i like a solid, compact phone. No "module" bullshit. No one is going to "change the camera for a better one" or "have a high quality audio amplifier". Or even "remove the camera and give me a larger battery.
It seems like they are over complicating the problem. Instead of some weird design with all sorts of modules, just offer a basic phone and then what amounts to a battery/expansion case. Want a headphone jack and SD card slot plus a bigger battery? Buy a case with those bits of hardware. Offer cases with various configurations and aesthetic designs to allow people to configure their phone to their particular needs. Then the handset maker can keep offering the paper thin phones for those who want that but people who want more can get that too. Pretty much any feature can be put into the case so why isn't this a thing?
Enough bezel to prevent accidental touches.
Grippy sides.
Replaceable battery.
Headphone jack.
128 GB or more of onboard storage without gouging on price, so I can forego the memory card slot.
NO NOTCH!
Pretty much all those things except the notch (which I wouldn't miss if it disappeared) could in principle be solved with a well designed battery case. You could even put features like an SD card, headphone jack, etc into the battery case for people who want them but leave them off for people who don't. The only one that really cannot be fixed without making the base phone thicker is a better camera because you can only shrink the camera so much before you need better glass for the lens optics. Aftermarket clip on lenses don't really solve the problem.
I think people would bitch a lot less about the iPhone if the people who wanted a headphone jack and external storage and a better battery could simply buy a case that offered those features. For example I don't actually care about the headphone jack (I just don't use it) so for me a case that had a bigger battery and maybe an SD card slot (I do a lot of photography) would be pretty handy. Maybe a headphone jack is important to you so you get a different case that has one. Then Apple can offer the super thin phone for people who want that but people like you and me that want a bit more hardware can be happy too.
Why do they buy new smartphones and then complain about battery life instead of getting a one week of batery life out of a feature phone?
Because other things matter too besides battery life. There is more than one variable to consider. Even with shit battery life smartphones bring a lot of value to the table so they are worth it even if they have flaws. Feature phones are fine if all you need to do is make calls but smartphones aren't really phones. They are handheld computers that just happen to be able to make calls too and I'm pretty sure you understand that perfectly well. Battery life is important but so are other things.
Any other reason other that they value what a smartphone does with a larger screen more than how often they need to charge it?
Exactly my point. Many people do want a larger battery. They ALSO want a larger screen. You can get both but you have to make the phone thicker to do it given the present state of technology. But Apple has only offered a stream of options each thinner than the last so despite improvements in battery tech the max time between charges has remained roughly constant for the last 10 years. They chose "good enough" rather than "best possible".
Apple did't make a better battery, true, but people are not stuck with ios and android. They just continue to choose them.
That's like arguing that people aren't stuck with the Mac and Windows (and linux) but they continue to choose them. There really isn't a viable alternative due to network effects. Technically you are correct but the reality of things today is that it is a two horse race.
And battery cases should be MY example:) To me it shows people find solutions, even on their own dime, just to get thay nice shiny screen. There are nokias almost as small as an iphone charger. Do you know anyone that owns one?
If people keep buying something to work around something they perceive as a problem then that is the CLEAREST possible indication to the OEM that there is a market for that feature in the phone itself. And because they refuse to make the phone thicker for a bigger battery they also are inherently limiting the quality of camera they can put in the phone because physics is kind of a bitch that way. Better optics requires a bigger lens.
That doesn't make any sense. Apple has one of the (or is it "the") biggest cash reserves of any public company in history. They can buy Dell with pocket change.
Exactly my point. The only reason to not update the Mac Pro is because either (A) it isn't profitable or (B) your attention is elsewhere or (C) gross incompetence. Funding the project is obviously not a problem for Apple so it's something of a mystery why they only can be bothered to update the Mac desktop lines once per presidential term. My guess is that management attention is largely on the iPhone and iOS and the Mac gets the sloppy seconds.
To me, the only thing that makes any sense is that it has something to do with taxes and a 2019 deadline of some sort. (That or they want to build a factory in a tax-favored location, and it won't be complete until 2019).
