- Kind of telling that
1, the iPhone outsells every other category by 5-7x ratio, and the Mac (which includes everything from Macbooks to Mac Minis to iMacs) barely sells more than the iPad.
2, Services (iCloud, apps, music, TV shows etc.) now bigger than every other category, except the iPhone, combined
Basically 76% of the sales are iPhones and Services
(millions)
iPhone $209,586
Mac $33,708
iPad $28,023
Wearables, Home and Accessories $35,686
Services $109,158
Total $416,161
Next 5 years or so (or even less) both the iPad and the Wearables, Home and Accessories category will overtake the sales of Macs.
- I really don't get how people do research work (like finding good flight tickets, or comparing hotels to stay in for a trip) without a computer. I really cannot stand seeing websites in a small screen without the ability to quickly open 4 browser windows with 4 tabs each for different combinations of dates, for example.
- I have literally watched my in-laws plan and book a vacation from their smartphones. From their house, where they also have computers.
They're quite different from my side of the family, but the biggest thing is that they've never been big planners. Everything is by the seat of their pants. If you're like that, you're probably OK with taking one of the first three SEO-optimized search results and making it work.
Meanwhile, I'm not booking anything until I have a proposed itinerary.
- There's a book out there (I don't remember the author, title, or anything really) written by a guy who traveled around the world, over several years, in a VW bus(?). The thing that struck me is, he got home within a couple days of when he planned to, before he even took off. The entire trip was planned.
- I find it so charming that people from the first world just assume that unplanned trips are the norm, and coming back as per expectation is can sometimes be surprising (even if it's a very long trip).
Do take a look at what people from developing countries go through - sometimes you cannot even get a visa without all your lodging booked and a confirmed return flight ticket.
- Or you are accepted to go to a conference in the USA to present your research and the USA conveniently grants your visa for you one week after the conference occurs.
- How often do you get a meaningfully better result than google.com/flights? Outside of booking with points, it's all basically the same thing and I can book on google on my phone in under a minute
- I could go into detail how being able to have a dozen tabs open almost always gives a better result than simply picking the first flight on google flights. But let's assume there's no difference:
Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes? If you have the choice to use a real computer for this, then why not? It's not like booking a big trip is something you do while sitting on a bus.
Then of course there's accommodation, itineraries, visas, trip research...
- Apparently the anxiety of making big purchases on phones is only a thing for the millennials and not really a thing for the younger generation.
- Which it should be noted, may not even have a laptop. Probably not a desktop even.
- > Probably not a desktop even.
I'd be more surprised if they had a desktop than a laptop.
- Gaming PCs are very often desktops, though I think those tend to be used more like consoles nowadays, not general purpose computers.
- My anecdata is that the households I know that have desktops are gamers, yes, but:
- the desktops in question tend to be "exclusively" used by one member of the household
- the desktop owners usually also have a laptop
- the desktop-owning households are well in the minority of households I know
- just for the record, I completely agree that _research_ is way easier on a computer.
But i take issue with this concern:
> Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes?
My iphone (safari) auto-fills almost all of those details. It’s also likely that semi-frequent travelers have an account with the airline in question, so passport and TSA precheck info is pre-saved too.
It’s simply a non-issue in my experience.
- My personal experience is that Chrome on my PC is more reliable/predictable than Safari on my iPad.
Now I am wondering if this is Safari/Chrome thing and not a mobile/desktop thing.
Certainly if the autofill doesn't work and I do need to to type it in, the PC is way easier. I'm thinking international travel for 5 people - all my responsibility and I don't want to get held up half way across the world when no one has slept for a day, work visas beign contingent on correctness, etc.
- Indeed. I often complete purchases via mobile because the experience is better. For example, using Apple Pay. The ability to have details auto-fill works on desktop, but it works far better on mobile I find.
The idea of manually typing any of this stuff in is very old fashioned.
- For tasks like planning travel I often am trying to optimize multiple goals at once. I might find cheaper flights on certain days but more expensive hotels. This is much easier on larger screens because you can view more information side by side.
- I live in a place where I have to fly to a nearby bigger airport to go anywhere outside my province. In other words, everything is a compromise on routing, layovers and cost. When I lived in a big city, it was just timing and cost that mattered.
Frequently it isn't that google flights on a phone doesn't find the same flight, its that it is much easier to figure out the tradeoffs with more screen real estate. E.g. I can see that a flight is cheaper, but it involves mixing airlines, and a terminal change that I probably can't trust on a tight schedule in winter.
- Use an iPhone or Macbook Pro, pay more.
Use an Android or Linux laptop, pay less.
Not kidding, pricing is based on these bullshit assumptions more than you might think. For the German market, for example, it's also cheaper to buy tickets on Thursday evening around 22:00-23:30. Paid around 400$ less for a 2k trip, multiple times, reproducibly, not depending on seasons or years.
- This. its enough to check a couple of alternatives, the prices are nearly the same most of the time. If you can move dates for your travel, that is far more impactful, like if you have the option to avoid major holidays or such. Note that I am not in the US, and I do agree that it is much better to do research on my desktop!
- Even that presumes you already know when you’ll want to leave and come back. For me, I’ve got a vague idea, but it’ll depend on how much time I want to spend there. And that’ll be based on what I want to do, which may only be available certain days of the week or times of day. And that’s before factoring in the prices of those things relative to their availability and how much I want to do them.
To figure all this out, I’m going to need to keep notes across several browser tabs, likely while communicating asynchronously with whoever else is going on the trip. All of this is dramatically easier with an actual computer.
- Dude, you've got to check every possible combination of departure and arrival dates from each different nearby airport then check everything again as one ways using different carriers then compare paying cash to using points then compare Airbnb to hotels then recheck the flights to make sure that paying slightly more for different dates or routes wouldn't be offset by saving more on the hotel... then you can book. Takes about 50 tabs.
- At this point, don't AI agents help a lot with this and diminish the need for the workflow you're describing?
- Why would you trust current gen AI to make decisions when paying thousands of dollars for flights and hotels? That’s an insane amount of risk to take.
- You will still need to verify their hallucinations.
- It's not that you get a meaningfully better result. It is that you can open an arbitrary number of results and trivially compare them side by side. Essentially multitasking multiple concurrent searches and scenarios. Smartphones limit you to one view at a time on the screen and make it somewhat clumsy to flip through tabs in comparison.
- Yes the results are pretty much all there on Google Flights
But if you want to shuffle times/dates/different choices of flights to find the "best one" (which does not mean the cheapest one with weird connections)
- I hope you don't think booking travel ends with the flights. There's so much more to getting the most out of a trip than the flight, or the hotel.
- That's the thing for us whose life is mostly "by the seat of their pants", there really isn't. You book the tickets, you go there, see what you feel like doing, do those things, and go home. Done that for all my travels more or less, never felt like I missed anything and had a blast most of the times.
I still do everything important on a computer and wouldn't book the flight on a smartphone, but that probably says more about my age than anything else.
- I mostly use a computer because you can get a better idea what is a good deal, and fits in my budget. If I had stacks of cash, I could easily see myself booking everything via my phone.
But I'm too much of a penny pincher..
But I do often only pre-book the first night/s accom, then book the rest as I travel and know where I will be when. But I do travel with my laptop, and often will park up somewhere and hotspot it, to find that days accom. (+ I get cash back deals on computer)
- I admire your style, and envy it, at least a little.
But I couldn’t do it, especially with the presence of which I’ll call “expectations of planning” in my immediate circle. Some people want the best possible experience and can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research.
- No level of planning can match the raw joy of spontaneously enjoying something with like minded friends.
> Some people want the best possible experience and can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research.
The majority of such people perform what I call “checkbox vacationing”. It’s not about actually enjoying any particular thing, it’s just about checking the boxes of whatever some online list says is the current “best XYZ”.
- > especially with the presence of which I’ll call “expectations of planning” in my immediate circle
Yeah, when traveling with others who do like/need to plan I'll go with their plans and flow unless it gets too boring. When traveling with my wife I'll even stick around even if I'm bored.
> Some people want the best possible experience
I mean, I do too! :) Just different methods of getting there.
