Wow - the closest number on that list is "Total assessed (taxable) market value of Manhattan real estate for FY 2014-2015" at $914.8 billion. That's the kind of order of magnitude of Apple's worth - one New York borough, containing the world's most valuable real estate.
(Sorry, but can't resist adding: Given that it's worth 30% more than Apple, I guess that's why they call NYC the Big Apple...)
The Japanese imperial palace in the heart of Tokyo was once estimated to be worth more than California. (As in, the State of.) Bubbles are a funny thing.
Consumer interest & willingness to open their wallets might be currently inflated. But even a year ago, Apple had $137 billion in actual assets. Their P/B ratio is a somewhat high but not insane 5.7
> Here's a company that sells grilled cheese out of 3 trucks, that has been valued at $100M.
With zero liquidity. http://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/GRLD/quote indicates trading volume of 800 shares and their shares were $0.10 until January 28th, upon which someone started trading a few hundred shares a day at about $6.
That's not a bubble, that's someone screwing with a tiny stock. Probably selling back and forth to themself.
One reason might be the owner wanting to say "I'm worth $100 million on paper!" There's also the potential it's part of one of those pump-and-dump scams, and that people are getting emails right now saying "don't miss this hot stock! Up 10,000% this month alone!"
You each sell 50% of your "stock" to each other for $xmillion. Since it's a stock swap, no money has to change hands but now both of your companies are valued at 2 x $xmillion and voila you're an instant paper millionaire.
You can play a similar game with paintings and both become instant hot vogue modern artists. Imagine your next piece going up for sale at auction "his last piece sold for $30 million". I've actually known a few artists doing something like this at low $ amounts (a $3000-$15000) in order to stir up interest in their work in local scenes. If you go to a show and see some pieces up, but marked "sold" with a price tag like this, it's usually to create buzz. The best part is they'll both have receipts of sale that legitimize the whole thing.
According to finance theory you're also creating market "value" without there needing to be any new currency circulated.
How meaningless valuation figures can be. Apple's stock is pretty liquid and its revenue and profits suggest its market cap is, if anything, conservative.
Except that since 2008, we've been experiencing an historically unprecedented flow of newly-created fiat money by way of bonds -> TBTF European and US banks -> central banks (and central banks don't need to have money in their accounts to buy something with bank transfer).
It's a massive flow of some of the cheapest capital available being pumped regularly into government treasuries and private financial institutions, with central banks (for whom losses are meaningless) holding more and more of the bonded debt continuously, every year.
Then, whether or not a government program like the "Working Group On Financial Markets" ('pluge protection team') prevents cascading selloffs in equity positions, or whether it's simply the self-reinforced cycle of buying-2x%-up-on-a-x%-drop asset trading algorithms that have enough cash this month because of the central banks, and don't have to sell down their equity positions because last months positions are neutral-to-good, there's enough breathing room to trade up again this month, and a reliable "Federal Reserve put" backstopping everyone.
This is happening because we live in a new state of financial fantasy ever since everyone went bankrupt in 2008. Now they just keep printing money and sharing it amongst elite government (military) powers and private equity/asset controlling powers.
Few in the private sector would be solvent if they actually had to take losses on their assets back in 2008, in an environment where liquidity could not match obligations, and everyone would have to sell. It's the same for the public balance sheets, who need profits in the private sector to have any money at all, and who usually overspend and oblige themselves to more debt than they can pay down even if good times lasted forever.
Debt is money, and debt is an asset. Who cares if there's always more debt than money?
We're just all continuously bull-shitting-out money from the central banks, to the elite capital/government institutions, down to the middle- and upper-class. And to the U.S. war machine, which has a magic credit card with no limit, but which would have gone bankrupt in anything like a real market.
One reason they have to do this is to keep baby boomers' retirement "assets" worth something, in a situation where they all are going to want to cash out of 50 year's of liquidity-draining investments over a 20 year period, which will be quite a liquidity-draining effect on the equity markets. But that's a whole 'nother long discussion.
The West bullshits itself pretty hardcore over the television, and on the internet, and in their suburbs, and at their corporate workplaces. But it's the bullshit financial markets (and the fantasy-land equity market valuations) that is the both the biggest pile of bullshit of all, and is the power source which keeps the rest of the bullshit from collapsing.