Might be a factor but taxes really aren't as big a consideration as most people think for these sorts of capital projects. Taxes can impact profitability but the project still has to be profitable for the taxes to play any role at all. So even at Apple's ~25% net profit margins taxes would at worst lower their net profit margin to 20%. A problem but nothing that should keep them from making the investment.
We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product. It's not something for this year,
Translation: We couldn't be bothered to get off our ass and work on this before now because we make all our money from iPhones these days.
In addition to transparency for pro customers on an individual basis, there's also a larger fiscal reasoning behind it.
If Apple wants to be transparent it might help if they didn't say things that only have meaning if you work at Apple. "Larger fiscal reasoning" could mean almost anything.
We used to grow bean sprouts while on long canoe trips. Sprouts are easy to grow, don't take up much space, taste good, and fairly nutritious.
I'm with you except for the "taste good" part. They're palatable but never once in my life have I ever craved a sprout or thought that they had a great taste. Nice bit of crunch and can add a little fresh but they have less taste than celery and are extremely bland.
I actually like the notch and I replied to you because I expect you to NOT judge me for it:)
And I assure you I wont. If you like it, cool. You be you. I don't love it or hate it. I just don't see the point of it.
When you say it fixes a problem nobody wants and that manufacturers should strive for better battery life you're actually projecting your personal preference.
True I am indicating my personal preference but I also know that my personal preferences in this case are pretty widely (though not universally) held. There almost certainly are non trivial numbers of smartphone buyers who would like a bigger battery and a better camera. But for the notch, the question is what problem does it solve for people? More battery life or a better camera has an obvious benefit for customers who might be interested. The notch? Not so obvious. The point is that any feature you put in a phone should solve a problem for a customer.
The growth of sale volumes over the last 10 years in smartphones clearly show that the MAJORITY of the market actually wants a bigger screen (screen size on smartphones has been increasing ever since) and doesn't care all that much about battery life, otherwise they wouldn't have bought the damn phones.
This argument is flawed on several counts. 1) Apple didn't present the option of a phone with a better battery so there wasn't one to buy. You can't make the argument that nobody bought it because they never had the chance. 2) Bigger screens do not preclude having a bigger battery too. It doesn't have to be either/or. 3) The fact that people buy battery cases CLEARLY demonstrates that many people do care about battery life. 4) Smartphone battery life has been one of the major complaints about smartphones since day one. The fact that other features might matter more does not change the fact that it is something that bothers many customers.
Yes, there is. Symmetry is one way to judge aesthetics.
That assumes greater symmetry = greater aesthetics which is not a reliable relationship for all viewers and/or circumstances. Your opinion of the beauty of symmetry can easily differ from mine. There is no reliably objective way to evaluate anything aesthetically at the single person level. Even at a group level all you can say is what percentage of people find something aesthetically pleasing but that's not objective, it's just a compilation of individual opinions.
Another way is double-blind group surveys.
Again, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Just because a group of people find something aesthetically pleasing does not mean you can extrapolate that to all people. Some people think blonde hair is beautiful and some people don't. Neither one is wrong since it is just their personal sense of aesthetics.
A display notch can offer a greater screen-to-body ratio, for example, but lower overall aesthetic value.
Aesthetics are a matter of personal taste. I can see people liking or hating the notch and you can't say they are wrong either way. There is no objective way to judge aesthetics. Conceivably the notch has some potential functional value though it seems a lot of trouble for some pretty minimal gains even under the best of circumstances. I have an iPhone X (spare the snark - it works for me) and I'm utterly indifferent to the notch. It doesn't bother me but I don't find it particularly useful either. Frankly it seems mostly like a mis-feature and a waste of money.
All this sturm and drang about notches really seems to be missing the point. It's an answer to a problem nobody has. What I want them to do is make a phone with a better battery life. They could double the thickness of all but the biggest phones and I would not care. A thicker phone would also enable them to put a better camera into the phone which has value to me. I'd also like someone to really get seamless cloud integration and device and document sharing right because that is still a hot mess whether you are talking about Android, iOS or any other system. You'd think Apple could figure it out since they control their platform the tightest but they always seem to only partially solve the problems.
I think a web server running on a low end system is powerful enough to prevent from being Slashdotted today.