> can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research
Man, just daily life must be tough if they're feeling FOMO from such low stakes situations, I couldn't handle that myself :/
- I don't over plan trips, but I still want to make sure I'm not overpaying. There's all kinds of combinations of things to check. Also thinking through routes through areas. Fly in, take a train around. Things like that. Also getting hotels or vacation rentals and go through the reviews and seeing which neighborhoods you want to stay in
- > There's all kinds of combinations of things to check. Also thinking through routes through areas. Fly in, take a train around.
For me, not knowing those things and figuring them out on the spot is part of why I love vacations, and going through review of neighborhoods or figuring out the exact place where to stay would remove a lot of the fun.
- I guess if you have money to burn that works. Shopping around for flights can save hundreds though or hours of time on the travel days
- You missed plenty, and you wouldn't even know it because you didn't even do the most basic research about where you were going. It's a very lazy way to travel, and I guarantee I got way more out of my travel than you did if we visited the same places. But I don't know you, maybe your idea of a good time is getting drunk in whatever corner bar there is nearby.
If I'm spending thousands on plane tickets and hotels, and taking time off from work, and I know I'll likely never visit a place again (because there are so many other places to visit), I can't understand not doing some basic research on the things that the area is famous for, to visit those things. But whatever, you do you.
- > It's a very lazy way to travel, and I guarantee I got way more out of my travel than you did if we visited the same places
It's funny, I'd say the same to you! :)
How often do you sleep over on the couch or floor of strangers homes, waking up when they wake up, participating in something that isn't overflowing with tourists already? Or got to experience how a day is for someone who works and lives in the place you're visiting for the first time?
Granted, it's not for everybody, but we both feel the same about each other, which hopefully means we at least enjoy our own lives, even if we wouldn't like each others. But I won't say you're lazy just because you don't try to truly experience other cultures when you travel, we just have different ways of traveling and enjoying life. And that's OK, as long as you enjoy what you do, and I enjoy what I do :)
- Speaking from a developing country with a large population of less educated people, I think you would be surprised to find out that a majority of the people in the world simply don't do "research work". Successfully booking a flight ticket from a straightforward app on their phone is already at their limit (BTW, ~80% of people in the world have never taken a plane). For most other "research" requirement like planning a trip, they would just search on tiktok to see what those influencers have to say (or nowadays, ask the AI)
- I feel exactly the same way. There are personal finance management softwares that are mobile exclusive.
Like, have you tried doing data entry on a phone? Who is using these products?
- I'm with you, but I guess users don't care (and I really don't get it).
None of the mobile finance apps I've used even have half the reporting ability I want (presumably because users don't care, and not because it wouldn't fit on the screen).
- The camera on the back of the phone actually helps quite a bit with said data entry.
- I normally ingest csv files exported from my bank - then have to manually tag and relate them (like internal transfers).
I have a bunch of scripts to help and wrote a custom web scraper to pull the data, automating much of this, but much is still quite manual.
- finance apps will soon automate that kind of things, and most probably the phone app will have it before the web version
there's resource rot it seems, desktop/web have less than the phone, and it shows
hp printer/scanner app is way leaner than anything they've ever released on windows (not saying much but still), same for my bank app it's a bit faster, and better designed (features and ui)
- The vast majority of people.
- I get the feeling that people don't do research work. They buy whatever is affordable that gets advertised to them first. They can't even tell the difference between ads and search results. Their devices are primarily for media consumption and they create little if anything. They have zero need for most of the computing power their devices offer, could get by just fine on a phone from 10 years ago if it were still being supported, and they really only want the latest models for social status reasons.
- You don't need a lot of space to see everything, because you can store information in your memory.
You narrow down your options by having knowledge like "I have points on these airlines so I want to fly on Star Alliance which has partners that fly out of (quick check) these airports, so let's plan the itinerary in this way..."
I just got back from traveling the last 3 months (40 flights, 6 continents) and planned all of it from my phone. From flights, to hotels, to visas.
And it's simply better than a laptop. 4 tabs in 4 browsers means you're distracted, you're not pruning useless information, you don't know what you don't know.
I do 95% of my work on my phone too, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
- You don't really have to buy a new laptop every year though. If it wasn't for my work provided laptop I'd still use my 2015 mbp
- You don’t have to buy a phone every year either
- I still use my thinkpad from 2012. It runs fine with Linux on it, i had to replace the hdd and some other parts but otherwise it’s holding up. Granted I only do very simple stuff on it, no dev work, video or gaming. Mostly browser, reading, writing, music and chatting
- Perhaps a lot of people use their "work computer".
Me, I was in on the ground floor with laptops (and desktops) and so prefer them. Kids though?
- Is this because they don't have macs or because they spent more on the other stuff? My M1 macBook is 4+ years old and still going strong. How many phones do average people buy in that same time?
- Whenever I travel I'm also coordinating with at least 2 other people. That may include my wife/extended family, or friends. I may jump on my desktop for research, but ultimately I'm sending a browser tab to my phone to share via txt with others.
- I'm not going to list specific apps since I don't want to be a shill, but in the last few years the web has become increasingly hostile with ads, fake reviews, bad information (Especially sites like Reddit.com). A lot of places that used to have good information have since been astroturfed. And Search Engines like Google will happily serve them up on the front page of any relevant web search.
"I don't get why the kids these days book their travel using an app" is this generation's "I don't understand why people don't use travel agents". There are better sources of information and that information has moved to walled-garden mobile apps.
- > I'm not going to list specific apps since I don't want to be a shill
If you’re not getting paid to promote them, you’re not a shill. Honest recommendations are welcome!
- > I don't understand why people don't use travel agents
I laughed. Just used a travel agent.
- Shill it out my dude. I want to know where the good stuff is hiding.
- People use computers, just not Macs. Which is a shame because it feels like where Apple has the largest advantage compared to their competitors, being that high end Android phones are rather nice and the barrier to making a good tablet is quite low but a laptop is a whole different ball game, and Apple is far ahead of the rest.
- Or rather not buying laptops as often as phone. 2015 Mac or other premium laptop is good enough for internet surfing.
- I bought my dad a Mac laptop when I got my first job out of college and he used it for well over a decade. I even later got him a MacBook Air and he kept using the old one for years yet out of habit… I imagine that’s not an uncommon pattern for non-programmers who aren’t gamers.
- they will pry my 2014 MBP from my cold dead fingers
- I hate submitting any kind of form on any website from my phone, because I can't open dev tools and see if there were any errors in the response which were invisible in the UI.
- Very few people do any research work. They usually click whatever platform they are already in (ie: mytrip.xxx) and just book the ticket there and probably pay using Apple Pay straight from their phone.
- > I really don't get how people do research work … without a computer
People used to do it in their heads.
Einstein, Tolkien, Hawking, Newton, Shakespeare, Euclid, Archimedes.
With paper being an storage medium they occasionally saved to :)
> (like finding good flight tickets, or comparing hotels to stay in for a trip)
Heck I was doing EXACTLY that on an iPhone while loafing at a friend's just now, because I wanted to make the most of my time and I don't want to carry my laptop/iPad anywhere.
Lightweight XR glasses would be the best of both worlds.
- That's an exceptionally high bar of talent and creativity. For the 99.999+% of us, the computer and the mobile has made completion of many tasks highly efficient. Like surfing HN on a lazy Saturday morning...
- Socrates famously frowned upon the written medium and preferred his memories for storage
- you mean very intelligent and very smart people used to do it in their head without computer or calculator
these days only idiots would do so on pen and paper only
- I really don't get how people do research work (like finding good flight tickets, or comparing hotels to stay in for a trip) without a computer.
For a lot of people, time is more valuable than money.
They get on their phone and complete a task and move on.
Spending an hour comparing a dozen tabs on a computer to save $30 on a flight is less important than spending that time with their loved ones.
- Yes exactly this. My time is more valuable than the research and headache.
I would understand if you saved $500 or more. If you are frequent flyer, that would add up.
