If they made their current net annual income for the entirety of their existence (not even close), then they would've needed to be taxed ~50% to have reached $1 trillion in taxes.
I get (or at least hope) that it's an exaggeration, but I'm not too keen on seemingly witty phrases without substance that get repeated everywhere.
How much has Apple paid? How about all the employees? Shareholders? How many millions of jobs has Apple created? I am pretty sure that the net economic value created by Apple has far outstripped any alleged deficiencies in they taxes.
And if you did tax them at 50% would they have innovated and hired as many people as they have? As a thought experiment, would Apple have been as successful if it were started in Paris rather than in a Los Altos garage? Why doesn’t Europe have more companies valued in the hundreds or billions? Why is there little Silicon Valley-style garage-based entrepreneurship in France? Culture is one aspect, but taxes and regulations are the primary reason. If you tax something, you get less of it.
>I am pretty sure that the net economic value created by Apple has far outstripped any alleged deficiencies in they taxes.
That's not how taxes, or any law for that matter, work. You don't get to steal from the society that created you by screeching "but look at the JOBS I created!"
Not sure which pedantry is annoying to you, but I thought it was surprising that the guy running Apple isn't crediting at least both Steves for founding the company on that belief.
Isn't it a little bit sad to see that Tim Cook in this situation still looks backwards and talks about Steve Jobs in half of the email? Instead of being forward looking and laying out his vision of the future of apple and the products to come? He really is still simply maintaining Jobs' business, trying to repeat what Jobs said as often as possible so that he sounds like him.
Bummer that Tim Cook didn't mention Woz. Heck, nobody here on "Hacker" News has mentioned Woz in the context of this article or Tim Cook's email. Way to go, folks. (and yes, Ronald Wayne deserves a shout out, too.)
Posthumous reality distortion field in effect. Can you feel it?
Woz got Apple off the ground and gave them their "magic seed", but he did not and could not bring it to such incredible business success. I doubt he would've wanted to. I think nearly everyone on HN still recognizes the amazing contributions he's made to computing.
Amazing magic seeds or sufficiently advanced technology? Call it what you will, but that's like mentioning AC and Westinghouse, but ignoring Tesla or only mentioning one parent on your birthday.
Isn't it awesome that he's making good on a promise to take care of the business to then pass it on to the next CEO? What if it's an 8 yr old African child right now looking up to code Swift 4 on YouTube?
Not everyone believes that giving non-privileged people access to technology is a panacea to a better life for them, or for a better world. As a result it comes off to me a lot like justifying capitalist motives with (highly unrealistic) humanitarian ideals.
For a good example of how this type of rhetoric fails to persuade people, look for criticism of Steven Pinker. I'm not trying to discard his work so much as to point out that the values he takes for granted as being desirable are not universal.
That doesn't make it tone deaf. That just makes it representative of a (widely held) perspective that you disagree with.
EDIT: for backup to my "widely held" claim, here's a poll on what people think has improved life the most in the last 50 years, as well as what they expect to improve it the most in the future. Technology and medicine / health (which is technology-related, of course) hold the top two spots in both results: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/12/four-in-ten-...
I genuinely don't get it. We just watched Asia lift literally billions of people out of abject poverty through capitalism, and now that Africa is on track to do the same, people are full of criticism. Unreal.
Well, an appeal to common belief has never held much water.
In any case, there are more things to measure with effects of technology than poverty, which is far from an objective measure and implies many things about the values of the person measuring it. You need to compare and contrast multiple views of the world to meaningfully conclude one is better. Steven Pinker has only made a readable argument for one perspective. Merely accepting that argument will not necessarily provide you with a better model. This viewpoint is inevaluable by itself; a pleasant bit of secular faith.
Anyway, it’s tone deaf because children are also mining our computer components, working in effectively slave labor factories, recycling our technology at great cost to their communities, likely because the power dynamics between nations are so skewed to wealth. This “progress” is paid for in the blood of children.... so, by producing such a simple view of the universe, you are implying your values and marginal life improvement completely justify the pain people go through producing your phone, sneakers, tv, all of which are designed to rapidly deteriorate and continue the cycle.
