People often say they're being "punished for their success" but I think that's an interesting concept.
Apple raked in $93bn in profits last year. It's such an aberration compared to other companies I feel like there must be anti-competitive barriers somewhere. You expect me to believe that no competition is able to take a slice of that? It's too juicy not to! Competition should be eroding those margins to a more reasonable figure and it's not IMO.
> You expect me to believe that no competition is able to take a slice of that?
IMO they don't have competition. Nobody's actually directly attacking them at the specific thing they do.
I really, really wish they did. The current situation makes it hard to get away from them when they release (relatively speaking) dud products like certain MacBook revisions.
It just runs counter to everything I think I know about capitalism. That all these disruptors and competitors would turn their nose up at a $93bn pile of money. The only other company more profitable that I could find was Saudi Aramco- a state owned petroleum company with all of the protection that that entails. Why is the iPhone so much more profitable (and the moat so much wider) than their other products? It doesn't pass the smell test IMO.
AMD is steadfastly refusing for provide software support equivalent to CUDA for their GPUs. They’re leaving a trillion dollars on the table. NVIDIA isn’t being anti-competitive, it’s AMD being un-competitive.
The Windows & Linux PC ecosystem badly lags behind Apple on a number of basic features. E.g.: literally just color! If I want to edit videos in HDR (which is just better color), I have to start with… buying a Mac. Windows essentially can’t do this without enormous effort, and Linux is hopeless. MacOS and all Apple hardware “just works”.
No Android phone manufacturer even begins to provide the quality and the service that Apple does. I give my old iPhones to my relatives to use and they still get updates and full support after six or more years! I can walk into an Apple Store, and they’ll fix or replace my phone on the spot. Etc…
I don't think anyone else wants to make the bet that they could take a sufficient slice out of that pie to make the gamble pay off, given Apple's significant lead, and ~all of the likely-competitor tech companies with enough capital & expertise to try having cultures and existing lines of business that run contrary to such an attempt.
How's Google going to credibly do that, especially without going wildly into monopolist territory by freezing out ad & spying competitors while surely still allowing their own? Why would they when getting more eyes and ears on "their users" and defending against a rise of platforms that might hinder them was the point of not just developing Android, but making it free so that others would stop trying to do their own thing?
Microsoft could maybe try, but is running fast the other direction instead, probably for similar reasons of wanting to grab that sweet, sweet data (gotta feed LLMs, now; more reason than ever!)
To viably compete you need:
1) Software that actually works really really well (perfectly? Not even close. Wildly above the median in the world of consumer software, even from big vendors? Oh my, yes). Lots, and lots, and lots of such software. So very much. Operating systems, server-side systems of several kinds, an "office" suite, advanced camera-related software, mapping software, utilities galore (things like Preview and Digital Color Meter are great and are absolutely part of Apple's "moat")—maybe even a browser, if you want to approach things like Apple's real-world-use battery life on MacBooks. So much software. And it'll need to all work together well enough not to look pathetic next to the relatively-excellent integration that Apple's stuff has.
2) You're gonna have to have tight integration with probably-custom hardware across several fairly-different product lines to achieve a similar quality level on #1, and to approach their levels of profitability. That's a huge investment, and hard. Your organization needs to be able to S-rank procurement, logistics, packaging, and hardware design on some balance of a functional and aesthetic level—at least more often than not.
3) You're gonna need to be able to play the "privacy defender" card and not have your pants immediately combust—whatever you think of Apple's credibility on this, it's surely well above the other tech giants. That also means forgoing or abandoning other opportunities at income (Apple's tentative move into ads is... worrisome, for this reason)
> without going wildly into monopolist territory by freezing out ad & spying competitors while surely still allowing their own
You mean like killing off third-party cookies while retaining a way to track and advertise to users via FLoC-turned-Interests? You can argue Firefox disables third-party cookies, but they're not an ad company. >85% (last I checked) of Google revenue is advertising or adjacent to it, and their legal team signed off on an action that harms their competitors and helps the ad network with the soon-to-be most accurate tracking
Samsung posted $3.2B profit in Q4 2022. Extrapolate that to $12.8B yearly. And they're one of several Android device makers, with about 1/3 of that market share. Apparently Samsungs profits fell dramatically in 2023 because just over half of their business is structured towards memory chips, and they have too much inventory and not enough demand. Meanwhile, Apple in-housed their CPU design and their new chips are crushing it.
Are these numbers not big enough to qualify as a "slice"?
> I feel like there must be anti-competitive barriers somewhere
That's not a very compelling argument. By all means look for them, but show results, not hypotheticals alone.
It could also be that Apple is just competing much better, and each X gained per year leads to X+n gains the next year, compounding. They're vertically integrated from end user software services to OSes to devices to ISA's, and they have decades of experience in each. You don't just go out and raise a series A and knock them out of the lead.
> I feel like there must be anti-competitive barriers somewhere
The barrier is inventing and organizing the logistics of delivering the most cutting edge technology and the accompanying software and support to hundreds of millions of people around the world every year.
If anyone else could do it, they would do it. Samsung and Alphabet come sort of close.
> The barrier is inventing and organizing the logistics of delivering the most cutting edge technology
LOL, nothing Apple does is cutting edge. They took Linux and made it easy for corporate system admins. Touchscreens were invented back in the 60's. GUI's were created by Xerox.
Steve Jobs was a hack and a douche by all accounts, the reverence people have for him is laughable. But this is the behavior of the oligarchs and the monopolies they run; they have such centralized power that they're able to vacuum up all competitors, even potential or tangential ones.
Apple used 386BSD (4.3?), some userland from FreeBSD, and the Mach Microkernel from *CMU, all from the acquisition from NeXT, who developed XNU and NeXTStep 18 months-2 years before the Linux kernel was released. The innovative thing with the touch screen was smooth and accurate touch based gestures on a capacitive screen. GUI's were argubably invented by Ivan Sutherland and further developed by Doug Engelbart at SRI, which is where PARC poached the majority of their engineers.
If your going to troll, have the decency to get your facts straight.
Why is it so hard to believe that competing products are simply inferior? $93bn in profits might seem huge, but is it really such an outlier for a company of this size?
Apple raked in $93bn in profits last year. It's such an aberration compared to other companies I feel like there must be anti-competitive barriers somewhere. You expect me to believe that no competition is able to take a slice of that? It's too juicy not to! Competition should be eroding those margins to a more reasonable figure and it's not IMO.