- My wife and I travel a lot, we aren’t that price sensitive. We are going to fly Delta where we both have status and stay in a Hyatt or Hilton brand hotel where I have status. It takes us less than 10 minutes to make travel plans on our phones.
- People do research work without a mac. A Windows box or Chromebook to do the stuff you want is less than half the cost of an Air, and a MBP is priced out of everything but status-conscious executive (and para-executive) consumers and FAANG-adjacent tech folks.
- Nah people just don’t do research work.
Maybe one in 100k does
- > Next 5 years or so (or even less) both the iPad and the Wearables, Home and Accessories category will overtake the sales of Macs.
Are we reading the same quarterly report?
Wearables/Home/Accessories is slightly higher than the Mac, yes, but its a category that has been trending poorly for Apple for ~18 months now IIRC, and that hasn't gotten better this quarter (9.04B->9.01B 3mo YoY). There's no foreseeable future where Vision starts driving Mac-like revenue (meaning, it'll be at least 2 years). Airpods are huge mainstays but have really hit market capacity and aren't growing. Apple Watch will see strong growth if they can successfully get glucose monitoring working, but that's an *if, and until then its slipping from an "upgrade every 3 years" to even longer lifecycle for most people.
Meanwhile: Mac is their fastest growing hardware segment by revenue (+12% 3mo YoY) (iPhone is +6%, iPad is flat, Services +15%).
iPhone aint going anywhere, Services are carrying their growth, but Mac is very solidly the #3 darling of this report. Their other product lines (Apple Watch, iPad, Airpods, etc) are interesting, successful businesses, but its unlikely we're going to see much growth out of them over the next 2 years. The story is iPhone, Services, and Mac, in that order, and there's no #4.
- Yeah, I agree. I have an Apple Watch 5 and I don’t really look at new models if they don’t have new sensors. Even then, I wait to see if they are useful. AirPods get replaced if they get broken maybe. I’m still rocking my 2018 iPad and I don’t feel like I need an updated one. iPhone gets replaced once they become unsupported. I’m still deciding if I want to commit to the ecosystem by getting a Mac or get a Framework.
- I wonder how much the Windows 11 debacle will increase Mac sales by.
- It's hard to see someone living under a rock for this long suddenly deciding to switch the Mac.
I suspect iPhone adoption has done a lot more toward Mac adoption.
- I was under that rock. Bought a used M1 pro this year for $600 and tossed the wheezing XPS 15 aside.
- We have a 2015 MPB that can no longer receive OS updates, because apple reasons. And because it can't get the latest OS, it can no longer run Signal, or the latest Adobe stuff that we need. So we ditched Apple and bought a Dell. So far it's working great.
- > We have a 2015 MPB that can no longer receive OS updates, because apple reasons
That CPU was dropped from Windows 10 support with 22H2, pretty much the same time that Apple stopped supporting it in macOS. The last build of Windows 10 supporting that CPU reached "end of service" more than two years ago.
- Microsoft officially supports Windows 10 22H2 on every CPU supported by previous versions of Windows 10; Windows "Supported Processor" lists are for OEMs building new PCs, not end users updating existing systems.
According to the current supported processor list, the oldest Intel CPU supported by Windows 7 was introduced about 5 years after Windows 7 itself [1].
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/mi...
- For certain non-critical computers (like my Mac mini in the living room whose primary job is to run Spotify), you might want to look at Open Core - which will let you update to a modern macOS.
It’s a great feeling to get years more life out of your old system with about an hour of work.
- Get back to us if that Dell makes it 10 years without catastrophic failure or pieces falling off.
- Want me to tell you about my 3 failed MacBook Pro logic boards?
Hate to say it, but Macs aren't any better. I've worked on literally thousands of laptops, and you win some, and you lose some. There are some shitty Dells, and some good Dells, and there are some shitty MacBooks and some good MacBooks.
I even have a couple of old Dells that are about 10 years old now. Working just fine too.
- Only 3? We had eight failed MBP motherboards before Apple finally told us the next replacement would cost us $1200. We joined a class action lawsuit against Apple and won. My wife refuses to give Apple another dollar, and she owns Apple stock.
- Which lawsuit was that?
I think it’s been a while since there was a MBP MLB lawsuit but maybe I’m forgetting about one.
This is the last one I recall.
“Apple faces class-action lawsuit over 2011 MacBook Pro GPU issues“
https://9to5mac.com/2014/10/28/apple-class-action-lawsuit-20...
- Dell XPS or whatever the new name is, or their premium line? You’ll be fine in 10 years. Dell low-end garbage? Not a chance.
- > the Windows 11 debacle
Seems to imply that anyone cares beyond a niche. I use Windows 11 on my gaming PC and emulator PC, and I don't care at all. It works perfectly fine.
OS X is much worse in my opinion, with awful window management and constant bugs breaking basic functionality.
The only decent OS experience I've ever had is with KDE and Gnome. But Linux sucks at running games, and there is no good Linux/x86 hardware out there.
Pick your poison.
- > Linux sucks at running games, and there is no good Linux/x86 hardware out there.
This isn't true in the slightest. You must be dealing with some seriously outdated information.
I've been running games on Linux full time for 3 years. I made the switch the week Elden Ring launched when it immediately ran better on Linux than on Windows. That was the top selling game at the time. I've had extremely minimal performance issues since my switch. Other major games I've run include Baldur's Gate 3, multiple Resident Evil games, and the Oblivion remaster.
I'm running a 7600X with a 9070XT as of last month and am finding my hardware is perfectly fine.
- Does it support all anti cheat and DRM? Does PCVR work well? What about old Windows rhythm games (with emulators like spice2x)? Until it has 100% coverage I’m not gonna drop Windows.
- Linux is fantastic at running games, and there is beginning to be good Linux/x86 hardware.
Linux compatibility is very high, and Linux install base is becoming a considerable size of total PC gaming market.
- Depends where on the world the people are located and their budget for laptops beyond 500 euros.
- > Windows 11 debacle
Do you really think that anything MSFT has done with MW11 --unfriendly to consumers or not-- will significantly impede the success of MW11?
- Nope, because outside Ferrari priced laptops, there is no choice on regular consumer stores.
The option is between Windows, ChromeOS and Android based laptops (aka tablets with keyboards).
Thus most consumers without endless budgets end up getting a Windows laptop, regardless of its current state.
We had the option with Linux, however first all netbooks already showed the trend with OEMs distros (gotta differentiate), Microsoft reacted, and tablets delivered the final blow.
Ideally there would be nice laptops with other options at consumer shops that people during their Weekend window shopping tour would feel like buying on a whim.
- [flagged]
- > Services (iCloud, apps, music, TV shows etc.) now bigger than every other category, except the iPhone, combined
This is reputation laundering. 'Services revenue' is undoubtably App Store game microtransactions, bigger than all other services categories combined.
- My understanding is Services includes the billions Google pays for Safari search default, reported to be $20 billion a year.
- Seems like the obvious reason for this is that Mac is now a niche for people that operate computers, where there are likely 6 people that don't for every 1 that does. We keep hearing that the next generation is "true computer" illiterate.
The second reason is likely that there are computers that are 1/3 of the price subsidized by the terrible ad-supported OS installs. (Has anyone tried to setup a MS computer lately, it's an ad-box).
- You can easily turn the "ads" off though. The only true ad are the start menu ones which is a single toggle in Settings. I have much bigger issues with setup time. I just got a Windows laptop and it took (not exaggerating) 3 hours to finally get to the desktop. Multiple reboots at the POST, then taking forever to download Windows updates and get through all the setup screens. Compared to a Mac setup it's an insanely long time to just use your computer.
That is even not counting the additional Windows updates after you get to the desktop and updates from the OEM. This is also with a Microsoft account while restoring my own settings from OneDrive.
- > We keep hearing that the next generation is "true computer" illiterate.
We had that development with cars. 40 years ago, it was common to fix your own car. Nowadays, we have a subscription for seat warmers. The manual tells you to visit the dealer to get your brakes checked. Makes me sad, somehow. But people have choosen this path as a collective.
- People choose what to outsource and, as cars have become more complicated and require more diagnostic equipment, they go to a dealer/mechanic. Personally, I've never done a lot of personal car mechanic work.
