johnny Posted February 19, 2016 Share Posted February 19, 2016 Why do you think Apple Music is awful? I pay 9 Euros every 3 months and can listen to all the music I want... What's not to like about it? It has not so much to do with the core service itself (streaming music works fine) but the actual UX/UI design, and the inelegant and confusing merging of what are essentially three completely separate music-streaming services (traditionally streaming songs you've purchased, streaming songs you've "Matched", streaming songs from "Apple Music"). The number of possible states an album might have is simply overwhelming to any user who doesn't intimately know the history of the service. You can "own" an album that you bought outright for $9.99, you can "match" an album if you subscribe to the Match service, acquired the album outside of iTunes, and scanned it on your system (annual fee), you can "add" an album from AM, if you're a subscriber (monthly fee), you can "heart" an album (but only if you own, match, or add it), and of course none of this indicates whether or not the album is actually on your device at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DCG Posted February 19, 2016 Share Posted February 19, 2016 (resulting in some things like the Apple Music app, which is awful). Why do you think Apple Music is awful? I pay 9 Euros every 3 months and can listen to all the music I want... What's not to like about it? Cheers, Gio I'm referring to the app itself, not the music service. All I want to to is only see music I have saved on the phone (and synced from my computer). The 'show only music on this iPhone' option does not work 90% of the time. It will work, and then after I close the app and re-open it it shows every album I ever purchased from iTunes. Why can't they fix this? Also, every time I plug my phone into my car stereo it starts playing the first song in alphabetical order. this might be something related to my car stereo (as I've used rentals cars where this didn't happen) but I know several people who have that same issue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted February 19, 2016 Share Posted February 19, 2016 iTunes is kind of a mess mostly because of the "legacy support" issue also faced by many others, especially Microsoft. The problem is that after a while if you are successful and run a software long enough, you have many users who depend on feature X or Y so it's very hard to change or remove them. Every little button of feature or interface item has its own constituency that will complain if you touch it. So you tend to keep piling up on top of the growing pile of code until it becomes complex and buggy. How long did Microsoft have to keep support for DOS software? With 1 billion iOS devices out there, you can be sure that there are tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of people using all kinds of parts of iTunes. I'm sure many still have old iPods that they synch with a wire, some have bought a ton of songs and TV shows/movies that they want to play, etc. So when Apple adds something like Apple Music, they try to add it on top of the existing stuff that was coded years ago and it becomes more and more complex. iTunes has tens of billions of dollars flowing through it, it's not an easy things to change on the fly and anything you do has big impacts. And any changes you make immediately goes out to hundreds of millions of people. When Spotify started out its music streaming, it had few users and fixed bugs as it went along; few people saw those early growing pains. When Apple released Apple Music, it immediately had tens of millions of people on the free trial and all kinds of bugs and edge cases that are hard to test for showed up for a vast number of people. That certainly doesn't help with perception. I'm pretty sure that Apple is aware that iTunes needs an overhaul and that they are working on refactoring it. But it's harder to do than even the iPhoto/Photos app that they recently completely refreshed because there's a lot more dependencies with iTunes than with Photos. You can't strip it down and rebuild it as you go like they did with the iWork suite and with Photos, because whatever you strip out will leave millions of people stranded. What might be slowing progress is that Apple's software resources are spread thin between maintaining and evolving 4 operating systems (depending how you count: OS X, iOS, Apple TV OS, Watch OS) + many first-party apps + all the new products that haven't been announced yet (electric car, VR, whatever). If they only had the Mac to deal with, iTunes would be a higher priority, but they have to allocate resources where they will be the most useful, and iTunes isn't at the top of the list. Despite it's many frustrations, it still works well enough to be one of the biggest and fastest growing online stores in the world. Part of me thinks they should never have made Apple Music and focused on other things, but I also think that it's hard to have the iTunes platform be viable long-term without streaming. I think what will probably happen is that in a few years Apple Music and iTunes will have been rebuilt and Apple customers will be glad to have them as option for their media needs rather than have to go to third parties that might have different kinds of problems that Apple can't do anything about. A more full-featured media platform will also be important for the Apple TV as it evolves. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dwy000 Posted February 19, 2016 Share Posted February 19, 2016 There are plenty of competitive advantages that can prevent a "gifted individual" from blowing up your business through disruption. It's hard to see a gifted entrepreneur disrupting Moody's business by offering a cheaper proposal (plenty of CRAs have tried). Of course, disruption happens when and where it can happen. Maybe MCO’s business is very well protected and doesn’t allow for disruption to happen. Technology is usually another matter. 