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At 40, There's Never Been a Tech Company Quite Like Apple (qz.com)
Mike Murphy, reporting for Quartz: Forty years ago today, two college dropouts decided to start selling cobbled-together computers out of a garage in California because they couldn't afford the ones on the market. They had an intricate wood-cut logo, not much money or manpower, and their first computer only sold about 175 units. But in the years between then and now, Apple has become one of the most valuable companies in the world, spurring revolutions in how we communicate, use computers, listen to music, and to a lesser extent, tell the time. [...] Some critics think that Apple is boring now, setting itself up to iterate on its successes and lock customers into their services with products that are very good, but nothing they haven't really seen before. This is a solid business strategy that will provide strong returns for years to come, but not those eye-popping leaps we've seen before. Here's a video Apple published recently showcasing 40 of its most remarkable products.
Boring? Just wait for the apple car. It will blow you away.
That term has always been meaningless when it comes to entrepreneurs. What could they possibly learn from academia? They have the idea, they have the motivation.
Bullshit. 50% mark up is pretty standard for pretty much every supermarket on the planet.
If it wasn't for Carly Fiorina, HP would have been bigger and better
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
Newton... *The* reason I will never personally own another Apple product, thanks to the way they killed it.
Will apple change a 30% fee for any toll usages will there cars on top of the tolls?
Proprietary company always releasing products with features disabled and a mindset counter to freedom and choice. Proud to say I NEVER spent any money on Apple products.
TFA is almost completely content-free. 4000 characters of wasted space. It looks like some financial writer was looking for clicks and is spouting the "Apple is doomed" meme again.
...and a middle-aged loser: Ronald Wayne.
On this day, even the advertisements are jokes.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
A quick google search says grocery stores tend to have a 12% markup.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
But not in terms of absolute markups, like 400 dollars on a phone vs 1 dollar on a packet of biscuits.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Isn't that exactly what used to be said about Microsoft 10-15 years ago?
I take it you've conveniently forgotten when Commodore removed memory sockets from the PET 4016 to prevent users from upgrading to 32 KB with cheaper parts instead of buying the PET 4032.
I miss OMG PONIES meme.
You can't handle the truth.
Will apple change a 30% fee for any toll usages will there cars on top of the tolls?
Yes, and you'll have to pass through iToll in order to proceed. You will not be allowed to use other tolls.
I for one will wait for the Firefox car.
Sony. Apple is basically another Sony.
"They had an intricate wood-cut logo, not much money or manpower, and their first computer only sold about 175 units"
And if you can find one of these units, they are still the most expensive product that Apple has ever sold
And the markup is virtually all cost. If a grocery chain profits by 0.5% on sales, it's doing well. Years ago when I was in grocery retailing the markup was about 20% with the same profit margin, so in no other industry has advancing backroom technology benefitted the customer more directly.
Apple Computer^W
proudly going out of business for 40 years.
The 30-50% thing is a myth. Apple's most recent gross margin is something on the order of 25%. The iPhone has at times peaked in mid-30's. That's not 30% over 'market rates' (whatever that means), that's 30% over cost.
Having a margin in the 25% range is not at all unusual or excessive. Intel, Qualcomm and Cisco all have similar margins, and I found those with ten seconds of googling.
In inflation adjusted dollars, they were still way ahead of Apple. Totally dominated multiple markets (not just press-domination, actual sales/revenue domination). And margins that still rival-or-exceed the best Apple ever had. I know it's not popular, but at their peak Microsoft was well beyond what the current Apple is.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Even though the C64 was a plastic kiddie machine sold at department stores, it had the schematic diagram in the back of the thick users manual that came included with every machine.
You may be thinking of retail stores, and 50% is very low for some of those.
We don't really know what they are working on in their labs.
I suspect the next leap with be some kind of "iGlasses", somewhat similar to Google Glass, but using hand-gestures in the air. The goggles will use 3D (stereoscopic) movement and image detection to understand the gestures.
Google has already filed related patents (below), but I imagine Apple is experimenting also. They have too much money to ignore the possibility.
http://phandroid.com/2013/10/1...
Either that, maybe direct brain control of some kind where an implant is made that allows one to use thought control as an interface. Experiments are gradually leading to less intrusive implants (see below). iBorg?
These are my best guesses as an amateur futurologist as to what the next logical device/UI leap is. If they play their cards right, Apple's deep pockets will allow them to be early-to-market players in these.
They better hope they have somebody akin to Steve Jobs so that they get the equivalent of an iPad instead of say the poorly executed Microsoft Tablet of 2000. Steve knew to say "no" to (most) stupid ideas and implementations, even if it meant expensive delays. Microsoft's half-ass ways and addiction to desktop Windows burnt them. Sometimes you gotta eat your own children.
http://fusion.net/story/266187...
Table-ized A.I.
So did the Apple ][. Plus it had slots.
My work only lets me drive the IE car. It takes me 3 hours to get home.
No, it will take 4 hours... 2.5 hours... 5 hours... 11 hours... 5 minutes...
still better than my hp-drive, running ms-car. it went into hybernation at a railway crossing the other day and then got stuck in an endless update loop. pushed it to a hp-garage, but they told me it was microsoft's fault. had it towed to a ms-garage where they told me hp was to blame - but they installed the free upgrade they had already secretly put in my trunk on my last visit. now it's not as fast as it used to be but on the other hand the steering wheel is now back on same place it used to be before the last update.
apple car looks nice, but i've heard it mysteriously shrinks over time.
