music app on iOS or MacOS starts with "Apple Music" for me. Only really the "Apple Music" radio stations, which is necessary to distinguish them from the generic playlists and third-party radio stations.
And what's the last revolutionary consumer technology that has come out of Apple? The original successful Macs, the iPod, the iPhone, iTunes, those were all under Jobs.
I don't know about revolutionary, but Apple's service revenue alone for 2022 was larger than the revenue of McDonald’s and Nike combined. Things can be wild runaway successes without being revolutionary.
You might dismiss it, but for me AirPods are the biggest QOL improvement from tech since smartphones. Bluetooth headphones were atrociously hard to use before them.
apple's bluetooth experience is so refined it's practically revolutionary in general. I used to fight bluetooth mouse/keyboard problems all the damn time, I'd have keyboards that suddenly stopped responding or would repeat a key over and over again, mice that would suddenly scroll like an inch at a time, etc. The best experiences were on an Intel NUC that might only have an issue once a day or a couple times a week, but it still was occasionally temperamental and barring that every single other platform I've used ranged somewhere between "highly flaky" and "completely unusable". When it's happening multiple times per day it's just not acceptable.
even a dell latitude business laptop is something else I'd consider that should probably be close to the intel nuc level of "mostly works with minimal flakiness" but it flatly was not... and the intel NUC was extremely flaky compared to everything apple I've used. And everything besides the NUC that used Intel wireless chipsets was a complete disaster that was basically unusable. When I have to put a USB bluetooth adapter in my B550 motherboard to get something that works... yeah.
know what I haven't had to fuck with since getting an intel macbook for work, and a M1 MBA for around the home? bluetooth problems. somehow apple can figure it out, even when using that same flaky intel hardware. nowadays I can just reliably assume that any connection problem means my peripheral has a dead battery for some reason.
When the iPhone was introduced , there were already 1 billion phones being sold each year. Sj said he wanted Apple to sell 10 million to capture 1% of the market.
There can’t really be anything bigger than the phone market that has 90%+ world wide penetration.
I don't know, people have been lamenting the poor quality of Apple software and how much better it was in the old days since I got my first Mac in 2007, at least that's when I became aware of the complaints. If it was really on a substantial continual down trend from then, by now nothing would work at all. Apple continues to invest massively in software, that means a ton of new code, which means a ton of new bugs. You can't develop new software and not have quality issues.
Apple continues to make extremely long term highly strategic investments. You don't get to develop a highly original, industry leading SOC architecture without long term investment in technology. Bankrolling new process node development and thereby locking in capacity in strategic contracts doesn't happen by accident or on a whim. Development and implementation of the Apple watch happened entirely in the post-Jobs era.
So I just don't see it, they continue to commit to heavy long term investment in capital intensive technology projects and innovative new products. Not everything works out. The touch bar and butterfly keyboards were notable misses. But then that's always been true. I look at the phones, desktops, laptops, watch, Airpods, iPads, etc. They're the most Apple-y products Apple has ever produced, and not a single one of them is a me-to product slapped together to ride a trend.
Yeah - people have been saying the mac software has been in decline for as long as there's been mac software. If you have enough users some fraction of them are going to get hit by some rare bug and declare the software is crap, even if it is 0.001% of the users.
My m1 mbp is the best laptop I've ever owned, and I've owned a lot. I don't really use any mac software though - just a terminal, emacs, and a web browser. Macos just stays out of the way and causes no problems. I routinely get 1 or 2 months of uptime - only ever needing to reboot to apply system updates. Maybe if I used more mac software I would see this supposed decline.
It was a very dark era for Apple, but the Power Computing years were the best time to be an Apple fanboy IMO. You had commodity firebreathing PC hardware running OS 8 better than Macs did, more ports and connectivity, the software was best-in-class, and this was the era with no spyware, telemetry and all the BS we face now.
And yes, I was still buying legit Macs and software, and a lot of stock when it was at $11. It was a blast, I tell you.