There haven't been enough people on slashdot for many years for the slashdot effect to be a thing. Plus as you point out the networks are a lot more robust these days.
Slashdot hasn't grown at the same rate computing has grown.
Indeed, slashdot has substantially shrunk to all appearances. This used to be a place where a lot of alpha geeks hung out but slashdot never evolved or got better. Just look at how the average number of comments per article has shrunk over the last decade.
I'll admit a certain amount of distrust of Intel right now. They did not behave as I expected them to.
Seriously not meaning to sound snide but perhaps your expectations are unrealistic? I think there is no reasonable basis to expect AMD would have behaved any differently than Intel in the same situation. Intel has done pretty much exactly what I expected them or any rational profit seeking company to do.
None of this makes me feel any more inclined to favor Intel over AMD. This isn't their first "brown paper bag" bug and I doubt it will be their last.
AMD has bugs in their chips too. They're vulnerable to Spectre as well.
If only a 3 year warranty is even offered on some of the highest-end chips they made at the time, when some new cars are warrantied for 10
You only see a 10 year warranty on powertrains (which seldom break) and even then it isn't a 10 year warranty, It's typically a 10 year OR 100,000 mile warranty, whichever comes first. The comprehensive warranties are 3-5 years OR 30-50K miles.
I think that says something really awful about even Intel's own assessment of whether its products can be supported in the long term.
Find me ANY large chip maker offering support on a ten year old chip. Why would they offer support on chips that by computer industry standards are ancient when none of their competitors do either? AMD certainly isn't offering 10 year warranties.
AMD may or may not be drastically better, but Intel has set a very low bar, and it is going to take them serious time to earn back my business, assuming they ever do.
Sounds to me like you already preferred AMD and were just looking for a reason to bash Intel. If you prefer AMD that's fine. They make good products in general and I'd have no quarrel with someone choosing AMD chips. But if you think AMD is going to be any better on the support front than Intel you are being naive.
Except for patents, is there any reason why GM etc. cannot quickly start battery production of their own?
In principle not that I'm aware of. It would probably make more sense for them to buy an already existing battery manufacturer at this point since they would be a bit behind the curve otherwise. Or they would need to establish a partnership on similar terms to the one Tesla has with Panasonic.
For double points, they hire ex-Tesla employees or conduct some good-natured spying / social engineering to learn from Tesla's manufacturing ?
Remember that Tesla is partnered with Panasonic for the gigafactory and Panasonic is the worlds biggest battery maker. So Tesla isn't really the company to worry about as far as GM is concerned. Most of the big battery manufacturers are Asian companies.
I think this is going to be the key disadvantage that the other major automakers will face when they finally decide that EVs make sense. They may know how to make the batteries, but actually being able to get them made is going to be difficult. I think they are making a mistake by letting Tesla get out ahead of them on battery production, that's going to be a harder gap to close than making the rest of the car.
I think the risk is that Tesla is vertically integrated with their battery production and Ford and GM etc are not. This means two things. 1) Tesla may ultimately have a cost advantage since automakers without their own battery production will have to buy them from a third party at a markup. Only a few percent but selling cars is not a high margin business. 2) Tesla can sell their batteries to Ford and GM (or whoever else) meaning they make a profit even if they don't sell their own vehicles. In theory Tesla doesn't have to remain in the car market once the market for EVs is proven - they could just build more gigafactories and sell the batteries to the incumbents.
Ironically GM became huge precisely because they were vertically integrated but over time they outsourced more and more instead of continuing to capture that margin for themselves. That's not to say outsourcing is always a bad decision - it can make a lot of sense sometimes. But I think there is a real risk to big automakers who don't effectively control their own battery production.
But a gross margin around 25% is quite solid for the auto industry.
Tesla doesn't have a gross margin of 25% and in fact since 2016 it has only approached that level twice. Good but not mind blowing and likely to go down as it will be difficult to maintain the same margins on the Model 3 as they get on the much pricier Model S and Model X. Luxury cars for obvious reasons tend to carry higher gross margins. Most manufacturing companies have gross margins somewhere between 10-30%. My company works primarily in the auto industry and we have gross margins around 27% but we serve mostly aftermarket customers. That said it doesn't really matter. Gross margins matter a lot but they are just the starting point.