On the other hand, I've done my own cooking more than not.
You make choices about what you do yourself and what you have others do for you.
- > cars have become more complicated and require more diagnostic equipment
For the consumable stuff every car owner has to deal with, nothing has really changed in 40 years, honestly! A brake service is still done the exact same way, same with virtually all the fluid services.
I just find far more people parrot "modern cars are so complicated" today and don't even consider that in fact, it is relatively simple to change a brake pad and disc, or your own oil, perhaps an air filter, even on most brand new cars. Fluids filters and brakes are like 90% of most people's maintenance needs nowadays.
YouTube has also massively lowered the barrier to working on cars, given there are multiple easy to follow guides for just about any car service for any car model you can think of.
- These are all relatively simple TO YOU. You are not everyone though. Some people lack the mobility, strength or even time to do these things. Some people just don't want to get dirty working on their car. Some people don't have the space to do these kinds of maintenance.
Not everyone needs to know how to compile their own kernel, build their own furniture or clean their laundry perfectly. Everyone has their own interests and areas of expertise they want to delve in to. Now I can screw up a brake job working on it all day and rewatching YouTube videos wondering what I missed, or I can take it to a shop and get it done in an hour for cheap. That's just me though. I spent a lot of time working on cars in my youth and I'm just tired of spending my time on it. I don't like it and I am more than willing to pay someone who does like it to do it.
- > These are all relatively simple TO YOU. You are not everyone though. Some people lack the mobility, strength or even time to do these things. Some people just don't want to get dirty working on their car. Some people don't have the space to do these kinds of maintenance.
That is irrelevant to the argument he is making that things have not gotten harder in the last 40 years in regards to car maintenance that you can do at home.
His point is that the perception that car maintenance has gotten harder for the average joe does not match reality. Almost all of the things that need periodic on modern cars are more or less the same as they were in 1985.
- No, I think the other side has a point. If I were doing 10 services on my car, I would have muscle memory of a lot of things. If I am doing only brakes, and maybe another thing, I do not have that muscle memory. While the work may not be harder, the familiarity is gone for a lot of people.
BTW just before Covid, or during Covid, I took a car mechanic course from the local De Anza college - no hands on, so that's why I think it was during Covid. But after 5 years and no experience, I have forgotten except the abstract concepts. Then imagine people who never had to look under the hood -- ever.
- I took several car mechanic classes from De Anza college. Great instructor, and I did do some hands on stuff.
But my primary takeaway was that this is hard & dirty work, and there are numerous ways in which you can make mistakes that ruin the car and/or endanger your safety, so generally paying a professional to do it is a more sensible way.
Of course, if you enjoy doing this, or have a very old car, or more time than money, the trade-offs are different.
- Which is true for a lot of things around the house. Although I got the whole house painted a bit ago because insurance was paying for it after a fire, there are some things I have experience with because I've done them a bunch of times--and often do them myself--there are others that I've never done. And may not have the right tools for and YouTube notwithstanding will probably take me a long time to do a very imperfect job.
- Stuff like changing cabin air filter or your own oil takes no additional space beyond the space already occupied by the parked car. You don't even need to lift the car to change the oil in most cases unless the car designers were massochists. Sure, maybe not everyone can get down on their back anymore, but that shouldn't be an issue for able bodied people.
- Doing your own oil changes is not worth the hassle when considering the risk of a spill and the difficulty of legal disposal—unless you have a fancy engine that needs frequent oil changes.
Cabin air filter and wiper fluid, sure. Headlights and taillights used to be a no-brainer, but now those are often sealed LED assemblies and difficult to access as well.
- You're overstating how easy these tasks are for many people. Doing brake pads/rotors or changing oil requires a driveway, some tools, and (for oil) a way to collect and dispose of the old fluids. Not everyone has access to those things - for instance, people who live in an apartment complex may not have the space to work on their car.
(Air filters are, admittedly, pretty easy.)
- You can change your oil wherever you parked the car. A way to collect the used oil is as easy as an old jug of milk, or the empty bottles from your new oil. Disposal involves finding an autozone or someplace similar and dropping it off for free. In terms of tools you'd need, a $5 dish from autozone to collect the oil, a 10c copper washer for your drain plug, and a socket wrench.
- Sure, everything you say was true for many folks 40 years ago too though! My point is, the processes haven't really changed for the common maintenance tasks over this period, people's perception of the difficulty certainly appears to have though.
- Actually, in modern times you can buy an oil extraction pump off Amazon for $100, making oil changes so much easier than they were 40 years ago! A lot of [especially European] cars have the filter accessible from the top, meaning that you can change oil in 15 minutes in any apartment parking space by doing little more than popping the hood!
- I’ve done oil changes decades ago but don’t bother anymore since I don’t feel like jacking the car up but using an oil extraction tool from the top does sound intriguing. Can you replace the filter from the top or does that require a jack? Also, does the filter need to be replaced each time?
- Air filters are easy, but so what? They are even easier for the mechanic when my car is in the shop for semiannual maintenance.
- Changing a pad/disc/caliper isn’t “hard” but it’s time consuming and very messy. Most people probably don’t find spending 2 hours getting the car jacked, tires off, etc to be a good or enjoyable use of time!
- I wish it took 2 hours. For me it's spend 2 hours shopping for the right part, finding it for a good price, and ordering it. Then spend an hour watching youtube videos for how to do it. Then spend 4 hours gathering the right tools, getting the car jacked, tires off, etc., then put everything away, and clean up. That's the best case. I could get the wrong part, my car looks different than the videos, I do it wrong, or break something. I recently replaced my front brakes. I maybe saved $400. I'm proud of myself. I kind of enjoyed it, but it's hard to justify.
- A lot of people here are probably equally proud that they built a a DIY PC from scratch which I did many times. But just don't have an interest in doing any longer and screwed up a bunch along the way.
I also choose not to mow my lawn at this point. I'm perfectly capable of doing so but just prefer not to do so,
- I can also bake my own bread, make my own clothes and build my own furniture. But I choose to spend my time elsewhere.
What is so noble about changing your oil?
- > it is very simple to change a brake pad and disc
I can attest that changing a brake pad is mission impossible level without the proper tools. The tools and experience are what make it look easy, for someone that has both.
- Except many new cars are locked down in software, for example not allowing to release rear parking brakes without authorized service subscription, keeping the electronic keys for each VIN unique and stored in the cloud. Yes, there are workarounds on releasing the brakes manually but it is a burden.
Also similarly as with iPhones, many cars require connecting to the authorized service to change headlights and other parts since they are paired with the MCU.
I know how to work on my car but I am not able to because someone decided to lock it down.
- I don't follow. Every time I drive my car I release the parking brake. On the cars with electronic brakes, you use a button rather than a lever. I'd do it the same way to service the brakes.
- A lot of electronic parking brakes do have a service mode. For most modern Fords, there is a procedure, as one example of many:
> https://www.brakeandfrontend.com/quick-answer-electronic-par...
You typically need the piston fully retracted to replace pads, which very rarely happens just by disengaging the park brake.
If you are old enough to have changed a manual handbrake pad, you normally had to screw the piston back in before you could fit the thicker new pad with a "caliper rewind tool" even if the handbrake was off, the electronic parking brake service mode essentially does this for you, or unblocks the piston permitting a rewind tool to work.
> https://www.thedrive.com/guides-and-gear/how-to-use-a-brake-...
FWIW, I've never found an electronic parking brake I couldn't rewind myself after a few minutes on google.
- Huh. Interesting. I've never replaced the parking brake mechanism or (separate) pads myself, though I've done a handful of brake jobs.
On the cars I've worked on, the hand brake did not actuate the primary caliper so retracting the piston wasn't an issue.
- Cars are both more complicated and way more reliable. You used to spend a Sunday changing your plugs and points. Now your car lacks points and if the plugs last less than 100000km it's a disappointment. You used to need new clutch plates on the regular, now nobody ever needs them or if they do need them the car is a total loss because good luck getting to the clutches. On my current car the closest I ever came to working on it was replacing the wiper blades.