Uhh, speak for yourself. As a fanboy myself back then, it was kinda terrifying. Sure Power Computing was able to bump the bus speed beyond what Apple seemed to to able to do, but they also cannibalized Apple’s hardware market which they needed to stay alive. Also it became clear that the wheels were falling off the “new” OS rewrite (Rhapsody) project with no real plan for remedying. It was scary times when Microsoft had to help bail them out. Honestly, buying NeXT was the accidentally smartest move Apple executives made. I remember how cool BeOS was but was glad they chose NeXTStep over it. Mostly, because I was a Unix fanboy by that time too.
Ehh, Apple has some big misses. Their software objectively sucks. OS X has gotten buggier and slower over the years. I traded “it just works” for the speed and customization of linux years ago and would _really_ like the benefits of Apple hardware but can’t bite the bullet on Apple software (Asahi isn’t in a good enough spot yet to be my primary computer imo).
The iPad pro line is a travesty. IPadOS is horrible, Apple need to take it out back and shoot it. The hardware fits a great niche but Apple have ruined it with their gimmicky software.
IPhones have been getting bigger, heavier, and last less time with each generation. I recently upgraded from the 11 to the 14 pro, and the hardware feels strictly worse. It’s snappier and has a digital island, but it’s significantly heavier and is the first iPhone I’ve ever really been worried about dying during the day (even after turning off the stupid always on display).
AirPods have probably been their biggest win in recent years. The original were amazing, Pros, and Pro 2 were significant upgrades and they’re a big reason (along w/ apple ecosystem integration) I won’t jump ship for android. Maxs are horrible, heavy, and I just don’t understand why people like them at all (bose + sony both make better headphones for cheaper here).
> OS X has gotten buggier and slower over the years. I traded “it just works” for the speed and customization of linux years ago
If you have been using Linux for years, how come you've been experiencing increasing number of OS X bugs and performance degradation? I thought you've been running Linux for years?
The basic iPads don’t have laminated displays, are smaller, heavier and come with older CPUs and less memory. So the decision for me is between iPad Air and Pro. Frankly which makes the best buy varies. My current iPad is an M1 Pro that’s just over a year old, but my brother bought one last summer and got an Air, and if I’d been buying one then I’d have done the same. Sometimes it comes down to which was refreshed most recently. I just look at the size, weight, screen features, processor, memory, storage tiers and price then see what is the most compelling package. 14 months ago it was a Pro. 6 months later it was an Air.
Yeah, I mean you’ve more or less reiterated what I said. The hardware is very nice. And if you play a game where you calculate the hardware/$, the iPad pro makes sense.
When you really ask yourself what workload you’re doing on an iPad that requires anything more than an A16 is … I think you’ll find there isn’t much. You’re limited to iPad apps. You can’t even install a browser that isn’t a safari skin. Multitasking is horrible. The mouse/touch interface has weird janky things (like text selection).
You don’t have an escape key or a function row, so even many web apps are broken.
The iPad pro is about the same price as an M2 Macbook Air, and significantly more expensive than an M1 Macbook Air. While the hardware looks comparable, the software makes the hardware more or less useless.
For something that’s useless, I get an incredible amount of use out of it. Honestly a pro is probably overkill for me, but I use my iPad a ton every day. I use multitasking a fair bit. I’m actually typing this in a floating browser panel on top of Teams. iPads last seemingly forever, my hand me down iPad 2 was being used by a relative and got retired a few months ago. So I go for the best experience because multiplied by the use I get out of it, it’s worth it.
So, 120hz is only on the 12.9. If it’s worth twice the price to you, that’s your decision.
The apple pencil difference is magnetic charging and magnetic storage on the side of the ipad. Which is nice, but it also means you have the camera in the absolutely most annoying spot in the world. Good luck using faceID while you’re browsing and you’re always going to have the worst angle/look like you’re staring into space during video calls.
iPadOS just doesn’t cut it for multi-tasking/any pro workload that would justify an M2 chip
Usually people decrying short-termism mean focuses on quarters rather than years. Are you saying Cook’s 10+ years that took the company from $100B/year to $400B/year are the short term, and it is at the expense of the next 90 years?
> Are you saying Cook’s 10+ years that took the company from $100B/year to $400B/year are the short term
Yes, however it's clearly successful.
> Are you saying Cook’s 10+ years that took the company is at the expense of the next 90 years?