Yeah, but people buying biscuits come back all the time to buy another pack of biscuits, and...
Okay, not so different, I guess.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Reality disagrees with you. Microsoft is down to a 58.5% gross margin, a gross margin Apple has never reached. And that 58.5% is LOW for Microsoft, historically.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
There are a lot of misconceptions about the early days of Apple. I would like to clarify some of them.
- The recent attention on Steve Jobs is only partially warranted. Yes, it's true that without Jobs there would be no Apple. However, the movies imply that Jobs' role was to make Woz realize the potential of the personal computer. That is false. Woz knew the potential: he just didn't particularly care. Woz was only interested in making one for himself, and if anyone else cared then he happily shared the schematics. Jobs deserves every bit of credit for convincing Woz to quit HP and go all-in at Apple, and also for making Apple a commercial success, but let's not insult Wozniak. He "got it". But "it" wasn't his priority.
- Apple's debut was not at the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire. Apple debuted the year prior at the Personal Computing '76 conference in Atlantic City, New Jersey. This is well documented. Woz himself , PC '76 founder John Dilks (>a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P_I5H_9uvU">video), and Stan Viet have all discussed it.
- The Apple 1 was far from being "the first personal computer". What made the Apple 1 special was its packaging. There were many other single-board computers at the time including plenty also using the MOS 6502 processor. There were also plenty of other microcomputers at the time which got input from QWERTY keyboards and displayed output on CRTs. However, most other SBCs only had hexadecimal keypads for input and LEDs for output, while most of the computers with full keyboards and CRTs back then cost five figures and were intended as engineering workstations. What did Woz do that was special? He found ways to put the engineering workstation technology into the hobbyist/SBC price point. The packaging, not the technology itself, was the important breakthrough.
- Woz built the Apple 1 and all the commercial Apple 1s in Jobs' parent's garage. False and false. Woz designed the computer mostly in his cubicle at Hewlett Packard, Jobs outsourced the board manufacturing, and Woz usually only stopped by the Jobs household when there were glitches with the boards that the first few employees couldn't solve. Woz was still employed full-time at HP.
How sad for you.
Really? Cool!!
What, do you just make stuff up out of raw bias? They were north of 44% last quarter.
still better than my hp-drive, running ms-car. it went into hybernation at a railway crossing the other day and then got stuck in an endless update loop. pushed it to a hp-garage, but they told me it was microsoft's fault. had it towed to a ms-garage where they told me hp was to blame - but they installed the free upgrade they had already secretly put in my trunk on my last visit. now it's not as fast as it used to be but on the other hand the steering wheel is now back on same place it used to be before the last update.
apple car looks nice, but i've heard it mysteriously shrinks over time.
Posting to undo accidental mod.
Wasn't sure if it should be +1 funny or +1 insightful
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
"Forty years ago today, two college dropouts decided to start selling cobbled-together computers out of a garage in California because they couldn't afford the ones on the market."
So they went on to produce the most overpriced and underpowered elitist garbage masquerading as a computer ever created. Moved on to essential obscurity by selling precious few of them overall in the scheme of things and saving the company only by dint of moving into the audio hardware industry while dodging taxes with superhuman skill.
LOL
To quote Mr Horse from Ren and Stimpy "No sir, I don't like it."
Apple has a lot of products, but only one that really matters: the iPhone.
My understanding: Apple gets 60% of it's revenue, and 80% of it's profit from the iPhone.
That's no where near a relevant example. That's because Microsoft is still mostly a software and services company. Once you bundle MS software with Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. hardware, gross maring is much lower than the same on a Mac. Likewise for Google software + services and Samsung, LG, etc. hardware. Gross margin is very different between Mac and iOS product lines, as well.
Taking these examples to their absurd limit, you could establish a subsidiary to collect software license fees and you'd have near infinite margin.
There's never been a company, period, with the margins Apple has.
Yes there has. If you want to move the goalposts because I showed the error of your post, go ahead - but the fact doesn't change. Apple's margins have been readily eclipsed in the tech sector. Even Intel crushes Apple and Intel is probably the most hardware-centric computer-technology company you will find. Apple dreams of getting margins of Intel...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You know that's gross margin as a whole? Microsoft has a higher margin. The actual margin varies by product.
5 hit product lines
Three (or four, if x86 -> x86_64 counts) architecture transitions inside one product line (68k -> PPC -> x86 -> x86_64)
Two industries destroyed (music, mobile phones).
One industry revolutionized (computing)
That's pretty good for a company that's been going out of business for 40 years
What, do you just make stuff up out of raw bias? They were north of 44% last quarter.
Gee, I hope you still have Flash installed, then you could look at the "Comparison with Competitors" chart. AAPL is doooomed with their tiny 44%,
That you got a Score 5 Interesting is most-interesting to me. I'm still having difficulty parsing the last part of your sentence: "...on top of the tolls?"
Will apple change a 30% fee for any toll usages will there cars on top of the tolls?
No sig for you! Come back one year!