But, hey, go ahead, tell yourself these are "conservatively" priced markets. You're a great citizen.
There's other weirdness, like Yahoo being valued at effectively $0 (once you discount their investments). But at least it's explainable in some sense.
Valuations are one of the least reliable attributes that use numbers I've ever seen. They're so unreliable as to be effectively worthless in any meaningful conversation. They indicate almost nothing, and aren't calculated in any consistent or meaningful way. If they're based on anything at all it's the most fractional speculation imaginable. Any company can sell me a single share at a price that would put their valuation into the billions. It's literally made up numbers. That's why this kind of stupidity exists http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/02/05/the_grilled_c...
Market cap implies public company because by definition private companies are not traded publicly on a market. It's the same way start ups have "valuations" and not "market caps".
> private companies are not traded publicly on a market.
Incorrect. They aren't traded on an exchange, but they are certainly traded in a market. A market is any situation where people buy and sell to one another. Venture capitalists certainly buy shares in private companies. Similarly, a private car dealership, private family restaurant, etc can (and often are) sold from the original owner to a new owner. Thus, a market exists.
I think the term you are looking for is exchange. The distinction between a market and an exchange is an exchange creates more explicit rules on trading in order to make the goods traded commoditized.
For example, instead of buying corn at my farmers market where the differences in corn might matter for both price and quality (local, organic, some farmer just happens to grow more delicious corn), when you buy agricultural commodities from Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), each contract is equivalent. X many bushes of corn at Y price. By making rules on quality and standardizing the goods/contracts/etc, an exchange helps to bring about price discovery and ensure the goods are priced correctly.
But it isn't inherent that exchanges cause the true price to be found or that OTC[0] markets are inferior or less accurate. It depends on numerous factors for whether a share price is being valued correctly.
Funny that you mention corn specifically, because all contracts are not delivered the same even on-exchange! The deliverable grade of corn is "#2 Yellow at contract Price, #1 Yellow at a 1.5 cent/bushel premium #3 Yellow at a 1.5 cent/bushel discount" per http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/agricultural/grain-and-oilse... .
Along these lines, I heard there were complaints in the UK's LIFFE market because excess rainfall was damaging French wheat crops, but even the poor crops were within the exchange's loose contract specifications.
But I suppose this is a bit of a tangent. The takeaway is that everything is traded on a market somewhere, but there are different sizes and standards for markets. Private companies can have some number of institutional investors while still keeping reporting requirements low (IIRC Facebook ran into this limit before their IPO). Ergo, every company has a market cap, but companies with fewer investors/owners are harder to measure.
actually, they averaged 95b/qtr last year vs apple's 75b last quarter. They have $36 trillion in assets (consisting of all of SAs oil and gas reserves + the state refining company that was merged in the 90s).
Considering the drop in oil prices lately, it's quite possible Apple's revenue exceeded Aramco's last quarter
Wikipedia tells me the company is valued somewhere between 1 and 7 trillion but has $30+ trillion is assets. I'm not a business person, shouldn't it be valued at more simply by the fact that is has a huge amount of assets?
I'm not an oil or gas expert, but the low valuation vs assets might be because many of those assets are underground in hard to reach places. Reserves may be proven but not economically viable to access at the current price of oil, for example.
A company's valuation is roughly the estimated sum of all its future profits until it shutters or goes bankrupt.
Most of those 30 trillion assets are deep into the ground, and cannot be turned into profits for free. If you need to spend (say) 2 dollars for every 3 dollars of worth of oil you extract, then the value of the company is already <$10T. The operating expenses can be pretty high. There's also taxes and interest.
Also, we don't know what the price of oil will be in 5 or 10 years, so we have to price in that uncertainty too.
It absolutely makes sense. All corporations have a market cap because they have shares outstanding and there is a price per share. We can disagree as to whether the share price is what it should be given the lack of trading liquidity, lack of transparency in their books, etc. Nevertheless, there is certainly a share price and a number of outstanding shares.
We can all argue whether Airbnb is worth $2B or $6B and Uber $40+ Billion, but these valuations aren't made up. They follow accounting rules.