Plus there are some important differences in how Tesla books Cost of Goods Sold that make it something of a misleading comparison.
Tesla ran a negative not because of negative automotive margins, but because 1) SGA is scaled up to the size Tesla is actively growing to, not to the company's current sales, and 2) likewise for the R&D budget.
Your analysis is flawed. You cannot claim that all of SG&A isn't related to the cost of producing the vehicles because a LOT of it definitely is. It's just that it gets lumped into SG&A because it is hard to tease out fixed costs and assign them. Stuff like the salary of the top management falls into SG&A and it's obvious that a non-trivial percentage of their time should be allocated to the cost of each vehicle but it's hard to assign an exact cost number. Similarly the cost of selling a vehicle cannot be dismissed as unrelated to the cost of the vehicle.
You are correct that Tesla has scaled up SG&A in anticipation of growth so that should be considered but you cannot simply dismiss all SG&A costs the way you did. I'm a cost accountant and it would make my life a LOT easier if I could.
Gross margins prove the economic case for your products; operating margins remain negative until you've grown large.
Gross margins by themselves prove nothing about the case for a product. It's one bit of data among many that must be considered.
Oh it's the typical overreaction of ignorant crowds.
The overreaction of ignorant crowds is why TSLA had a market cap greater than Ford. The ignorance is on the upside. TSLA market cap should be at most 1/10th of its current value. Currently it is ludicrously out of line with any reasonable projection of future profits.
I bought some Tesla today and hope to buy more at an even lower level tomorrow.
Your money but as much as I like Tesla's cars I wouldn't touch their stock with a borrowed dick. WAY too overpriced even after a pullback. Tesla's stock price should be 1/10th of it's current market cap even under the most optimistic valuation. The fact that it peaked higher than Ford is just absurd.
The problem there is that they aren't adequately funded. They've been through something like 4 rounds of funding, their currently credit rating is C+, which for a company is pretty fricken garbage.
Doesn't matter as long as investors are still willing to throw money at them. Given the ludicrous value of the stock price that obviously hasn't been a problem to date.
And if they don't start turning a true profit by the end of the year, they're in serious trouble as their debts start to become due at the end of this year.
Only a problem if they cannot find additional financing. You really want to bet Elon isn't going to be able to sweet talk investors into another round of financing? Possible of course but I wouldn't bet against the guy.
Holy crap. I haven't been posting attention to the market recently, so thanks! Great time to buy.
TSLA isn't even close to being cheap enough to be a good buy. It's a fine company but their stock price is ludicrously overvalued even after the recent pullback.
Learn the difference between margins and profits. Thanks.
Are you talking about Gross Margins or Net Margins? Net margin ARE profits - the terms are literally synonyms. I'm an accountant so I should know. Gross margins are just revenue minus cost of goods sold but have nothing to do with profits directly until you include overhead, taxes, etc. A manufacturing company will have gross margins around 25%-35% but the most profitable car companies in the world have net margins around 10%. Tesla's net margins are negative since they are losing money.
Meanwhile, Tesla produced its first 10k Model 3s in the time it took GM to produce its first 1000 Bolts
That doesn't really tell you some very important information. What good is it to produce something fast if the quality stinks? I'm not saying Tesla's quality is good or bad but as the saying goes you can have it good, fast, or cheap. Pick two. Furthermore, it is pointless to run a production line faster than demand for the product. Tesla has a huge backlog of orders for the Model 3. The Bolt? Not so much even though it is a respectably good vehicle. I think the production line in Lake Orion has a capacity of something like 25-50K vehicles per year which is probably reasonable given expected sales.
And in all seriousness, do you REALLY doubt that GM's ability to ramp up production in a big hurry if they decide to do so?
Incidentally I'm distantly involved in the supply chain for the Bolt and I can see why GM is losing their ass on the Bolt based on the meeting I've had to sit through. The part I was involved in was a inexpensive piece and we had innumerably meetings with 10-15 people in attendance which had to have cost FAR more than the sales value of the part could ever amount to. Unbelievably inefficient.