2) I don't see Apple as a disruptive company, and I don't see how simply saying they "disrupted" generates any insight into their business or the industry. Maybe not now, but you don’t think Steve Jobs has been a disruptor? Secondly, if you think that AAPL has more patience in allocation of capital than Korean Chaebols (Samsung) or Chinese state controlled electronics manufacturers (Huawei) I believe you are hugely mistaken. AAPL's competitors are effectively government agencies that do not really have to answer to equity or credit markets, and do not have the same ROIC demands that American public companies have. IMO their patience for losses is far higher than any public American company. To summarize, access to capital is not a competitive advantage due to the particular nature of AAPL's competitors, and the size of the profit pool simply entices continued efforts from these competitors to steal profit share from AAPL. Again, this might be true if you believe you understand very well what goes on inside those Asian state controlled electronics manufacturers… I don’t think I know enough about those dynamics to judge. Instead, I know the position of strength I enjoy when I earn all the profits and my competitors none… Have you ever personally experienced it does no good, and only attracts more competition, or have you just read it in some books? Cheers, Gio Isn't that the complete opposite of Amazon? They earn 0% of industry profits but continue to garner massive equity and debt support and use it to take add'l market share (even at zero returns on that add'l market share). The companies that earn strong profits have PE's closer to 10x and have seen their margins shrink to keep pace with a competitor who feels no need to make a profit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted February 19, 2016 Share Posted February 19, 2016 Isn't that the complete opposite of Amazon? They earn 0% of industry profits but continue to garner massive equity and debt support and use it to take add'l market share (even at zero returns on that add'l market share). The companies that earn strong profits have PE's closer to 10x and have seen their margins shrink to keep pace with a competitor who feels no need to make a profit. Another way to see this - a more economically correct way IMO - is to say that Amazon has found ways to reinvest everything they make internally, but Apple's capital needs and opportunities aren't that big. If Apple could somehow redeploy 70bn/year internally and expense that, they might also show zero accounting profits, but that wouldn't mean that their activities are uneconomic. The question would be, what kind of return are they getting on that investment? Buying back stock is a different way to reinvest in the business, in a way, from a shareholder's point of view... Or said another way, Amazon shows zero accounting profits, but I don't think it's true that they take zero percent of the retail industry's profits. If amazon didn't exist, we could quantify how much more money everyone else would be making. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KCLarkin Posted February 19, 2016 Share Posted February 19, 2016 Isn't that the complete opposite of Amazon? They earn 0% of industry profits but continue to garner massive equity and debt support and use it to take add'l market share (even at zero returns on that add'l market share). The companies that earn strong profits have PE's closer to 10x and have seen their margins shrink to keep pace with a competitor who feels no need to make a profit. Amazon is a float-based company. They earn $0 on their "underwriting" and invest the float. Just like in insurance, the company most willing to take a loss in underwriting will get the most float. This dynamic works in commodity industries. Retail is a pure commodity. But I'm not sure the same dynamic will work at the premium end of the smartphone market. -- Actually, this is how the consumer PC market works. The PC guys make ~ $0 selling the computer. And make their money by preloading bloatware and adware. This is the race to the bottom. This leaves the high end of the market to Apple. Where they get most of the profit pool and continue to win share. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DCG Posted February 19, 2016 Share Posted February 19, 2016 So now Donald Trump wants people to boycott Apple: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/19/trump-calls-for-apple-boycott.html He is an ass, but Apple has said they would comply with any federally-issued subpoenas (not just a 'request' from the government), right? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted February 19, 2016 Share Posted February 19, 2016 So now Donald Trump wants people to boycott Apple: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/02/19/trump-calls-for-apple-boycott.html He is an ass, but Apple has said they would comply with any federally-issued subpoenas (not just a 'request' from the government), right? I think the law can force them to give information that they have. But they don't have the key to that phone. I don't think the law, as it stands, can force them to hack into their own system by creating new software to do so. As far as I know, tech companies can't be enrolled by force by the government to write hacking tools to be used against their own products. The risk here is that if they can be forced to do so in this case (which the FBI obviously picked carefully so that it's as clear-cut as possible so that it's hard to fight, to create a precedent), then that software can eventually leak and make all iPhones insecure. The government can over time start to make requests for less and less clear cut cases using the newly created precedent, or force Apple to give over the software tools to be used at the government's discretion. And other governments can follow the US' example and then you have chinese intelligence, Saudi secret police, Russia's FSB, etc, all asking Apple to help them crack phones/read iMessages/access GPS location/etc. Either everyone has secure devices, or nobody does. There's no such thing as a security hole that only "good guys" can exploit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jurgis Posted February 20, 2016 Share Posted February 20, 2016 To support Apple's position against government backdoor I might decide to change my stand against buying Apple devices. Go Tim Cook! If I buy Apple device though, you can pretty much turn of the light for the company's success. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted February 20, 2016 Share Posted February 20, 2016 Interesting read by someone who seems to know what they're talking about: http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=5645 Also, did the FBI change the account's password? Why was it changed after they had the device? http://www.buzzfeed.com/johnpaczkowski/apple-terrorists-appleid-passcode-changed-in-government-cust#.gsQbREQdB More here: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/02/19/paczkowski-apple-id Snowden, who knows a thing or two about surveillance and security: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NewbieD Posted February 20, 2016 Share Posted February 20, 2016 Nice to see Apple's stance on this. Just for trivia it can be worth mentioning there are companies purely focusing on this market (helping governments hack and recover phone data): https://www.msab.com/products/xry/ Stock has been really good to own. Can't see a newer Apple contact in their arsenal though so unsure if they do iphones. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
innerscorecard Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 A man who has repeatedly had Apple in his sights is now one step closer to the US presidency. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