- They were already this reliable by the 80s and 90s.
Where new cars get shitty is the electronics that get shoehorned in to control systems that were previously controlled by a button or dial.
- More complicated and more reliable!
- Cars are a lot safer now. People routinely walk away from collisions that would have killed everyone in the vehicle back in 70s. So there is some gain to the trade off.
- Not if you're a pedestrian.
- According to this, pedestrians were dropping until around 2007, which I believe was the year of the iPhone. One could posit that distracted walking has increased pedestrian fatalities since 2007 and not car size.
https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
- "Cars are a lot safer now" does not seem related to "40 years ago, it was common to fix your own car" to me.
- > Makes me sad
On one hand, yes. But also, cars are now an appliance. They rarely break, can be bought quite cheaply (if that’s what you want) and consume little time. I like this.
- Except they are 2020s appliances with bells and whistles and reinventing the wheel for no reason with electronic wizzbangs and dohickeys and layers and layers of complexity. Your car in the 90s was the appliance. Simple electronic system. Reliable simple ICE engine. Simple gearbox. Easy to work on which means even if you don't work on your own car it helps you, because labor takes less time and therefore repair shop bills are lower. Parts back then were widely shared across a manufacturers lineup so readily available and relatively cheap. 4 cylinder economy car was practically a commodity back then.
- I drive a second generation Leaf.
We will see if it lives up to the promise, but the dealer said ‘don’t bother’ when I asked about serving.
So far that has held true, but it’s early years.
- Modern cars are also way harder to work on than in the past. You used to be able to buy a Haynes manual for every major car and could do most of the repair work if you wanted! Nowadays, not so much. Specialized tools galore, tearing apart the whole car for minor hidden things... This one is far more on the car manufacturers than consumers IMHO. I am also sad about the death of the manual transmission. Glad to have gotten one of the final years that Mini will be producing them!
- They are harder to work on in the past, but people have developed the belief that they're actually impossible to work on. A huge amount of car repair is still doable by the average person.
- > We keep hearing that the next generation is "true computer" illiterate.
I 'member when "personal" computers were going to be a kind of capital-equipment made available to the masses, creating new levels of autonomy and personal control over our own lives, working for our goals and interests... Whoops.
Folks like Stallman did warn me though.
- It also helps that they are moving phone financing off their balance sheet and onto AT&T’s, where people who don’t know anything think AT&T is giving away iPhone 17s right now, when of course, actually, Apple is.
The better question is, who do you know pays full price up front for an iPhone with no discounts? Only people who destroy or lose their current iPhone? The parents of teenagers giving the teenager the old phone and replacing theirs?
- I pay full price, and use cheap MVNOs for phone service. Ends up being much cheaper and no mobile carrier shenanigans polluting my phones, sim lock, etc.
- Same. I buy the phone I can afford. And then I pay for cell coverage I can afford. And then I go about my life living it logically.
- You didn't trade in your old phone?
- I do trade in with Apple, or resell it.
- I pay full price up front. Just bought an iPhone 17 pro and sold the 16 pro on Swappa. I've never found a trade-in deal that was better than selling a phone myself, and the 1 or 2 times I've tried it, I've ended up frustrated by having a locked phone, and paid it off early anyway.
The big carriers hide the phone in the price but you're still paying it. I just use US Mobile unlimited plans for $35/mo, plus it gives me free international service which was the real advantage for me. Paying 1/3 the annual service plan and $0/day int'l roaming instead of $15/day.
- There's also the fact that it's tough to share a smartphone like you can a computer. I suspect Apple hasn't made user switching a thing on iOS for this reason.
- My wife has been without a desktop or laptop for more than a decade. Her primary computing devices are her phone and iPad.
For doing tasks like online banking or booking plane tickets, I find the mobile experience frustrating and therefore do it on my laptop. She finds the laptop clunky and finds mobile much easier.
- >We keep hearing that the next generation is "true computer" illiterate.
This is logical result of walled gardens.
- > Next 5 years or so (or even less) both the iPad and the Wearables, Home and Accessories category will overtake the sales of Macs.
I view this the exact opposite way. The death of the laptop in favor of tablets has been touted for about a decade now, and it has still failed to materialize. Wearables have even surpassed the iPad.
Not to mention, the Mac laptops have seen a recent surge of popularity last few years, due to still being the only realistic ARM-based laptop, with the battery life / weight vs performance you get from this. This is still likely to remain the reality for at least a few years, and thus they're likely to snowball even more based on this reputation.
- Even if people still own laptops, if they aren’t using them as much they aren’t going to upgrade as frequently and they aren’t going to buy the expensive models.
Theres also the fact much of the developing world went straight to mobile, skipping laptops.
- And yet MacBooks, some of the most expensive laptops, ate out selling iPads, and outgrowing them. I don't think the data points in the direction of your argument, quite the opposite.
- Revenue growth is more interesting than raw revenue: iPhone up 6% YoY, Mac up 13%, iPad flat, Wearables, Home, and Accessories flat.
So Mac is doing very well!
- Mac hardware has been the best it’s ever been.
Though if the Mac Pro with all those slots could run nvidia GPUs I’d be even crazier I think.
- If only devs wanted to build for mac like they did 15 years ago when the hardware was shitty
- Crazier if Apple got into the GPU business.
- They somewhat are, and have long been, but weren't targeting the same audience as Nvidia has lately.
- Serious question because I don’t know about this sort of thing:
Apple’s investment in building its own in-house “Apple Silicon” is large. Can anyone definitely prove they haven’t been working on the sort of AI GPU stuff that NVidia has been?
- Interesting that Wearables is flat.
AirPods completely saturated their market incredibly quickly.
- I presume AirPods sales at this point are mostly just replacing lost AirPods...
- The changes for the watch were also very uninspiring this year.
- Great, Apple is probably going to force more ads onto all of its platforms to drive service growth.
In ancient times Apple prided itself on not polluting its platforms with intrusive advertisements, but the line has been crossed and going back seems unlikely at this point.
- Yeah, the corporation cancer.
DRM slowdowns have also made the built-in apps like TV worse for watching shows than just pirating and watching them with IINA etc. In Jobs' days iTunes even let you play purchased songs on any computer.
I wish there was a law or something that did not allow shareholders & board members who did not have an understanding of the industry, to influence or dictate the course of a company, without feedback from its USERS/customers.
- Stakeholders such as customers, employees, and the general public are all affected by corporate actions, but they don't seem to have much of a voice in current corporate governance structures.
Google's law says that "don't be evil" and "unlimited growth" are ultimately opposing forces.
- These are the wrong numbers. You posted the 2024 numbers, not the 2025 numbers.
2025: iPhone $209.586 billion, Mac $33.708 billion, iPad $28.023 billion, Wearables, Home and Accessories $35.686 billion, Services $109.158 billion, Total $416.161 billion
- Yeah you are right, my bad! Fixed
- I think your conclusion is also wrong. iPad sales are flat, and wearables are actually declining:
(Wearables, home, and accessories already surpassed Mac sales, although I don't know what exactly is included in accessories.)
Also, I don't think it's useful to compare wearables to Mac, because Watch isn't much of a computing platform, AirPods aren't a computing platform at all, and Vision Pro has almost no sales. This category is mostly accessories to iPhone.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/10/charts-apple-caps-off-bes...
- I find iPads only marginally interesting now that I don't travel as much. Although the newer magnetic keyboards make them more usable as laptop replacements than they used to be. (Still not totally sold--maybe next longer trip.)
Re: Macbooks generally. My mind was somewhat blown when a former co-worker told me their kid didn't want a Macbook. They were fine with an iPhone for their schoolwork.
Personally, I still find MacBooks as the least replaceable category--other than the iPhone. Anything else I could live without as needed.
- Wearables may include lightning charger cables :) ?
- Not too long ago the iPad was painted as a disappointing product line, relative to the iPhone. It's still bigger than the entire Mac business. Alas.
EDIT: Ack, you're right. Bad comment, self.
- No, iPad is not bigger than Mac. It's smaller. Look again at the numbers.