People know Ray Kroc = McDonald's. We know Rockefeller = Standard Oil. We know Thomas Watson = IBM.
I'm not sure how many CEOs from 100 years ago I can name, period. Most companies that old do seem to include a person's name. But I'd say Steve Jobs stands at least as likely to be remembered as Ray Kroc or Thomas Watson, and for many of the same reasons.
Every culture has its myths, and in Apple's culture today, no myth is bigger than Steve Jobs. It might be wise of Cook to invoke Jobs at big moments.
He knows he's never going to match that legend... so why try? Instead of fighting it, he uses it to foster a common purpose within the company.
In terms of "maintaining" the business, Apple's share price when Cook became CEO seven years ago was about a quarter of what it is now. Pretty good maintenance.
I was just having a conversation with a friend about Tim and his role at Apple.
I posited that Steve probably wasn’t the right person to grow Apple to $1T in market cap and that Tim really made it happen. My friend took the opposite side believing that Tim is just running of Steve’s ideas and that Tim had relatively little to do with making it happen.
This kind of debate is like who's the GOAT of the NBA, Lebron or MJ. It's gonna be a lot of cherry-picking of data, subjective thoughts, etc. Not that the debate wouldn't be fun or illuminating, just that an objective answer is probably out of reach.
This is an interesting topic for me as I find myself asking similar questions about my role at a company I founded.
I founded a company currently valued in the low-mid 8 digits. I successfully brought the company through an acquisition and have doubled revenues since.
I keep coming back to an article I read on HN years ago talking about the 4 types of CEOs: founder, growth, maintenance, death (bankruptcy). While I’ve found success in 1 and 2, I don’t enjoy 2 as much as 1 and I don’t think I’d be any good at 3 or 4.
I’m probably experiencing a form of imposter syndrome as the board & leadership are all satisfied with my performance, but the thoughts still linger.
Read Rocket Fuel. Its a book I am sure the HN crowd will critique but it has made a large difference in how my biz operates and how multiple founders fill roles. I am very much an "integrator" from the book. I am less of the massive, big picture and more of the day to day execution. Good at growth/maintenance. Not great as a true "founder". And I have managed through near death and it seemingly took years off my life so I'd prefer not to go back to that one!
I think they're different people with different strengths, so it's futile to compare them.
I think Steve Jobs was an incredibly talented person and it's not really fair to ding Tim Cook for not being Steve Jobs. Apple is obviously not the same company without Jobs, but is that Tim Cook's fault? I don't see how.
It seems to me that a lot of the "analysis" of Tim Cook vs Steve Jobs is really just people wishing Steve Jobs was still alive. I wish he was too.
I will point out that Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and hired Tim Cook in 1998. So Jobs' incredible 2nd run at Apple was also, to some extent, Cook's incredible run too.
Great way of looking at it. It even raises the question if it would be possible or desirable to match the legacy of Steve Jobs. Or if - from a business point of view - the best thing Tim could do was to manage Steve's legacy. Similar to the pope, to stay in your metaphor.
HN downvotes anything critical of apple, so heres my criticisms-
>Anti consumer- Proprietary hardware, non standard devices, and a constant cornering of user content. I remember burning CDs from Itunes and ripping them back just to use them on my mp3 player... The hardware is 2x the price of non Apple brand, this should come as no surprise.
>Anti developer- It sounds like at bare minimum I will need a 600 dollar refurbished apple mini to compile my app. And pay for yearly development. And apple intentionally breaks code. Not to mention prior to 2014, they were harsh on app developers denying many people's hard work.
I cannot understand the fandom on HN, why would anyone be a fan of such an aggressive company?
EDIT: 3 downvotes and 0 reasons why? Did Apple buy accounts on HN?
On the consumer side, I don't want "standard devices". I want excellent hardware with excellent software, and I want it to just work. Apple isn't perfect here, but they're much better than their competition. I also like their stance on privacy, and the fact that their business model is aligned with their stance.
Also, didn't iTunes lead the charge to ditch DRM?