The key phrase there was"non publicly traded company". By definition, non publicly traded companies don't have (stock) market capitalization, which is the value of all outstanding shares (stock).
damn, if marketing doesn't prove its worth with these numbers. Yes they make good products but its obvious their margins are so damn high because their marketing has convinced people that it is worth it. (iphone/mac/airport owner.... so yeah)
Honestly though, I would love some other choices but they competition in general just sucks. For awhile android phones almost caught my attention but the pc world hasn't since my first 24 inch iMac. Tablet market is just, Apple.
I swear by my Nexus tablets and I was one of the backers for the Jolla tablet. Nothing about an ipad or ipad mini is appealing to me, and the draconian lockdown and lack of control of my own hardware guarantees I will never own an Apple product.
And in my daily life I do not see many ipads. Only amongst those so ignorant to think tablets = Apple in the same way they think computers = Windows. There are plenty of Android tablets out there in use, a lot of them are in businesses now due to the significantly lower cost to adopt $100 - $200 tablets over ipad minis, combined with developer fees and the hoops to jump through with xcode licenses and ios developer licenses and all that bullshit.
So it is your opinion that the people who buy iPads do so only out of ignorance and none out of preference for Apple's product?
In my daily life I see quite a few iPads, but rarely a Nexus, and then only amongst those that have severe psychological issues. Nothing from Google interests me with their insistence on seeing me as a slave to their income generating advertisements./s
I love backhanded compliments about Apple's marketing. If marketing had the impact you seem to think it does, Samsung would be doing a whole lot better than they are.
The fact that they have such a massive share of the market despite the mediocre quality of their products really is a testament to their marketing.
Even just among Android phones, their products are neither the most affordable, the most powerful, the most user-friendly, the best supported, or the best constructed but they have managed to become the go-to brand for people buying an Android handset.
Pretty much everyone I've met (yeah, anecdotes) with less of an unhealthy interest in consumer electronics than me defaults to "iPhone or Samsung" when looking at phones. Of the people I interact with most often, about 50% have Apple Phones, 45% have Samsungs, and the remaining 5% have Moto X's or Nexuses or other brands.
I recently went to replace my HTC 1 M7. First I got a Moto G, but due to cell signal, and general quirks in lollipop I thought I would try a Samsung S5. Ugg. I don't know how people could stand all the non-standard stuff that samsung puts on there. So I decided to settle in with a Nexus 6. It was pretty good. But it just seemed empty. Maybe because I was used to using custom roms on One it just seemed like features were missing. I didn't want to install a custom rom on it because in the past I always just ended up with bugginess and quite frankly a custom roms are a cop out. I paid for something, the people I paid should give me a good experience not random people on the internet. But the app store, even though it gives users a plethora of customizations like lockscreens, locks, etc, they will never bring android up to the level of a unified experience of the iPhone.
So I went and got a 6+. I have to say since it was my first iPhone I was blown away. I was in the camp of "Why do I need to spend $1000 to do what this $200 moto g can do?" I really can't see how android users feel that any android device is as polished as the iphone. I guess its subjective but honestly >90% of people I know in silicon valley have an iphone. If the most tech centered place in the world all use iphones, I think that says something. Its more than just its the trendy cool thing to do. Its honestly a better experience and the professionals can see that. If I, an engineer in silicon valley, can't get android to do what I want when I want it, how can I expect the average user to master it? Maybe its because I have a higher standard for software and user design since I am in the business but everyday I find some subtle way that the iphone manages to impress me, a feeling I never got on android.
I tried an iPhone 6, moving away from a Nexus 5 and then a Moto X. I enjoyed many parts of it--Touch ID is cool, Apple Pay is cool--but I took it back two days later because the operating system expects you to have a thumb the size of Montana to do something as simple as going back a screen in the mail app and I found dealing with applications and getting the phone the way I wanted it (and I'm no iOS newbie, I had an iPhone 4 and have multiple iPads) was at best interminable, at worst impossible. I bought a Sony Xperia Z3 Compact. It's the first cell phone I've loved since the iPhone 4--unsurprising, as it borrows a lot from its design while being pretty unique and pleasant on its own. (The waterproofing is great, hiding the connectors during regular use is nice, having a real focus-stop camera button is brilliant. Also, it's bright orange. My Nexus 5 was bright red. This is kind of my thing.)