If they're so good at making EVs, well, why don't they?
The answer is because they don't have to. he strategy they are using is called fast follower and it has been used very successfully by a lot of companies. Ford, GM and the rest can afford to wait and let Tesla prove the market and make the mistakes for them. It takes them about 18-24 months to bring a completely new vehicle to market and start production at scale which isn't very long in the car industry. Once they decide to move they can move very quickly and they know it. So they are playing wait and see because establishing a new market segment is expensive and risky. The big automakers are well funded, experienced in manufacturing, and are doing a lot of research into EVs even if they aren't bringing them to market yet.
Now there are risks in waiting. The longer they wait the more chance that Tesla takes market share that they cannot get back. There also is the risk that they will not invest enough in key battery vehicle technology putting them at a competitive disadvantage. Being a first mover does have advantages as well.
At one point, Elon Musk was talking about doing 500,000 a year which is clearly still way out of reach. Even 200,000 a year (not enough to clear the order backlog in a year) looks unattainable right now.
For perspective the Ford F150 which is the fastest selling vehicle in the US most years has an annual production volume of around 800K/year.
Tesla doesn't have to please their critics - that's probably impossible. They just have to please their customers. The question is whether they can do so fast enough to keep their customers excited about the product. I know I wouldn't buy a car I had to wait 3 years to receive.
Skipping proto tooling would be a big gamble for a well-established company; for a start-up, that's suicide and IMHO just further confirms the team at Tesla really doesn't have much experience in manufacturing.
If they are adequately funded it might not matter. Yeah they are taking some risks and they know it. But I work with some of those big established auto makers and I can assure you that they waste HUGE amounts of money and time in endless meetings and reviews and prototypes that often don't actually make things better. My company makes a part for an EV for one of the big automakers and given how much time we spent in meetings with 10-15 engineers in attendance about this one little part I cannot imagine how they are making money on it. If Tesla tried to operate like the big automakers do Tesla would be out of business in a big hurry.
Slashdot Mirror
i like a solid, compact phone. No "module" bullshit. No one is going to "change the camera for a better one" or "have a high quality audio amplifier". Or even "remove the camera and give me a larger battery.
It seems like they are over complicating the problem. Instead of some weird design with all sorts of modules, just offer a basic phone and then what amounts to a battery/expansion case. Want a headphone jack and SD card slot plus a bigger battery? Buy a case with those bits of hardware. Offer cases with various configurations and aesthetic designs to allow people to configure their phone to their particular needs. Then the handset maker can keep offering the paper thin phones for those who want that but people who want more can get that too. Pretty much any feature can be put into the case so why isn't this a thing?
The rest of my wish list:
Enough bezel to prevent accidental touches.
Grippy sides.
Replaceable battery.
Headphone jack.
128 GB or more of onboard storage without gouging on price, so I can forego the memory card slot.
NO NOTCH!
Pretty much all those things except the notch (which I wouldn't miss if it disappeared) could in principle be solved with a well designed battery case. You could even put features like an SD card, headphone jack, etc into the battery case for people who want them but leave them off for people who don't. The only one that really cannot be fixed without making the base phone thicker is a better camera because you can only shrink the camera so much before you need better glass for the lens optics. Aftermarket clip on lenses don't really solve the problem.
I think people would bitch a lot less about the iPhone if the people who wanted a headphone jack and external storage and a better battery could simply buy a case that offered those features. For example I don't actually care about the headphone jack (I just don't use it) so for me a case that had a bigger battery and maybe an SD card slot (I do a lot of photography) would be pretty handy. Maybe a headphone jack is important to you so you get a different case that has one. Then Apple can offer the super thin phone for people who want that but people like you and me that want a bit more hardware can be happy too.
Why do they buy new smartphones and then complain about battery life instead of getting a one week of batery life out of a feature phone?
Because other things matter too besides battery life. There is more than one variable to consider. Even with shit battery life smartphones bring a lot of value to the table so they are worth it even if they have flaws. Feature phones are fine if all you need to do is make calls but smartphones aren't really phones. They are handheld computers that just happen to be able to make calls too and I'm pretty sure you understand that perfectly well. Battery life is important but so are other things.