On the developer side, I'm an iOS dev. It might be frustrating that Apple doesn't make their toolchain available to you on a Linux box, but I'm actually really glad. It's complex and frustrating enough without them trying to support hobby developers on other platforms. This sounds harsh, but if you don't care about / enjoy Apple's platforms enough to spend $600 to develop on them, they probably are better off without you developing for those platforms.
Also, Apple doesn't generally "intentionally break code". They deprecate stuff all the time, which I appreciate both as a consumer and developer. It keeps the platform relatively cruft-free and ensures that I don't have to make my apps support iOS 1.0 through 12.0.
All of the above is generally my opinion, so if you're going to argue that I actually do want standard devices, or that I should want Apple dev on Linux, or that deprecating things on their platforms shouldn't be my preferred approach, don't bother.
So yes, I'm a fan of Apple, because I value things differently than you, and their actions align with my values.
The downvotes are because your comment does not address the content of the article in question. Instead, you have merely posted a generic criticism of Apple, going over the same old talking points we have all heard before. Thus, your comment does not constitute a quality contribution to this thread.
Non standard devices? Who makes those standards and why? I had a “standard” Windows computer for many years and it was driver hell. For almost any reasonably modern peripheral, I can plug it into my Mac and it works. Macs use “standard” USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports. Some other laptops still require dedicated and proprietary chargers. Lightning is proprietary, however, it’s only used for Apple devices, so that doesn’t make much difference. It isn’t like Apple requires lightning for third party external drives.
Internet Explorer was standard. Chrome has become a standard — both browsers got downright proprietary with all of their “standards.”
Have to buy a Mac to build your Mac/iOS apps? I don’t see what is so tragic about having to actually use the device for which you are developing. How can you run a Mac App on Windows or Linux? It seems like to even do basic testing you should be testing on Mac Harware. You can buy a brand new Mini for $499. Seems like a small price if you are a “professional” developer.
As far as intentionally breaking code, have you thought about why that happens? I assure you that there isn’t some secret group at Cupertino trying to figure out how best to annoy developers.
As far as “why Apple” — as an example, I have a 2010 iMac with 16GB RAM running High Sierra that is far more stable and reliable than a 2010 Dell running the latest Windows. That’s subjective, but the point is that Macs have a long lifespan and thus a high resale value.
Also privacy and security — Apple cares about it. They don’t always get it right, but how often have Macs or iOS been infected with malware compared to other platforms?
And there is UX. Macs are easier to use for most people that have tried them. iPhone satisfaction ratings are over 95%. That means something.
Of course Apple isn’t perfect, but find a piece of software or hardware that is — Apple gets things right far more than they get things wrong. Look at the various incarnations of Windows as a comparison and all the controversy they have generated.
Don’t like Apple? Don’t buy their stuff and stop trying to sell to people that do. You are free to go and sell wherever you want. As far as the Apple developer fee — if $99 per year is too expensive, then don’t pay it and go somewhere else. There are enough generic me-too apps on the store already. If you had something unique and valuable, you’d make plenty of money so that $99 would be insignificant anyway.
> To this day, you can't even reliably search for local files on a win10 system. They literally laid off their QA department.
I would've thought this to be an exaggeration, but I have the discord app installed, it's automatically starting at boot, It's pinned to the task bar, but when I search for "discord" in the start menu, it gives me a worthless "search the web" result. It's almost insulting...
Ironically there's a Search and Indexing Troubleshooting Wizard built into Windows 10 because the feature is so unreliable but the Start Menu search doesn't find it even when it's working properly.
The conspiracy theorist in me says they broke it on purpose to encourage users to migrate to azure or onedrive. Even on 3+ghz CPUs with multi-gbps SSDs, copying hundreds of little files on my win10 OEM pc was painfully slow. I suspect the A/V was scanning every single one. They have every incentive to gimp local file I/O to promote their higher-profit cloud services.
That is the Defender real time protection, loves to hog enormous amounts of CPU during any file I/O, you can disable it temporarily but it very aggressively nags you about it. However it does let you exclude specific folders and will not prevent you from doing things like excluding your entire home folder or even C:\.
You're getting downvotes because your criticism is off-base and completely unrelated to the point at hand. If you don't want to buy Apple products, don't buy them. That doesn't make them anti-consumer. If you don't want to spend the money to develop on the platforms, don't do it. Needing to own a part of the platform in order to develop for it is not anti-developer.