Apple is slowly pulling away consumer ownership of their devices and is turning into an advertisement company. I honestly believe that is at the expense of the next 90 years. And this is rather more the point that I tried to make: short term profits at the expense of long-term customer satisfaction.
It is possible, with a lot of effort, that Apple could go from advertising representing 1% of revenue to maybe 10% over the next 10 years. I don't think that's realistic, but maybe. "Turning into an advertising company" is maybe overstating?
Besides, the whole reason Apple is in advertising is that free-with-ads is an important business model for media and developers, and the other players are pretty horrible. Me, I hate ads and will always pay directly for apps/media, and I don't like what Apple's doing in ads. But I think you're being a little over-dramatic there.
Look, if Apple just made the watch open source with fully-user-upgradable parts and modular CPU + display + battery, and a command line interface, they would reach dozens of new customers.
> “Apple is doomed any day now”. That’s been the narrative for over 40 years.
And they almost went out of business at least twice, once they survived because MS bailed them out.
Apple pre-iPod was a source of amusing commercials. Pre iPhone they were the catalyst for change in the music industry, but they were still a consumer goods company with one product that had pretty wide, but still overall limited appeal.
Apple still doesn't have a diversified revenue stream. If Microsoft had to stop selling Windows today, they'd still make a fortune from Office. If Microsoft had to stop selling Office and Windows today, they'd still make a (much smaller) fortune from Azure.
Just Mac revenue by itself would be the envy of most companies.
But you can easily look at Apple’s revenue breakdown between Mac, iPads, services, wearables, etc and see that it is well diversified.
And Microsoft never “bailed them out”. Before the MS deal was signed, Apple had already gotten a line of credit for a couple of billion. The $250 million that Microsoft invested in Apple was nothing.
Apple turned around and used $100 million to buy out PowerComputings Mac license. It didn’t become profitable for another two years. The little money that Microsoft invested didn’t make a difference.
Microsoft’s financial contribution was nothing, but Office on Mac was huge. Had there been some third OS that was thriving so Microsoft didn’t feel the need to prop Apple up for antitrust reasons, the world would be different.
But so what? I can’t believe someone is seriously arguing that the failures of the Scully era are somehow damning to Apple under Cook. Sure, every company can fail. Apple is the most profitable company in the world right now, so it’s an odd time to sing doom songs.
What % of those wearables and services are tied to devices?
If iPhones vanished tomorrow, how much trouble would Apple be in? Wearables are 100% attach rate to iPhone, and I'd presume so are the vast majority of service subscribers.
> Before the MS deal was signed, Apple had already gotten a line of credit for a couple of billion. The $250 million that Microsoft invested in Apple was nothing.
As others said, the software support, browser + office were huge.
Seeing that Apple and Microsoft both have a history of staying relevant for over 45 years, Microsoft has been one of the most valuable companies in the world for two decades and Apple for over a decade, I would bet on these two companies before any other company.
But it’s not good enough just to be right, you have to be right at the right time. How many products categories failed during the dot com bust that are doing well now?
It’s like me predicting the heat death of the sun. There is a big difference between saying it will happen eventually and that it will happen tomorrow.
> They are probably one of the best run companies in the world.
I would disagree with this. Although their risk is spread much better than it was in the early 00s, a huge amount of their recurring revenue right now teeters on the brink of destruction in the form of their 30% app store cut and the walled-garden nature of their app store. All it would take is a morally principled, non-lobbied regulator to step in and regulate that down to something reasonable like 5% or 3% and require allowing third party app stores (both actions would be equivalent economically because their current fee only works because of their monopoly), and I don't see someting like this not happening in the next decade.
It will be a huge and deserved adjustment when this does happen, and stock speculation will only amplify the blow in the form of lost stock value. There are many, many long-time holders of apple stock who might see the threat of such an event as a time to finally sell. Then we'll see how much value is really there.
Additionally, they have sunk billions of dollars in a brand new campus at a time when WFH is here to stay. That investment will also likely turn out to be worthless in the coming decades as the value of CRE races to $0.
So you're saying Apple isn't a well run company because they haven't properly managed their regulatory risk around the app store? What should they do hire more lobbyists? Not have built a $100 billion/year business because of a vague threat of future regulatory change?