As far as your argumentum ad turtleneckum, I wouldn't give ninety percent of the people I know in Silicon Valley the time of day. Their choice of phone doesn't reflect on me or the world at large.
Going back a screen in the mail app is as simple as swiping right. I don't understand why you'd need a huge thumb for that. It doesn't need to reach up to the top of the screen.
The swipe gestures are not standard across all apps (they didn't seem to work in GMail, for example), and when they did I had to hit the left edge of the screen. I do not have monsterhands that can securely grip the phone, reach all the way across, and do that edge swipe. (I can hold securely the Z3c and hit almost any point on the screen with my thumb.) I also don't really like gestures--other than Swype keyboards--when using a phone one-handed, which doesn't help either.
That wasn't the main reason I took it back, though if they had an iPhone 5-sized upgraded iPhone 6 I'd probably have kept it longer. (I probably wouldn't have kept it, there were enough other frustrations that not paying $900 for a phone and being able to get a better phone for my use case for $375 was appealing, but it might have lasted longer than a snowy weekend.)
I had an iPhone4 then moved to Nexus for the larger screen. I like Android, but it was never as polished at iOS. The iPhone 6 got me to try it again and I think it's awesome. The big thing I notice is how polished all the iPhone apps are over their Android counterparts.
Most of my iOS complaints were fixed in 8 and phone size was finally remedied.
Admittedly, if Google had released an update Nexus5+ for $350 I likely would have just stayed with Android for the cost alone.
Honestly? Every app I use on Android is really nice and polished. Chrome, GMail, Maps, Twitter, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Hangouts, 1Password, Pocket Casts, Poweramp, and Pandora are all completely satisfying. The worst app I have is OpenMBTA...which fails to get my jimmies rustled because it's a dropdown list and a map overlay.
There are lots of shovelware applications on Android (lots on iOS too, though), but I don't really live on my phone so I think it's just much less of a thing for me.
I'll second your thoughts on the Xperia Z3 compact. I've gone through a variety of iPhones and Android phones, and this is the first phone that blew me away since the iPhone 4.
If the most tech centered place in the world all use iphones
It's a status signaller. It's like the Macbook Pro. From your reasoning, OSX must be the best OS out there given its popularity in SV, yet the grunt work for the vast majority of SV companies is done by linux - the stuff on the servers, making their money. Horses for courses, there is no One True OS.
It's also a massive overgeneralisation to say that the population of SV are essentially experts in phone design and UX. And if you think that the SV engineer is immune to fashion trends by dint of 'being professional', you'd be wrong. Witness the current fad of flat design, for example.
Then there's people like me, who see the 'better experience' as including things outside the phone. Supporting Apple supports their business model which suffocates open source and prevents tinkering. That's a worse experience for me.
What's wrong with Linux on a properly supported laptop? (OS X also sucks on improperly supported laptops... much worse than Linux, in fact). I find GNOME 3, in particular, much more productive on a laptop than OS X.
I don't doubt your anectodes, but the idea that Linus uses OS X on his macbook air is hilarious (according to what he's said, he's a Fedora user, and has retired his MBA in favor of a Pixel).
That's something you're projecting onto me - I put in the line "Horses for courses, there is no One True OS" specifically to avoid that.
Edit: I also disagree with the comment that OSX is the only usable laptop OS. Linux does require more maintenance overhead, but it's perfectly usable. At my last workplace there were plenty of people complaining about their OSX laptops, both in terms of various problems, and also that their older machines were slowing to the point of uselessness.
Marketing encourages people to take a look at their products. But if the products are terrible then nobody is going to buy them. Apple has had plenty of failures in the past despite good marketing e.g. Cube, many of the iMac variants.
The reason Apple does well is FOCUS. They keep their products lines simple which makes it easy for consumers to rationalise and easy for them to scale and improve.
Every product of theirs I own has two attributes that I prize: it works without much thought from me and it is well supported by Apple. Basically, an iPhone just works. There is no tweaking necessary. I have AppleCare. If I drop it and the screen shatters, I can get it replaced for cheap. Not many other phones can claim this.
This is huge. My parents (ages >60) bought galaxies. They pay $9 per phone and a >$200 deductible if it breaks. The insurance is through a 3rd party. That is insane.
if it breaks 12 months in, you put in $108 then $200 for the deductible. Those are conservative estimates because I can't find the pricing right now but I now it is more.