For most people that like Apple, both developer and consumer alike, there are pros that vastly outweigh any negatives. Developers, for example, make hundreds of times more income via Apple's platforms than they do off Android. The investment in the hardware is part of that. It's an investment. For consumers, it's an investment in a product that they feel is better for them.
Your criticisms are nothing more than opinions. They don't really belong here.
At Netflix, the milestone we celebrated was subscriber numbers, since that is what drove the business. Someone once asked our CEO why we didn't have a holiday party, and he said in effect that he'd rather celebrate important business milestones, and not a day on the calendar.
It's interesting to me that Mr. Cook is downplaying this, but it makes some sense, since the price of the stock (and therefore the valuation) is only loosely tied to the success of the company.
It seems like the CEOs who really know what they are doing choose their celebrations carefully.
Fundraising and celebration is a related phenomena. I've sometimes noticed a lot of young first-time founders throw parties and celebrate having (investor) cash in the bank. Seems like folks with more experience tend to treat a successful fundraise as more of somebody else's money that you have to give back, and instead celebrate what they get done with that cash.
Why this crazy obsession for meteoric growth? If Netflix tops paid subscribers, it's likely doing incredibly well. Hell, even free subscribers make enormous amounts of money to Facebook.
Great point, may be personal life should also be like this. Instead of celebrating birthday or new year, you go all out on achieving personal milestones.
That sounds like a great way to create a toxic culture. A company is made up of human beings after all. God forbid a company has a social event among team mates that doesn't revolve around a performance metric.
In my opinion when the performance metrics are down is when you need the team building the most.
> It's interesting to me that Mr. Cook is downplaying this, but it makes some sense, since the price of the stock (and therefore the valuation) is only loosely tied to the success of the company.
Aren't these types of messages mostly meaningless? I mean, what is he going to say?
"Our stock price reflect our ability to continue to charge substantially more for our products than they cost to make. So I would like to thank our lawyers for making sure we aren't the ones who have to pay more taxes. The executive team at the other tech companies for helping us collude against our own employees so we don't have to pay them more. And our friends in China who keep a steady stream of low payed dormitory bound workers available so we don't have to spend our money in the US, or even much at all. Thank you all for helping us continuing these practices as the world burns."
So how much cash has Apple amassed in the last fifteen years or so since the iPhone reign? I'd say enough to keep them floating for at least another 20 years. And a lot of that could be attributed to Cook.
A bit off-topic. I've noticed that P/E ratio (Price / Earnings) is pretty decent for Apple and it doesn't change much. In fact, since 2009 till today P/E stays in corridor between ~10 and ~20. What it means is that $1TB market cap is relatively cheap price for Apple. Their stock price merely reflects growing net income, so their EPS (Earning Per Share) growing steadily over years:
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadI get (or at least hope) that it's an exaggeration, but I'm not too keen on seemingly witty phrases without substance that get repeated everywhere.
And if you did tax them at 50% would they have innovated and hired as many people as they have? As a thought experiment, would Apple have been as successful if it were started in Paris rather than in a Los Altos garage? Why doesn’t Europe have more companies valued in the hundreds or billions? Why is there little Silicon Valley-style garage-based entrepreneurship in France? Culture is one aspect, but taxes and regulations are the primary reason. If you tax something, you get less of it.
That's not how taxes, or any law for that matter, work. You don't get to steal from the society that created you by screeching "but look at the JOBS I created!"
Posthumous reality distortion field in effect. Can you feel it?
This is an unbelievably tone deaf thing to say and a reason why people roll their eyes when techies talk about the future.
For a good example of how this type of rhetoric fails to persuade people, look for criticism of Steven Pinker. I'm not trying to discard his work so much as to point out that the values he takes for granted as being desirable are not universal.
EDIT: for backup to my "widely held" claim, here's a poll on what people think has improved life the most in the last 50 years, as well as what they expect to improve it the most in the future. Technology and medicine / health (which is technology-related, of course) hold the top two spots in both results: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/12/four-in-ten-...