Any other reason other that they value what a smartphone does with a larger screen more than how often they need to charge it?
Exactly my point. Many people do want a larger battery. They ALSO want a larger screen. You can get both but you have to make the phone thicker to do it given the present state of technology. But Apple has only offered a stream of options each thinner than the last so despite improvements in battery tech the max time between charges has remained roughly constant for the last 10 years. They chose "good enough" rather than "best possible".
Apple did't make a better battery, true, but people are not stuck with ios and android. They just continue to choose them.
That's like arguing that people aren't stuck with the Mac and Windows (and linux) but they continue to choose them. There really isn't a viable alternative due to network effects. Technically you are correct but the reality of things today is that it is a two horse race.
And battery cases should be MY example :) To me it shows people find solutions, even on their own dime, just to get thay nice shiny screen. There are nokias almost as small as an iphone charger. Do you know anyone that owns one?
If people keep buying something to work around something they perceive as a problem then that is the CLEAREST possible indication to the OEM that there is a market for that feature in the phone itself. And because they refuse to make the phone thicker for a bigger battery they also are inherently limiting the quality of camera they can put in the phone because physics is kind of a bitch that way. Better optics requires a bigger lens.
That doesn't make any sense. Apple has one of the (or is it "the") biggest cash reserves of any public company in history. They can buy Dell with pocket change.
Exactly my point. The only reason to not update the Mac Pro is because either (A) it isn't profitable or (B) your attention is elsewhere or (C) gross incompetence. Funding the project is obviously not a problem for Apple so it's something of a mystery why they only can be bothered to update the Mac desktop lines once per presidential term. My guess is that management attention is largely on the iPhone and iOS and the Mac gets the sloppy seconds.
To me, the only thing that makes any sense is that it has something to do with taxes and a 2019 deadline of some sort. (That or they want to build a factory in a tax-favored location, and it won't be complete until 2019).
Might be a factor but taxes really aren't as big a consideration as most people think for these sorts of capital projects. Taxes can impact profitability but the project still has to be profitable for the taxes to play any role at all. So even at Apple's ~25% net profit margins taxes would at worst lower their net profit margin to 20%. A problem but nothing that should keep them from making the investment.
We want to be transparent and communicate openly with our pro community so we want them to know that the Mac Pro is a 2019 product. It's not something for this year,
Translation: We couldn't be bothered to get off our ass and work on this before now because we make all our money from iPhones these days.
In addition to transparency for pro customers on an individual basis, there's also a larger fiscal reasoning behind it.
If Apple wants to be transparent it might help if they didn't say things that only have meaning if you work at Apple. "Larger fiscal reasoning" could mean almost anything.
We used to grow bean sprouts while on long canoe trips. Sprouts are easy to grow, don't take up much space, taste good, and fairly nutritious.
I'm with you except for the "taste good" part. They're palatable but never once in my life have I ever craved a sprout or thought that they had a great taste. Nice bit of crunch and can add a little fresh but they have less taste than celery and are extremely bland.
I actually like the notch and I replied to you because I expect you to NOT judge me for it :)
And I assure you I wont. If you like it, cool. You be you. I don't love it or hate it. I just don't see the point of it.
When you say it fixes a problem nobody wants and that manufacturers should strive for better battery life you're actually projecting your personal preference.
True I am indicating my personal preference but I also know that my personal preferences in this case are pretty widely (though not universally) held. There almost certainly are non trivial numbers of smartphone buyers who would like a bigger battery and a better camera. But for the notch, the question is what problem does it solve for people? More battery life or a better camera has an obvious benefit for customers who might be interested. The notch? Not so obvious. The point is that any feature you put in a phone should solve a problem for a customer.
The growth of sale volumes over the last 10 years in smartphones clearly show that the MAJORITY of the market actually wants a bigger screen (screen size on smartphones has been increasing ever since) and doesn't care all that much about battery life, otherwise they wouldn't have bought the damn phones.