My iphone apple care was $100. If it breaks that is $79. I can break it 3 times over the course of 24 months and it is cheaper than breaking the galaxy once at 12 months. Applecare is a steal.
I agree, and that could be dangerous for Apple in the long run. But they still seem to be ahead, especially when it comes to laptops. I've used a Nexus 4 with great pleasure for about two years, and being back on an iPhone 5S, while slightly better (in my opinion), is only barely worth the higher cost.
I hope that happens to laptops too, because I'd love to have alternatives and some more competition.
In one sentence you ascribe Apple's success to their marketing. In the next you wish Apple's competition released products on par with Apple's quality.
Could it not be that Apple's success has less to do with marketing and more to do with the lack of quality amongst it's competitors?
I wonder how much of the stock growth is due to the investor program (stocks buybacks), how much is linked to the stock split (making the stock more affordable and potentially more liquid)?
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] thread(Sorry, but can't resist adding: Given that it's worth 30% more than Apple, I guess that's why they call NYC the Big Apple...)
Now let's watch the words "worth" and "value" be thrown around recklessly. :)
With zero liquidity. http://www.otcmarkets.com/stock/GRLD/quote indicates trading volume of 800 shares and their shares were $0.10 until January 28th, upon which someone started trading a few hundred shares a day at about $6.
That's not a bubble, that's someone screwing with a tiny stock. Probably selling back and forth to themself.
You and a friend start a couple "businesses".
You each sell 50% of your "stock" to each other for $xmillion. Since it's a stock swap, no money has to change hands but now both of your companies are valued at 2 x $xmillion and voila you're an instant paper millionaire.
You can play a similar game with paintings and both become instant hot vogue modern artists. Imagine your next piece going up for sale at auction "his last piece sold for $30 million". I've actually known a few artists doing something like this at low $ amounts (a $3000-$15000) in order to stir up interest in their work in local scenes. If you go to a show and see some pieces up, but marked "sold" with a price tag like this, it's usually to create buzz. The best part is they'll both have receipts of sale that legitimize the whole thing.
According to finance theory you're also creating market "value" without there needing to be any new currency circulated.
It's a massive flow of some of the cheapest capital available being pumped regularly into government treasuries and private financial institutions, with central banks (for whom losses are meaningless) holding more and more of the bonded debt continuously, every year.
Then, whether or not a government program like the "Working Group On Financial Markets" ('pluge protection team') prevents cascading selloffs in equity positions, or whether it's simply the self-reinforced cycle of buying-2x%-up-on-a-x%-drop asset trading algorithms that have enough cash this month because of the central banks, and don't have to sell down their equity positions because last months positions are neutral-to-good, there's enough breathing room to trade up again this month, and a reliable "Federal Reserve put" backstopping everyone.
This is happening because we live in a new state of financial fantasy ever since everyone went bankrupt in 2008. Now they just keep printing money and sharing it amongst elite government (military) powers and private equity/asset controlling powers.
Few in the private sector would be solvent if they actually had to take losses on their assets back in 2008, in an environment where liquidity could not match obligations, and everyone would have to sell. It's the same for the public balance sheets, who need profits in the private sector to have any money at all, and who usually overspend and oblige themselves to more debt than they can pay down even if good times lasted forever.
Debt is money, and debt is an asset. Who cares if there's always more debt than money?
We're just all continuously bull-shitting-out money from the central banks, to the elite capital/government institutions, down to the middle- and upper-class. And to the U.S. war machine, which has a magic credit card with no limit, but which would have gone bankrupt in anything like a real market.
One reason they have to do this is to keep baby boomers' retirement "assets" worth something, in a situation where they all are going to want to cash out of 50 year's of liquidity-draining investments over a 20 year period, which will be quite a liquidity-draining effect on the equity markets. But that's a whole 'nother long discussion.
The West bullshits itself pretty hardcore over the television, and on the internet, and in their suburbs, and at their corporate workplaces. But it's the bullshit financial markets (and the fantasy-land equity market valuations) that is the both the biggest pile of bullshit of all, and is the power source which keeps the rest of the bullshit from collapsing.
But, hey, go ahead, tell yourself these are "conservatively" priced markets. You're a great citizen.
