I don’t agree with the conclusion that they should just have bought more AI chips
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I thought this was a really fascinating video, since Apple Explained is one of the biggest Apple-Stans on youtube. He finally realized that his favorite company is wrought with greed, and was willing enough to make a video about it. The content or his ideas don’t necessarily matter; it’s his revelation that’s intriguing.
TL:DR?
Yes.
I’m not watching a fucking YouTube video.
No judgment if that’s your thing. I just don’t enjoy it.
The very tl;dr is that Apple has been catering to shareholders first and foremost to the point that all else suffers. To elaborate a lil more:
The video shows an internal email from the iPhone VP of marketing that basically says they should only add features that are good enough and that what the iPhone already offers could be considered too much. “ Anything new and especially expensive needs to be a rigorously challenged before it’s allowed into the consumer phone”
Then there’s the thing where Cook allows stock buybacks which Jobs didn’t. I am not sure what this means exactly but it plays into the broader point that Jobs was a product genius and Cook is a financial genius. (also, they spent $77 billion on stock buybacks, this will be relevant in a second).
Lastly there is AI. Apple is lacking in AI chips so there was a request to double their amount, which would’ve cost about $10bn. But this request was denied. So they had to not just work with their own aging chips, but rent cloud computing infrastructure from Google.
tl;dr Cook is cooked or something idk
Honestly, the downfall of Apple would be good news in my book.
I know Google is not the greatest about it, but at least on Android, you can install third party app stores and custom operating systems.
They are slowly taking it away with attestation though.
Yes, let’s all cheer for a monopoly. That always works out well.
I would rather have Linux phones, but while those exist, they are not mainstream and ready quite yet.
So, custom Android, such as Lineage or Graphene, is about the closest we can get for now.
Graphene is half dead now that Google stopped releasing drivers. They depended pretty heavily on the pixel drivers coming out in the AOSP source.
They’ve just been deprecated to doing it the same way that every other custom operating system has been doing it for a long time. It makes it slower, but it doesn’t make it impossible.
If these were seats on a plane, they got bumped from first class down to coach at the very back. They’ll still get there. They just won’t have the nice leg room and the extra peanuts.
Or, like, you know, they got bumped and it’s get a hotel or fly another airline.
Best I can do is a greyhound bus, take it or leave it
Good news would be them strategically repositioning in favor of their mid-90s image. Would be hard, but doable.
Green energy, autonomous devices, openness to tinkering, friendliness, “other companies mess with you and we don’t”, perhaps some retrofuturism. It wouldn’t even be out of character, they sort of hold the window open, with the kind of series on AppleTV they are making, and part of their advertising, and even honestly with their devices being not yet as enshittified.
Just do that for real.
And honestly, Apple is not the worst of these companies. Perhaps they were just worse at baiting.
In general, over years I’m slowly becoming more and more appreciative of Apple. Their advertising is just atrocious and their stuff is very expensive in, eh, pretty outrageous ways (like a charger costing like some devices together with their chargers), but that’s pretty open and honest. “We sell you that for our humongous price, we say it’s miraculous and magically cool, and it seems like a scam, but you can say no”. While with Google and Meta and such they first sell you something looking normal, and then farm and abuse you indefinitely.
So I’d wish for Apple to survive the bubble bursting (for which I hope they don’t go the AI way) and become a more general-kind computing company. Maybe hold closer to 50% of personal computing in the world, not the luxury niche they are holding now.