This argument is flawed on several counts. 1) Apple didn't present the option of a phone with a better battery so there wasn't one to buy. You can't make the argument that nobody bought it because they never had the chance. 2) Bigger screens do not preclude having a bigger battery too. It doesn't have to be either/or. 3) The fact that people buy battery cases CLEARLY demonstrates that many people do care about battery life. 4) Smartphone battery life has been one of the major complaints about smartphones since day one. The fact that other features might matter more does not change the fact that it is something that bothers many customers.
Yes, there is. Symmetry is one way to judge aesthetics.
That assumes greater symmetry = greater aesthetics which is not a reliable relationship for all viewers and/or circumstances. Your opinion of the beauty of symmetry can easily differ from mine. There is no reliably objective way to evaluate anything aesthetically at the single person level. Even at a group level all you can say is what percentage of people find something aesthetically pleasing but that's not objective, it's just a compilation of individual opinions.
Another way is double-blind group surveys.
Again, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Just because a group of people find something aesthetically pleasing does not mean you can extrapolate that to all people. Some people think blonde hair is beautiful and some people don't. Neither one is wrong since it is just their personal sense of aesthetics.
A display notch can offer a greater screen-to-body ratio, for example, but lower overall aesthetic value.
Aesthetics are a matter of personal taste. I can see people liking or hating the notch and you can't say they are wrong either way. There is no objective way to judge aesthetics. Conceivably the notch has some potential functional value though it seems a lot of trouble for some pretty minimal gains even under the best of circumstances. I have an iPhone X (spare the snark - it works for me) and I'm utterly indifferent to the notch. It doesn't bother me but I don't find it particularly useful either. Frankly it seems mostly like a mis-feature and a waste of money.
All this sturm and drang about notches really seems to be missing the point. It's an answer to a problem nobody has. What I want them to do is make a phone with a better battery life. They could double the thickness of all but the biggest phones and I would not care. A thicker phone would also enable them to put a better camera into the phone which has value to me. I'd also like someone to really get seamless cloud integration and device and document sharing right because that is still a hot mess whether you are talking about Android, iOS or any other system. You'd think Apple could figure it out since they control their platform the tightest but they always seem to only partially solve the problems.
I think a web server running on a low end system is powerful enough to prevent from being Slashdotted today.
There haven't been enough people on slashdot for many years for the slashdot effect to be a thing. Plus as you point out the networks are a lot more robust these days.
Slashdot hasn't grown at the same rate computing has grown.
Indeed, slashdot has substantially shrunk to all appearances. This used to be a place where a lot of alpha geeks hung out but slashdot never evolved or got better. Just look at how the average number of comments per article has shrunk over the last decade.
I'll admit a certain amount of distrust of Intel right now. They did not behave as I expected them to.
Seriously not meaning to sound snide but perhaps your expectations are unrealistic? I think there is no reasonable basis to expect AMD would have behaved any differently than Intel in the same situation. Intel has done pretty much exactly what I expected them or any rational profit seeking company to do.
None of this makes me feel any more inclined to favor Intel over AMD. This isn't their first "brown paper bag" bug and I doubt it will be their last.
AMD has bugs in their chips too. They're vulnerable to Spectre as well.
If only a 3 year warranty is even offered on some of the highest-end chips they made at the time, when some new cars are warrantied for 10
You only see a 10 year warranty on powertrains (which seldom break) and even then it isn't a 10 year warranty, It's typically a 10 year OR 100,000 mile warranty, whichever comes first. The comprehensive warranties are 3-5 years OR 30-50K miles.
I think that says something really awful about even Intel's own assessment of whether its products can be supported in the long term.
Find me ANY large chip maker offering support on a ten year old chip. Why would they offer support on chips that by computer industry standards are ancient when none of their competitors do either? AMD certainly isn't offering 10 year warranties.
AMD may or may not be drastically better, but Intel has set a very low bar, and it is going to take them serious time to earn back my business, assuming they ever do.
Sounds to me like you already preferred AMD and were just looking for a reason to bash Intel. If you prefer AMD that's fine. They make good products in general and I'd have no quarrel with someone choosing AMD chips. But if you think AMD is going to be any better on the support front than Intel you are being naive.