Valuations are one of the least reliable attributes that use numbers I've ever seen. They're so unreliable as to be effectively worthless in any meaningful conversation. They indicate almost nothing, and aren't calculated in any consistent or meaningful way. If they're based on anything at all it's the most fractional speculation imaginable. Any company can sell me a single share at a price that would put their valuation into the billions. It's literally made up numbers. That's why this kind of stupidity exists http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/02/05/the_grilled_c...
They make the most popular consumer products in the world, and make a huge amount of profit as a result.
Shouldn't that be "..largest PUBLIC company by market cap..."? Isn't Saudi Aramco's value in trillions for example?
Incorrect. They aren't traded on an exchange, but they are certainly traded in a market. A market is any situation where people buy and sell to one another. Venture capitalists certainly buy shares in private companies. Similarly, a private car dealership, private family restaurant, etc can (and often are) sold from the original owner to a new owner. Thus, a market exists.
I think the term you are looking for is exchange. The distinction between a market and an exchange is an exchange creates more explicit rules on trading in order to make the goods traded commoditized.
For example, instead of buying corn at my farmers market where the differences in corn might matter for both price and quality (local, organic, some farmer just happens to grow more delicious corn), when you buy agricultural commodities from Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), each contract is equivalent. X many bushes of corn at Y price. By making rules on quality and standardizing the goods/contracts/etc, an exchange helps to bring about price discovery and ensure the goods are priced correctly.
But it isn't inherent that exchanges cause the true price to be found or that OTC[0] markets are inferior or less accurate. It depends on numerous factors for whether a share price is being valued correctly.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-counter_(finance)
Along these lines, I heard there were complaints in the UK's LIFFE market because excess rainfall was damaging French wheat crops, but even the poor crops were within the exchange's loose contract specifications.
But I suppose this is a bit of a tangent. The takeaway is that everything is traded on a market somewhere, but there are different sizes and standards for markets. Private companies can have some number of institutional investors while still keeping reporting requirements low (IIRC Facebook ran into this limit before their IPO). Ergo, every company has a market cap, but companies with fewer investors/owners are harder to measure.
Considering the drop in oil prices lately, it's quite possible Apple's revenue exceeded Aramco's last quarter
http://news.exxonmobil.com/press-release/exxon-mobil-corpora...
Most of those 30 trillion assets are deep into the ground, and cannot be turned into profits for free. If you need to spend (say) 2 dollars for every 3 dollars of worth of oil you extract, then the value of the company is already <$10T. The operating expenses can be pretty high. There's also taxes and interest.
Also, we don't know what the price of oil will be in 5 or 10 years, so we have to price in that uncertainty too.
I don't see why valuation isn't just as good at market cap, if a bit less liquid. same idea.
We can all argue whether Airbnb is worth $2B or $6B and Uber $40+ Billion, but these valuations aren't made up. They follow accounting rules.
One primary example is mark to market. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark-to-market_accounting
Honestly though, I would love some other choices but they competition in general just sucks. For awhile android phones almost caught my attention but the pc world hasn't since my first 24 inch iMac. Tablet market is just, Apple.
And in my daily life I do not see many ipads. Only amongst those so ignorant to think tablets = Apple in the same way they think computers = Windows. There are plenty of Android tablets out there in use, a lot of them are in businesses now due to the significantly lower cost to adopt $100 - $200 tablets over ipad minis, combined with developer fees and the hoops to jump through with xcode licenses and ios developer licenses and all that bullshit.
In my daily life I see quite a few iPads, but rarely a Nexus, and then only amongst those that have severe psychological issues. Nothing from Google interests me with their insistence on seeing me as a slave to their income generating advertisements./s
Even just among Android phones, their products are neither the most affordable, the most powerful, the most user-friendly, the best supported, or the best constructed but they have managed to become the go-to brand for people buying an Android handset.
Pretty much everyone I've met (yeah, anecdotes) with less of an unhealthy interest in consumer electronics than me defaults to "iPhone or Samsung" when looking at phones. Of the people I interact with most often, about 50% have Apple Phones, 45% have Samsungs, and the remaining 5% have Moto X's or Nexuses or other brands.