We've seen pushback on the 30% but mostly for a select group of major companies who want to offer alternative payments. The majority of apps aren't going to be asking customers for their credit cards separately vs a single "subscribe" button, nor do they all have CCs already in their existing DBs. Even worst case if 25% of the revenue gets lost due to secondary subscription payment support (assuming they don't somehow still take a cut), that 75% is still a monster that could support Apple for a long time.
I'm saying they have over-extended to the point where they are begging for regulation. Much wiser to not over-extend to the point where regulators are pissed off. Now they could lose it all instead of having a more reasonable rate.
At this point they should self-regulate, like any misbehaving child who realizes they are in the wrong should before they get punished. It's not a risk and it's not going to hurt their stock if it's self-imposed. People always praise anything that comes from within with Apple so it would actually be a pretty savvy play, given what's on the horizon.
Have you ever sold anything in a retail channel such as Walmart or Target? Do you know how much they charge to put your product on their shelves?
Welcome to the world of retail!
If Apple tried to make it so that you couldn't make an app and offer it both on Android and Apple, i.e. it had to be an Apple exclusive, then I'd say you have a point. The regulators aren't concerned with the 30%. Their concern is with the fact you can't go to another store and shop for a better price. THAT is what they're trying to fix. Watch out though - deregulation and market competition all-too-often leads to higher prices. People always act surprised by this.
So what should they have done? Conceded to a group of Epic type companies on a VIP-type basis so regulators don't eat their lucrative subscription model? Without bigco lobbying the gov I doubt there'd be as much regulatory pressure. So the best bet might have been to work with the major companies hiring lobbyists and getting PR.
Rumour is Apple is opening up side-loading so the "walled garden" thing might be neutered.
No no they should have never had it above 10% to begin with. The case with Epic never should have needed to happen. They've been over-extended all along.
I agree that the cut is too big, but its entirely reasonable to think that setting and keeping the cut at 30% is the rational profit-maximizing course even in a long run that includes new laws throttling them to some lower number.
Playing the game according to the current rules seems preferable than playing the game according to rules that may or may not come into existence.
Also, they will still be one of the, if not most, profitable businesses in the world even if they lose all the App Store revenue, so it does not seem reasonable to expect more.
Companies of this size need to play the long game, but quarterly OKRs and a beuracratic structure ensure they only ever play the short game. The 30% is great this quarter and next quarter, and every quarter until the quarter where it goes away completely. Keeping it this high is extremely risky behavior, literally taunting for regulation.
Commenting on the campus bit.... Apple makes devices, not just software. Good luck developing device from home and dealing with the constant headache of shipping samples around the world. The campus was not a mistake.
Trusted engineers get to take home prototypes. Usually also loaned a maxed out Mac Pro so they have something with enough memory to unpack MacOS's built in system process recording mode. (digging through a 5 minute recording of MacOS took ~~200GB of system memory to unpack and evaluate.)
I assume by your answer that you work at Apple or know someone who works there so let me clarify that I'm talking about the messy work that happens before you have a take home prototype for a device. I'm talking about building the prototype with in-house machinery before asking the manufacturer to make samples at the factory. If you do work at Apple, do you hand assemble prototypes at the office or do you just ask the manufacturer to build them and overnight them to your house? If so, do you have lab equipment at home to inspect and test it?
> regulate that down to something reasonable like 5% or 3%
How is 5% "reasonable?" Who determines that? That's not something up for a vote -- that's up to the market.
Let's say you have an iOS app.
If you sell it for $5 on the App Store, you keep $3.5. And you sell 100,000.
App Store nets you $350k.
And let's say you sold the app direct to users and did everything yourself:
$5 sales price, you keep $5 however, you also have to collect and remit sales tax for jurisdictions in which you sell. Your street price is $5 + tax, and you keep the $5 but you incur some expense for sales tax compliance.
You have to use a payment processor. That's 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. So if you sold 100k apps at $5, that's $455,500 in revenue after credit card fees are paid.