- Yeah, but since the average Mac costs >3x the average iPad, we're still talking about 2-3x the number of iPad sales as Mac sales
- The OP was referring to dollar sales, not unit sales.
Apple no longer announces unit sales. In any case, it has always been true that Mac Average Selling Price is much higher than iPad Average Selling Price. In the sense of unit sales, iPad is bigger than Mac and has been for many years, so in that respect the 2024 Q4 results would not prove anything new.
The OP was giving a false narrative about future growth that is contrary to what recent quarterly results have shown.
- Around a decade ago, even as they were just launching Apple Pay, Apple was trading at a multiple barely over 10x. Street was valuing Apple like a manufacturing OEM company. I remember buying a small chunck of shares at the time thinking, this is crazy, just the services revenue off of owning these platforms is going to become massive one day.
- Good investment decision and obviously the street was very wrong, but the reason the multiple was low was because of concerns earnings were at risk from a) their issues in China (which they solved, at least for now, but was a very valid concern at the time) and b) android eating them (there was a narrative they were about to be blackberried, or that android was doing what windows did to mac). There are good reasons why that didn't happen.
- If anything, they're the iPhone company and they are massively understating how much of their revenue is directly attributable to the iPhone.
Take "Services" for example: most of their services are things like App Store revenue and Google Search revenue, something they technically have on all of their platforms, but the lion's share of that revenue comes directly from iPhone users subscribed to iPhone apps, playing iPhone gacha games or using Google (or any of the other officially supported search engines) in the iPhone version of Safari. The reason to have iCloud+ is to be able to backup your phone, and the photos you take on your phone, and store the emails and iMessages and other data you create on your phone. It's all there accessible on the Mac and iPad too, but they have far more iPhone customers than Mac or iPad customers.
Even the smaller services are mostly supported by iPhone users: most AppleCare users, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple News+, arguably you could make a case that Apple TV+ (a.k.a. just Apple TV now for some reason) is the one service that isn't directly attributable to the iPhone, but that is also like the one part of their services division that has had prior reports that it isn't exactly turning a profit, and I don't think you can even apply for an Apple Card unless you own an iPhone.
It's the same with most of the other divisions: the reason to have an Apple Watch or AirPods is they go great with your iPhone. They have their individual appeal, and at least with the AirPods, you don't technically need an iPhone to use them, but these are at the end of the day iPhone accessories, the same as their Magic Keyboard, Trackpad and Mouse lines or displays are Mac accessories even though technically, any iPad could also take advantage of them now, or you could plug a Magic Keyboard into a Windows PC or something. The math on that doesn't change just because of technicalities like that.
So yeah, Apple is the iPhone company and has been for a very long time now. Macs & iPads, the tens of billions of dollar businesses that they are, are just side gigs for them and Services/Wearables et al. is just obfuscating the degree to which they are the iPhone company.
- The day Playground evolves to something similar to XCode is when iPadPro takes over.
- If they ever stopped making Macs guess I'd start using Linux other than just for servers.
- Framework desktop incoming here. (mac/iPad/i)OS 26 tipped me over the edge. Eyeing whether 7 years of GrapheneOS on a pixel will suffice as well..
- Good luck. I went the other way on the laptop desktop side (I was always an iPhone guy throughout it all). I’m super happy. I won’t go back.
- One would hope that before ceasing to make the hardware that they open it up and actually allow you to install other OSes
- Eddy Cue was tasked, over a decade ago?, with getting out front with services. Microsoft was doing it. And no one wants to have all their eggs in the iPhone basket.
Congrats to Eddy Cue then?
- Most of the "Services" are the App Store and iCloud and AppleCare, so it's still directly tied to market share of the iPhone. If iPhone sales drop 20%, "Services" will drop 15% (with some amount of time lag / smoothing)
- iCloud (and the Mac) App Store, AppleCare are Mac products as well. But to your point, sure, Mac sales are a fraction of the phone's—the latter's loss would be devastating for Apple and for services.
It's too bad the world has moved on as it has. I liked Apple a lot when they were just a computer company.
- In terms of unit sales, Apple sells roughly double the number of iPads over Macs.
If the rumors about a cheaper entry-level MacBook are true, that might put a small dent into that, though I wouldn’t hold my breath.
- Their computers don’t need to be replaced often so that makes total sense to me. Both of my m1 series Macs will be more than adequate for my web dev needs for the next few years or at least until Apple force deprecates them.
- It is also clearly why Apple wants to control all e-commerce and is fighting tooth and nail to keep controt
- I get that the phones outsell the Macs but just wild Ipads almost match Macs.
- Especially given how long an ipad lives, and how overpowered they are for a large portion of their users.
- i'd love to know how much of that "services" revenue is just iCloud storage for storing iPhone backups.
- Any data on the Vision Pro?
- I've been using my 16" MacBook Pro with M2 Max and 32 GB of RAM, 1 TB of SSD, for more than 2 years and I feel or see no reason to upgrade.
At least not until there's an external design refresh. But maybe I'll get the M5 Max just for the heck of it.
Mostly because it'd be a pain to move all the data and state (the Time Machine or Mac-to-Mac transfer is not always perfect and hands-free in my experience)
They're just too good for their own good.
- Kind of funny they don't separate out accessories as its own category. If I were to guess it's because they don't want to advertise how much they make selling dongles.
- Personal take :
The iPhone and services that go with the iPhone (music apps iCloud) together make apple what it is even today. The numbers are huge and the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro are still the gold standard of smartphones. Everything else is probably secondary support hardware and software for the iPhone.
I plan on moving away from macOS (maybe Asahi on my old M1 Air but leaning towards Arch on framework) but every attempt to reconsider the iPhone for me has failed.
The biggest thing I see is how the iPhone helped fuel social media and in turn social media helped iPhone with sales. The phone is a social and secure device and the iPhone excels at that thanks to iCloud services and the ease with which you can manage the phone. Upgrading is so seamless, managing Photos with iCloud is a no-brainer. Everything about it screams social and it does it extremely well.
The personal computer vs Mac war is still ongoing but android vs iPhone war was over years ago. The iPhone won and there is not much anyone can do at this point to compete at that scale unless someone comes up with something truly extraordinary rather than just putting LLMs inside apps.
- Won where?
Android has about 70% market share and there are countries where only rich people get to use iOS devices.
Other population layers also need phones and digital services.
- For companies revenue and especially profit margin share usually matters much more. If an iPhone user in the US etc. is worth >= 10x more than an user in a third world country (both for manufacturers and ad/service providers that’s a win).
Apple could probably get > 50% market share in those countries if they significantly reduced their margins (they’d still be profitable but of course it makes little sense m)
- There are 195 official countries in the world, many of those have close to zero iPhone customers, and surely the companies on those countries also need customers.
Truth is Apple doesn't care about those countries where regular citizens cannot afford Apple, they see themselves as the Ferrari, Bentley, Karan Acoustics, ... of the computer world.
- They certainly don’t see themselves that way. Maybe Lexus or Audi, but not even that.
Those are very niche luxury brands, that sell impractical status products (there isn’t really and equivalent for them in the “computer world”) for the 1% or subset of it. Apple is not that, it’s an upper middle tier mass market brand.
But yes, they certainly don’t care about markets where they can’t be competitive while maintaining their margins
- > leaning towards Arch on framework
That's a wonderful idea.
> The personal computer vs Mac war is still ongoing but android vs iPhone war was over years ago.
I don't think Macs are even a consideration for most "hackers." You can't build you own machine, Linux support is limited, they just cater to a crowd that wants a polished experience and don't mind giving up their freedom for it.
As for the phone market, I think Apple's success mostly comes to a combination of clever marketing and phone users being on average even less technically-minded than desktop users. Add to that social pressure now the the iPhone is dominant. That being said you couldn't pay me to give up my Pixel running Graphene, a device that is completely immune to corporate spyware, forced "upgrades," sideloading restrictions and compliance with idiotic laws like client-side scanning (if it ever happens).
- Declining Mac sales aren’t concerning because Macs are high quality. People can skip generations and use their M1s for years.