str8shot Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 A man who has repeatedly had Apple in his sights is now one step closer to the US presidency. A man who, off the cuff at a rally, with little knowledge and/or contemplation of the facts and implications, blurted out that everyone should boycott Apple until they cooperate with the Feds. He probably didn't consider that his staff uses iPhones and iPads to run his campaign. Reporters on hand said that after the rally said staff were still using their devices. And we haven't heard Teflon Don repeat this silly idea since. He's symbolic of today's culture - offering outrageous sound bytes with no substance. In the end I think Rubio overtakes him. Regardless Apple will be fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
innerscorecard Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 He repeated it on several Twitter posts. And at another rally, I believe. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnny Posted February 21, 2016 Share Posted February 21, 2016 I think Apple would absolutely love the opportunity to figure out a way to do a tax inversion and frame it as some gesture of political progressivism. So I'm going to say that even if we have a Trump Presidency, not very much is going to come of this dispute. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
giofranchi Posted February 22, 2016 Share Posted February 22, 2016 If control of profit pool isn't a huge barrier to disruption (it's tautologically not as the disruptor is always stealing the profit pool from the incumbent) then maybe that isn't the greatest competitive advantage in business as you say it is. Sorry if I have said that… I certainly expressed myself poorly. Instead, here is what I meant: I would not even talk about a competitive advantage. I would talk about a “virtuous circle”. Let me explain: basically I invest in companies still led by their founders (Berkshire, Google, the Liberty family of businesses, Fairfax), and/or in companies which have a very long track record of very good capital allocation capabilities (Johnson&Johnson, Abbott Laboratories). My primary concern then about investing in Apple is the quality of management (Jobs has left prematurely, and present management has no real track record). This is the reason why I think it is important that present management finds itself in a virtuous circle, in which the great majority of its industry earnings should be used to further increase the gap between AAPL and its competitors in terms of the value proposition they have to offer to smartphone users. And this widening gap should help them retain the great majority of earnings while also gaining market shares in sales. In other words, management don’t have to be geniuses of Job’s caliber in order for Apple to continue being a success. And that is very important to me as a minority investor. This is the dynamic I personally experience every day on a very small scale… Of course another objection could be that what is true on a very small scale might not be as relevant on a global scale. I agree. Cheers, Gio Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted February 22, 2016 Share Posted February 22, 2016 http://fortune.com/tim-cook-apple-q-and-a/ http://www.apple.com/customer-letter/answers/ http://assets.amuniversal.com/1ba0d980b96d01334099005056a9545d Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted February 22, 2016 Share Posted February 22, 2016 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/technology/mark-zuckerberg-backs-apple-in-its-refusal-to-unlock-iphone.html?smid=tw-dealbook Mark Zuckerberg on Monday threw his support behind Apple in its bitter battle with the United States government over attempts to gain access to information protected by the company’s sophisticated encryption technology. Edit: Good summary of the situation and implications of the legal precedent: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2016/02/20/the-fbis-demands-to-hack-tashfeen-maliks-iphone-are-a-threat-to-everyones-online-security/ Another one: https://stratechery.com/2016/apple-the-fbi-and-security/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted February 25, 2016 Share Posted February 25, 2016 Microsoft just came out backing Apple against the FBI : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-25/microsoft-says-it-will-file-an-amicus-brief-to-support-apple Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DCG Posted February 25, 2016 Share Posted February 25, 2016 Microsoft just came out backing Apple against the FBI : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-25/microsoft-says-it-will-file-an-amicus-brief-to-support-apple Which is a little interesting, being that Bill Gates is publicly backing the FBI. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mephistopheles Posted February 25, 2016 Share Posted February 25, 2016 Microsoft just came out backing Apple against the FBI : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-25/microsoft-says-it-will-file-an-amicus-brief-to-support-apple Which is a little interesting, being that Bill Gates is publicly backing the FBI. He said he was misquoted and that he understands both sides but recognizes the danger in any extreme precedent (in either direction). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted February 26, 2016 Share Posted February 26, 2016 Microsoft just came out backing Apple against the FBI : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-25/microsoft-says-it-will-file-an-amicus-brief-to-support-apple Which is a little interesting, being that Bill Gates is publicly backing the FBI. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2016-02-23/gates-disputes-report-that-he-backs-fbi-in-apple-dispute Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
giofranchi Posted March 15, 2016 Share Posted March 15, 2016 First Click: A month with Apple Watch as my wallet http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/15/11232282/first-click-a-month-with-apple-watch-as-my-wallet Cheers, Gio Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted March 17, 2016 Share Posted March 17, 2016 Real world matters more than paper specs: For example, IOS has always been more RAM efficient than Android, can do more per amount of RAM. And it's better to have fewer, faster cores than a bunch of cores that are each slower, because most apps can't parallelize tasks into 4 or 8 cores anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liberty Posted March 17, 2016 Share Posted March 17, 2016 Amazing testimony. Not an ad. Made by the subject of the video. All companies need to focus more on accessibility. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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