So I went and got a 6+. I have to say since it was my first iPhone I was blown away. I was in the camp of "Why do I need to spend $1000 to do what this $200 moto g can do?" I really can't see how android users feel that any android device is as polished as the iphone. I guess its subjective but honestly >90% of people I know in silicon valley have an iphone. If the most tech centered place in the world all use iphones, I think that says something. Its more than just its the trendy cool thing to do. Its honestly a better experience and the professionals can see that. If I, an engineer in silicon valley, can't get android to do what I want when I want it, how can I expect the average user to master it? Maybe its because I have a higher standard for software and user design since I am in the business but everyday I find some subtle way that the iphone manages to impress me, a feeling I never got on android.
I tried an iPhone 6, moving away from a Nexus 5 and then a Moto X. I enjoyed many parts of it--Touch ID is cool, Apple Pay is cool--but I took it back two days later because the operating system expects you to have a thumb the size of Montana to do something as simple as going back a screen in the mail app and I found dealing with applications and getting the phone the way I wanted it (and I'm no iOS newbie, I had an iPhone 4 and have multiple iPads) was at best interminable, at worst impossible. I bought a Sony Xperia Z3 Compact. It's the first cell phone I've loved since the iPhone 4--unsurprising, as it borrows a lot from its design while being pretty unique and pleasant on its own. (The waterproofing is great, hiding the connectors during regular use is nice, having a real focus-stop camera button is brilliant. Also, it's bright orange. My Nexus 5 was bright red. This is kind of my thing.)
As far as your argumentum ad turtleneckum, I wouldn't give ninety percent of the people I know in Silicon Valley the time of day. Their choice of phone doesn't reflect on me or the world at large.
That wasn't the main reason I took it back, though if they had an iPhone 5-sized upgraded iPhone 6 I'd probably have kept it longer. (I probably wouldn't have kept it, there were enough other frustrations that not paying $900 for a phone and being able to get a better phone for my use case for $375 was appealing, but it might have lasted longer than a snowy weekend.)
Most of my iOS complaints were fixed in 8 and phone size was finally remedied.
Admittedly, if Google had released an update Nexus5+ for $350 I likely would have just stayed with Android for the cost alone.
There are lots of shovelware applications on Android (lots on iOS too, though), but I don't really live on my phone so I think it's just much less of a thing for me.
It's a status signaller. It's like the Macbook Pro. From your reasoning, OSX must be the best OS out there given its popularity in SV, yet the grunt work for the vast majority of SV companies is done by linux - the stuff on the servers, making their money. Horses for courses, there is no One True OS.
It's also a massive overgeneralisation to say that the population of SV are essentially experts in phone design and UX. And if you think that the SV engineer is immune to fashion trends by dint of 'being professional', you'd be wrong. Witness the current fad of flat design, for example.
Then there's people like me, who see the 'better experience' as including things outside the phone. Supporting Apple supports their business model which suffocates open source and prevents tinkering. That's a worse experience for me.
Apple makes the only usable laptop OS these days (now that Windows 7 gave way to iOWondows)
Also, Linus Torvalds uses OS X on his macbook air.
It's almost like OSX isn't the One True OS, and that different people have different preferences.
Edit: I also disagree with the comment that OSX is the only usable laptop OS. Linux does require more maintenance overhead, but it's perfectly usable. At my last workplace there were plenty of people complaining about their OSX laptops, both in terms of various problems, and also that their older machines were slowing to the point of uselessness.
Like I said, horses for courses.
Marketing encourages people to take a look at their products. But if the products are terrible then nobody is going to buy them. Apple has had plenty of failures in the past despite good marketing e.g. Cube, many of the iMac variants.
The reason Apple does well is FOCUS. They keep their products lines simple which makes it easy for consumers to rationalise and easy for them to scale and improve.
if it breaks 12 months in, you put in $108 then $200 for the deductible. Those are conservative estimates because I can't find the pricing right now but I now it is more.
My iphone apple care was $100. If it breaks that is $79. I can break it 3 times over the course of 24 months and it is cheaper than breaking the galaxy once at 12 months. Applecare is a steal.
I used to be impressed with how Apple products 'just work', but recently they have noticeably started slipping in this area.
I hope that happens to laptops too, because I'd love to have alternatives and some more competition.
Could it not be that Apple's success has less to do with marketing and more to do with the lack of quality amongst it's competitors?