- Thinking this through… I spent around $3500 and $4500 on my last two MBPs, but got 9 years of use out of each of them. That’s only $450/yr.
But where I used to get a new iPhone every other year, I’m now on the fourth year of my 13P and it still works great. That’s only $300/yr.
It’s interesting to think about.
- I still use my iPhone SE after 8 years and bought it for 170€. That’s under 25€ per year :-). (Ok I had the battery replaced for 30€ once.)
- For us as consumers to think about, but there are multiple teams in many companies (not just Apple) that are dedicated to (exploiting) this interesting fact.
- Mac sales are up 12%, year over year. It's Apple's fastest growing hardware category. They're just going to be lower next month (year over year), due to the release cycles being different.
- This stuck out like a sore thumb to me:
Q4 2024: Income before provision for income taxes $29.610 billion, Provision for income taxes $14.874 billion
Q4 2025: Income before provision for income taxes $32.804 billion, Provision for income taxes $5.338 billion
[EDIT:] The 2024 taxes were actually an aberration.
"the one-time charge recognized during the fourth quarter of 2024 related to the impact of the reversal of the European General Court’s State Aid decision" https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-reports-fourth-...
- Corporate income tax is one of those ideas that are immensely popular politically ("someone who is not me will pay billions to benefit me? yay!") but not supported by economic theory or real economic outcomes. Rent control / other price controls is another one ("No more rent increases for me, yay!").
Personal income taxes are a better choice according to [0] and that makes sense if you think about it. Let companies go wild creating wealth; eventually the company matures, growth slows, and instead of reinvesting, the money mostly gets paid out to employees and owners as salaries, dividends, or stock buybacks. That's the point where it's most efficient to tax it.
[0] https://www.economicsobservatory.com/which-taxes-are-best-an...
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/taxedu/primers/primer-not-all-taxe...
- Thinking the last part is happening or will happen anytime soon feels very naive. Advantaged companies have the means to not pay their fair share and they never will.
Corporate tax rates were insanely higher many decades ago. Both industry and the public thrived despite it. Corporate tax rate slashed, public flounders, corporations act in ungrounded and bizarre ways. This is not a healthy system.
- > Thinking the last part is happening or will happen anytime soon feels very naive.
"The last part" of GP is taxing the company's money when it's distributed to shareholders, and that is absolutely already happening. You might not like the current rates or loopholes (neither do I), but I think most of the somewhat-wealthy big tech engineers on this board can attest that it "is happening".
- The more you concentrate taxation via capital gains, the more you incentivise the type of tax strategy where people just leave the state/country before cashing out. Countering that with exit taxes and such is hard.
Taxing company profits directly may be less efficient from an economics point of view but it's much more politically palatable.
- >the money mostly gets paid out to employees and owners as salaries, dividends, or stock buybacks.
This is the last part. Where do you think the money goes if not to employees or owners?
- Earned income tax makes no sense, it targets the young and hard working, and work should be maximally rewarded. Land value tax is what makes sense, targeting rent seekers and the wealthy. Also consumption taxes, if one is concerned about things like the environment or substance abuse.
Land value tax is a consumption tax too, since defending and servicing and routing around one’s occupied surface area of the earth is very costly for the rest of society.
- Correct. Corporate income tax is really a tax on shareholders (alternative to paying tax is paying shareholders a dividend). The corporate tax rate hits all owners regardless of income/wealth. That includes pension funds, 401ks, small investors, etc. Proponents of progressive taxes should be against corporate tax and in favor of income tax, property tax, etc.
- It also takes money away from the corporation, when they should be doing one of these:
- spend their profits to try and grow, but fail; thus spreading their capital into the rest of the economy
- spend their profits to try and grow, and succeed; not only spreading capital but creating new wealth that will eventually work its way around to the shareholders
- return it to shareholders, where it gets taxed
- Isn’t that how it already works? They can spend all of their profits or pay taxes on profit and sit on the rest?
- Depends on what it gets spent on - capital purchases dont reduce net income. You can write it off, but there are rules limiting how much.
So you could have a situation where you have $1m in profit, and you want to buy a $1m machine, but the machine goes on your balance sheet and not your income statement, so your books still show $1m in profit, even though you now have no cash. And now you still have to pay tax on the $1m.
Now, in the next year, the rules allow you to write off say $200k of that machine, reducing your profit by that much. Eventually, you get to write off much / all of the machine.
But cash is king, and on a cash basis, the tax man is doing very much better than the business in this scenario.
Better to dispense with all the accounting intrigues, tax corporations at 0%, and just tax dividends, buybacks, and salaries.
- Yes, it reduces the amount paid out to shareholders, but that doesn't mean it is bad for the economy as a whole. When corporate taxes are higher, companies spend more - wages, r&d, etc - because they'd rather do that and squeeze some value out of it then have it taxed.
There isn't a "right" answer, there are trade offs between incentives that drive the flows into different places.
- This is a good counterpoint, but forcing companies’ hand with investment will at best distort the economy, and slow it down long term.
Companies are single-purpose wealth creation machines, let them find their optimal investment mix. Taxing only dividends, buybacks, and salaries will bias the taxation to mature companies that aren’t growing so fast anymore, minimizing the damage.
- There's no such thing as an "undistorted economy," there is only different configurations which are more or less efficient in different areas. Taxation isn't "damage," it is the fee you pay for the stability of the system you are operating in and the services that system provides.
> Taxing only dividends, buybacks, and salaries will bias the taxation to mature companies that aren’t growing so fast anymore, minimizing the damage.
This is a reactionary policy to the existing system, not a sustainable new one. At the minimum, it incentivizes:
1. Hoarding cash
2. The acquisition of assets unrelated to the core business (real estate for example)
3. Increased corporate debt (no tax on interest payments)
4. Shifts from salary to stock options
5. Acquisitions over investments in new product lines or R&D
Functionally, you and I probably disagree on some things though - I would want to encourage companies to spend their money on salaries, pushing the money towards the broad consumer base.
- > alternative to paying tax is paying shareholders a dividend
I thought corporate income tax was a tax on profits, and if a company pays a dividend that doesn't lower profits so wouldn't that be after taxes?
- A higher corporate tax rate leaves less available to issue to shareholders from net income.
- What happens when shareholders are out of the country?
- When I get dividends from US stocks, I pay a US witholding tax before the cash lands in my Canadian account
- Well seeing as they are a shareholder who has bought in, they are effectively investing in our economy giving our companies greater access to capital to grow at cheaper rates at the expense of investing in their own country.
- It's an open secret by now that OpenAI and SpaceX have already minted hundreds of millionaires, and in California (SpaceX has a large socal office) they'll end up paying 50.5% tax (CASDI+others). (AMT is a whole other thing.) The amount of service they get for that is enough to turn anyone Republican, however.
- Their 2025 US taxes are actually higher. In Q4 2024 "Apple paid a one-time income tax charge of $10.2 billion in order to resolve the tax issue with Ireland, which dates to 2016."
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-profit-drops-36-tech-20...
- Actually it was a huge tax addition in 2024 (from Europe over dispute about how Ireland had taxed Apple for many years). In 2024 Apple added 14.4 billion in additional taxes accrued over many years.
- Are different sources of income taxed differently? Could it partly be from some change in income sources? Seems Services is more significant this quarter.
- No, the 2024 number is goosed by paying a big back tax bill after a court decision in the EU.
- Yes Tax Avoidance strategies are inversely correlated to enforcement efforts.
What could have possibly changed…
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- All these companies depend on TSMC for their life.
- And TSMC depends on machines by ASML they can also sell to others.
And ASML licensed the technology from EUV LLC.
Which was a conglomerate of a bunch of state-funded US research labs.
And the US cut its science funding.
Misery all the way down!
- > And ASML licensed the technology from EUV LLC.
And glass/mirrors from Zeiss, amongst a whole bunch others:
> ASML employs more than 42,000 people[1] from 143 nationalities and relies on a network of nearly 5,000 tier 1 suppliers.[6]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding
* https://www.robotsops.com/complete-list-of-all-suppliers-and...