Also, just by way of info, Africa is now one of the world's fastest growing economic regions, thanks to capitalism: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/middle-east-and-a....
I genuinely don't get it. We just watched Asia lift literally billions of people out of abject poverty through capitalism, and now that Africa is on track to do the same, people are full of criticism. Unreal.
In any case, there are more things to measure with effects of technology than poverty, which is far from an objective measure and implies many things about the values of the person measuring it. You need to compare and contrast multiple views of the world to meaningfully conclude one is better. Steven Pinker has only made a readable argument for one perspective. Merely accepting that argument will not necessarily provide you with a better model. This viewpoint is inevaluable by itself; a pleasant bit of secular faith.
Anyway, it’s tone deaf because children are also mining our computer components, working in effectively slave labor factories, recycling our technology at great cost to their communities, likely because the power dynamics between nations are so skewed to wealth. This “progress” is paid for in the blood of children.... so, by producing such a simple view of the universe, you are implying your values and marginal life improvement completely justify the pain people go through producing your phone, sneakers, tv, all of which are designed to rapidly deteriorate and continue the cycle.
In 100 years when people hear Disney they will think about Walt Disney.
Why? Because it literally is "The Walt Disney Company".
https://www.nyse.com/quote/XNYS:DIS
Will they think of Jobs or Gates when they hear of Microsoft or Apple? It's far from certain.
How many CEO's from 100 years ago can you name that did not have their name in the company's name?
I'm not sure how many CEOs from 100 years ago I can name, period. Most companies that old do seem to include a person's name. But I'd say Steve Jobs stands at least as likely to be remembered as Ray Kroc or Thomas Watson, and for many of the same reasons.
He knows he's never going to match that legend... so why try? Instead of fighting it, he uses it to foster a common purpose within the company.
In terms of "maintaining" the business, Apple's share price when Cook became CEO seven years ago was about a quarter of what it is now. Pretty good maintenance.
I posited that Steve probably wasn’t the right person to grow Apple to $1T in market cap and that Tim really made it happen. My friend took the opposite side believing that Tim is just running of Steve’s ideas and that Tim had relatively little to do with making it happen.
Curious to see what HN thinks.
This is an interesting topic for me as I find myself asking similar questions about my role at a company I founded.
I founded a company currently valued in the low-mid 8 digits. I successfully brought the company through an acquisition and have doubled revenues since.
I keep coming back to an article I read on HN years ago talking about the 4 types of CEOs: founder, growth, maintenance, death (bankruptcy). While I’ve found success in 1 and 2, I don’t enjoy 2 as much as 1 and I don’t think I’d be any good at 3 or 4.
I’m probably experiencing a form of imposter syndrome as the board & leadership are all satisfied with my performance, but the thoughts still linger.
I think Steve Jobs was an incredibly talented person and it's not really fair to ding Tim Cook for not being Steve Jobs. Apple is obviously not the same company without Jobs, but is that Tim Cook's fault? I don't see how.
It seems to me that a lot of the "analysis" of Tim Cook vs Steve Jobs is really just people wishing Steve Jobs was still alive. I wish he was too.
I will point out that Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and hired Tim Cook in 1998. So Jobs' incredible 2nd run at Apple was also, to some extent, Cook's incredible run too.
He told me that Steve was his friend, and he believes that no true friend can ever be/replace their friend, so he chose to run Apple like Tim.
From his emphasis on privacy to his masterful supply chain management, it is clear that he has stuck to that position.
>Anti consumer- Proprietary hardware, non standard devices, and a constant cornering of user content. I remember burning CDs from Itunes and ripping them back just to use them on my mp3 player... The hardware is 2x the price of non Apple brand, this should come as no surprise.
>Anti developer- It sounds like at bare minimum I will need a 600 dollar refurbished apple mini to compile my app. And pay for yearly development. And apple intentionally breaks code. Not to mention prior to 2014, they were harsh on app developers denying many people's hard work.
I cannot understand the fandom on HN, why would anyone be a fan of such an aggressive company?
EDIT: 3 downvotes and 0 reasons why? Did Apple buy accounts on HN?
Also, didn't iTunes lead the charge to ditch DRM?