However, there's also chargebacks. Chargeback ratio averages roughly 0.6% across all industries (it's much higher for digital goods and CNP transactions -- so let's call it 1.5%) So from 100k sales, you really sell 98,5000, so your revenue is $448,667 (after cc fees.) However, you have 1500 in chargebacks that cost $20 each (per stripe.). So that's $30k in chargeback fees. So now your revenue is $418,667. Apple rarely loses chargebacks and refunds are extremely rare. So that sales loss is negligible.
You also have to set up a server to serve the downloads and pay hosting, storage, and bandwidth. As well as shipping updates to all of your customers. As well as ensuring updates are compatible for any iOS version your customers might be using. There's going to be some level of customer support required. That's a non-zero cost.
Finally, how are people going to discover your app? You aren't on any app stores, so you have to advertise. You'll need to market. And -- convince people that you aren't going to infect their device with malware.
Let's just assume that you sell just as many outside the App Store as you would doing it yourself. (That won't happen, but let's assume your marketing is so good that it's the case.)
The difference is $419-$350k. (That's assuming zero expense for hosting, marketing, customer support, etc.) So you're "losing" $69k per year. After tax however -- $280k from the App Store, $335k doing it yourself. So $55k additional. Yet you have hosting, customer support, marketing -- etc. $55k per year as a salary for doing those tasks is tiny and that doesn't include the cost of the hosting and bandwidth.
This is the real problem, the crApp Store race to the bottom. Apple's cut was never really the problem. The cut is obscene, but only because the prices are already obscenely low. I'd be happy to give Apple 50% if I could sell my software for higher prices.
> And you sell 100,000.
Good luck with that.
> You also have to set up a server to serve the downloads and pay hosting, storage, and bandwidth.
Cheap.
> As well as shipping updates to all of your customers. As well as ensuring updates are compatible for any iOS version your customers might be using. There's going to be some level of customer support required.
You have to do these things anyway.
> Finally, how are people going to discover your app? You aren't on any app stores, so you have to advertise. You'll need to market. And -- convince people that you aren't going to infect their device with malware.
You have to do all of this stuff regardless of whether you're in the App Store. As an App Store developer myself, I can tell you that Apple absolutely does not do these things for you.
Notice how many Mac developers, given the choice, choose to distribute themselves rather than via the Mac App Store. They don't see the App Store as a win like you do.
> How is 5% "reasonable?" Who determines that? That's not something up for a vote -- that's up to the market.
If you ask Apple themselves to split the payment processing from the hosting and 'marketing', they claim it's 3% and 27%.
So if you could use their payment processing by itself, that would put you at $485k before server costs, not $419k. So you can have very nice servers and over a third more revenue.
You'll have to decide whether being in the main app store is important enough to pay a big percentage. And advertising and updates and customer support are costs either way, so please don't imply you only pay them if you avoid the app store.
> So if you could use their payment processing by itself, that would put you at $485k before server costs, not $419k. So you can have very nice servers and over a third more revenue.
Most companies don't do their own payment processing. They have accounts with companies that provide merchant services (e.g. WorldPay, Ayden, various investment banks) under specially negotiated contracts. These contracts would cover contingencies that wouldn't apply to "normal" customers and there's obviously a premium to pay for that. What you're demanding is the financial equivalent of adding millions of people to an individual's credit card account.
Why would you think a for-profit company (or for that matter, any financially sensible individual) would should share the financial benefits its negotiated for itself with millions of others? Not only would Apple be introduced to additional legal and financial liability, but so would the payment processor.
You're ignoring my point almost entirely. I'm sorry for not adding "the equivalent of their payment processing". If Apple can do it for 3%, I'm sure other companies could do it for 4.5%, and the rest of my argument doesn't change at all.
Though I do have an answer to "why"! It's because Apple claims they want to be in charge of payments to protect their users. Even if we ignore the "charge slightly more and make tons of money" plan.
> Though I do have an answer to "why"! It's because Apple claims they want to be in charge of payments to protect their users. Even if we ignore the "charge slightly more and make tons of money" plan.
There's a difference between being charging payments as a service and acting as a financial fiduciary on behalf millions of developers. I don't think you understand the legal gravity of the latter.
Apple was smart to move slower. They are probably one of the best run companies in the world.