Let's also not forget the the two most prominent chip design software companies, Cadence and Synopsys, are American:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_EDA_companies
There are all sorts of inter-dependencies between companies and countries: welcome to globalization.
- It’s a conglomerate of researchers that were employed by the feds and private institutions who met have received various forms of grants
I think the science funding cuts will be inconsequential to that entity
- If true, TSMC would command much higher margins. Their net revenue is a fraction of Nvidia or Apple
- TSMC's business is much higher risk, each improvement to manufacturing process is a massive investment that's never a guaranteed success.
- TSMC is famous for not taking margin when they could. It’s part of their strategy.
- I mean... do they? TSMC is the best but in a world where they had to use Samsung or Intel is it really a death sentence?
- My intuition is that we would adapt just fine. Maybe we'd have to drop to assembly more often, read the chip docs closely, etc. Unheard-of performance benefits are still being found from Commodore 64s and first-gen IBM PCs, for crying out loud. What if we wrung every last cycle out of the Samsung or Intel chips?
- Had to look up what TSMC meant (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company).
What would Apple's next best option be if a war rendered TSMC unavailable?
- https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/02/apple-will-spend-more...
> The fund’s expansion includes a multibillion-dollar commitment from Apple to produce advanced silicon in TSMC’s Fab 21 facility in Arizona. Apple is the largest customer at this state-of-the-art facility, which employs more than 2,000 workers to manufacture the chips in the United States. Mass production of Apple chips began last month.
- There's an amazing book on Apple in China all about this issue (and more). It's a great read and I'd highly recommend if you're interested.
Also Chip Wars is really good. I may be confusing which one is which because I read them back to back, but they overlap!
- Thanks! I've added both to my reading list
- >What would Apple's next best option be if a war rendered TSMC unavailable?
Onshore TSMC fabs followed by Intel fabs.
Properly motivated, I think Intel and Apple could do a lot relatively quickly.
- TSMC in Taiwan has a significant share of the wafers produced by the world every month. If those wafers were not produced the global economy would suffer badly.
It takes years to bring a fab online. Fab 21 in Arizona took 5 years to enter mass production from ground breaking. Some believe it could be done in two but that’s yet to be demonstrated. Then there are the wafers themselves. The total time it takes to process one wafer at the single nm scale is around 100 days.
So realistically, even if one makes up their mind to make a fab fast, you’re looking at 3 years before you have your first sellable wafer.
- The supply chain for this simply does not exist.
- If a war rendered TSMC unavailable it would crash the global economy. There is no next best option.
- Samsung, Intel, SMIC are not incredibly far behind. TSMC is the best because we (the US and its customers) trust them more than its competitors and so fund its R&D and license them more exclusive technologies.
- SMIC in particular have made very quick progress. They’d probably match TSMC first in such a scenario.
- No they haven't, they're just trying to show off by running older processes with high failure rates very hard to make it look like they can keep up.
We're not giving them EUV and they can't reinvent it, so they're stuck.
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- What do you mean serves them right? They made records.
- The title was changed since I made my comment. Seems the message of their earnings increase outdid trepidation about their future.
- FWIW the submitted title was "Apple reports fourth quarter results" and hasn't changed.
- I really like that you seem to go through the auto-junked posts to investigate what happened. It says good things about Hacker News.
- Only some of them, alas - there's too much for us to see it all. But we do what we can, and readers can always help out by emailing hn@ycombinator.com when they notice an important miss.
- Beats earnings consensus, up 4.5% in after hours, yeah, that’ll learn ‘em. You misread something, but I’m not sure what it is.
- > Make products people want and they buy, ignore them, and they don't.
What does this even mean? When I went to my local Apple Store to see the iPhone air in person (to decide if it was right for me, which it was), they had a line out the door for people who wanted to buy new phones. Their Mac business is very healthy since introducing their own silicon. Everyone in the Bay Area (skewed, I know) has AirPods on the train or at the grocery store.
- AirPods are certainly super popular, but I can't think of many places that are extreme outliers in almost every category like the Bay Area. A lot of startups have failed assuming their business that worked for Bay Area customers would work elsewhere.
- This is true but airpods is a bad example. They are a runaway success. Estimates are they did around $25bn of revenue in the last year. For context the highest annual revenue Bose ever did was $4bn (since declined). Sonos does something like $1.5bn. If Airpods was a standalone company it would be one of the biggest consumer hardware companies in the world.
- Interesting that Google and Apple matched their quarterly earnings in revenue .
- Why is AAPL still one stock?
- New law: large companies grow until they become a media company and the C-suite gets to attend the hollywood premiers and awards shows.
- How come they don’t add AI?
- They have enough "AI" stuff. People just don't know it is AI. That is the best way of integrating AI into your product(s). The tech behind stuff doesn't really matter for the end user.
other companies should also follow that trend, use ai for useful features, just give the feature a good name... no need to mention "ai"... because next year it could be something else that is powering the feature.
- AI spell check OR rather sentence improvements are awesome.
But by AI, people mean LLM and context. Remember what I told you -- yesterday I was booking a flight, can we check the prices again? What happened to that hotel booking? Dozens of other use cases. A private AI with awesome memory and zero hallucinations will be ... awesome.
- Siri can’t tell the time and people on Android can remove passerby’s from pictures, we can’t. I’m an Apple fanboy but Apple has been coasting for 10 years.
- Siri can tell the time (I just checked - I’ve never tried before now) and you’ve been able to remove people/cars from photos for a while now I believe. Looks like iOS 16? Still took way too long and it wouldn’t surprise me if it is crap compared to Android (I haven’t used it). They also finally added call screening - idk why that took so long as my Pixel 3 had it over 5 years ago.
- Apple is far behind the competition when it comes to image editing...
- Yeah no shock there haha
- Apple has (entirely on-device) OCR, computational photography, image segmentation for creating stickers, image classification and person/pet recognition, voice-to-text. These were added and useful before "AI" became a buzzword dujour.
If you're only talking language models, Apple has on-device language models available to developers and end-users via Shortcuts, and image generation for emojis. They just don't advertise most of their neural network models as "AI".
- If people are buying iPhones without AI mashed into every orifice, why bother?
- They tried and made fools of themselves. They're trying again right now.
- No wonder they treat the Mac like a third-class citizen. Mac sales barely pay their tax bill.
- At this point Macs have a great deal of parts in common with phones and tablets - M4 / M5 chip, flash design, and so on.
The main purpose of the Mac (for Apple) is to host the development environment that is used to create apps which sustain the iPhone ecosystem.
It does continue to baffle me just how cheap Macs are. $649 for a brand new 16GB MacBook at Best Buy with M2, more than powerful enough to do the aforementioned development. And cheaper than most iPhone models.
- Apple could substantially eat into Nvidia’s AI lunch if they really tried, honestly Macs are fast enough… my guess is by the time M6 is coming out they will have external GPUs available for both the data centre and home use. If I was them I’d already be taking orders, power requirements alone even if they aren’t as fast 2 nodes ahead would make their offering sensational.
- They'll just need to start from scratch on all this. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!CwyW!,f_auto,q_auto:...
I don't think some power efficient laptop SoCs gives you much competitive advantage there.
- I don’t think so. The GPU die itself isn’t the key it’s the interconnects and data center scale infra coupled with their closed software. If it were just GPUs AMD is better positioned than Apple.
- "If it were just GPUs AMD is better positioned than Apple."
Is that true? Does cash mean nothing?
- I assure you if AMD could sell a story to take even a fraction of Nvidia’s market share they could raise as much capital as they want.
- by the time M6 is coming out they will have external GPUs available for both the data centre and home use.
I thought there were already external GPUs for Macs. Since before COVID, IIRC.
- There were eGPUs for Macs, but only the Intel ones. To my knowledge there are no drivers for eGPUs for Apple Silicon. My guess is that without Apple's involvement it would be near-impossible to get graphics accelerators working.
In theory you could make things work for some sort of computational acceleration (e.g.: AI, or some OpenCL work), but I am not sure that that market is really worth all of the work it would take. For those sorts of things it is probably a lot easier to setup an external (Linux) box, and send the work over.