On the developer side, I'm an iOS dev. It might be frustrating that Apple doesn't make their toolchain available to you on a Linux box, but I'm actually really glad. It's complex and frustrating enough without them trying to support hobby developers on other platforms. This sounds harsh, but if you don't care about / enjoy Apple's platforms enough to spend $600 to develop on them, they probably are better off without you developing for those platforms.
Also, Apple doesn't generally "intentionally break code". They deprecate stuff all the time, which I appreciate both as a consumer and developer. It keeps the platform relatively cruft-free and ensures that I don't have to make my apps support iOS 1.0 through 12.0.
All of the above is generally my opinion, so if you're going to argue that I actually do want standard devices, or that I should want Apple dev on Linux, or that deprecating things on their platforms shouldn't be my preferred approach, don't bother.
So yes, I'm a fan of Apple, because I value things differently than you, and their actions align with my values.
Internet Explorer was standard. Chrome has become a standard — both browsers got downright proprietary with all of their “standards.”
Have to buy a Mac to build your Mac/iOS apps? I don’t see what is so tragic about having to actually use the device for which you are developing. How can you run a Mac App on Windows or Linux? It seems like to even do basic testing you should be testing on Mac Harware. You can buy a brand new Mini for $499. Seems like a small price if you are a “professional” developer.
As far as intentionally breaking code, have you thought about why that happens? I assure you that there isn’t some secret group at Cupertino trying to figure out how best to annoy developers.
As far as “why Apple” — as an example, I have a 2010 iMac with 16GB RAM running High Sierra that is far more stable and reliable than a 2010 Dell running the latest Windows. That’s subjective, but the point is that Macs have a long lifespan and thus a high resale value.
Also privacy and security — Apple cares about it. They don’t always get it right, but how often have Macs or iOS been infected with malware compared to other platforms?
And there is UX. Macs are easier to use for most people that have tried them. iPhone satisfaction ratings are over 95%. That means something.
Of course Apple isn’t perfect, but find a piece of software or hardware that is — Apple gets things right far more than they get things wrong. Look at the various incarnations of Windows as a comparison and all the controversy they have generated.
Don’t like Apple? Don’t buy their stuff and stop trying to sell to people that do. You are free to go and sell wherever you want. As far as the Apple developer fee — if $99 per year is too expensive, then don’t pay it and go somewhere else. There are enough generic me-too apps on the store already. If you had something unique and valuable, you’d make plenty of money so that $99 would be insignificant anyway.
For all their faults, they brought personal computing quality out of the gutter and actually gave a fuck about UX.
To this day, you can't even reliably search for local files on a win10 system. They literally laid off their QA department.
I would've thought this to be an exaggeration, but I have the discord app installed, it's automatically starting at boot, It's pinned to the task bar, but when I search for "discord" in the start menu, it gives me a worthless "search the web" result. It's almost insulting...
For most people that like Apple, both developer and consumer alike, there are pros that vastly outweigh any negatives. Developers, for example, make hundreds of times more income via Apple's platforms than they do off Android. The investment in the hardware is part of that. It's an investment. For consumers, it's an investment in a product that they feel is better for them.
Your criticisms are nothing more than opinions. They don't really belong here.
It's interesting to me that Mr. Cook is downplaying this, but it makes some sense, since the price of the stock (and therefore the valuation) is only loosely tied to the success of the company.
It seems like the CEOs who really know what they are doing choose their celebrations carefully.
A good lesson to learn here.
I feel like this is the same trap that Facebook fell into. Celebrating subscribers is great until you top out.
In my opinion when the performance metrics are down is when you need the team building the most.
But when it came to something for the whole company it was tied to company events.
Aren't these types of messages mostly meaningless? I mean, what is he going to say?
"Our stock price reflect our ability to continue to charge substantially more for our products than they cost to make. So I would like to thank our lawyers for making sure we aren't the ones who have to pay more taxes. The executive team at the other tech companies for helping us collude against our own employees so we don't have to pay them more. And our friends in China who keep a steady stream of low payed dormitory bound workers available so we don't have to spend our money in the US, or even much at all. Thank you all for helping us continuing these practices as the world burns."
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/pe-rati...