Except for patents, is there any reason why GM etc. cannot quickly start battery production of their own?
In principle not that I'm aware of. It would probably make more sense for them to buy an already existing battery manufacturer at this point since they would be a bit behind the curve otherwise. Or they would need to establish a partnership on similar terms to the one Tesla has with Panasonic.
For double points, they hire ex-Tesla employees or conduct some good-natured spying / social engineering to learn from Tesla's manufacturing ?
Remember that Tesla is partnered with Panasonic for the gigafactory and Panasonic is the worlds biggest battery maker. So Tesla isn't really the company to worry about as far as GM is concerned. Most of the big battery manufacturers are Asian companies.
I think this is going to be the key disadvantage that the other major automakers will face when they finally decide that EVs make sense. They may know how to make the batteries, but actually being able to get them made is going to be difficult. I think they are making a mistake by letting Tesla get out ahead of them on battery production, that's going to be a harder gap to close than making the rest of the car.
I think the risk is that Tesla is vertically integrated with their battery production and Ford and GM etc are not. This means two things. 1) Tesla may ultimately have a cost advantage since automakers without their own battery production will have to buy them from a third party at a markup. Only a few percent but selling cars is not a high margin business. 2) Tesla can sell their batteries to Ford and GM (or whoever else) meaning they make a profit even if they don't sell their own vehicles. In theory Tesla doesn't have to remain in the car market once the market for EVs is proven - they could just build more gigafactories and sell the batteries to the incumbents.
Ironically GM became huge precisely because they were vertically integrated but over time they outsourced more and more instead of continuing to capture that margin for themselves. That's not to say outsourcing is always a bad decision - it can make a lot of sense sometimes. But I think there is a real risk to big automakers who don't effectively control their own battery production.
But a gross margin around 25% is quite solid for the auto industry.
Tesla doesn't have a gross margin of 25% and in fact since 2016 it has only approached that level twice. Good but not mind blowing and likely to go down as it will be difficult to maintain the same margins on the Model 3 as they get on the much pricier Model S and Model X. Luxury cars for obvious reasons tend to carry higher gross margins. Most manufacturing companies have gross margins somewhere between 10-30%. My company works primarily in the auto industry and we have gross margins around 27% but we serve mostly aftermarket customers. That said it doesn't really matter. Gross margins matter a lot but they are just the starting point.
Plus there are some important differences in how Tesla books Cost of Goods Sold that make it something of a misleading comparison.
Tesla ran a negative not because of negative automotive margins, but because 1) SGA is scaled up to the size Tesla is actively growing to, not to the company's current sales, and 2) likewise for the R&D budget.
Your analysis is flawed. You cannot claim that all of SG&A isn't related to the cost of producing the vehicles because a LOT of it definitely is. It's just that it gets lumped into SG&A because it is hard to tease out fixed costs and assign them. Stuff like the salary of the top management falls into SG&A and it's obvious that a non-trivial percentage of their time should be allocated to the cost of each vehicle but it's hard to assign an exact cost number. Similarly the cost of selling a vehicle cannot be dismissed as unrelated to the cost of the vehicle.
You are correct that Tesla has scaled up SG&A in anticipation of growth so that should be considered but you cannot simply dismiss all SG&A costs the way you did. I'm a cost accountant and it would make my life a LOT easier if I could.
Gross margins prove the economic case for your products; operating margins remain negative until you've grown large.
Gross margins by themselves prove nothing about the case for a product. It's one bit of data among many that must be considered.
Designed to turn a profit, sure - who doesn't design to turn a profit?
Uber as far as I can tell. They are burning through cash WAY faster than Tesla and I don't really see how Uber becomes magically profitable.
Oh it's the typical overreaction of ignorant crowds.
The overreaction of ignorant crowds is why TSLA had a market cap greater than Ford. The ignorance is on the upside. TSLA market cap should be at most 1/10th of its current value. Currently it is ludicrously out of line with any reasonable projection of future profits.
I bought some Tesla today and hope to buy more at an even lower level tomorrow.
Your money but as much as I like Tesla's cars I wouldn't touch their stock with a borrowed dick. WAY too overpriced even after a pullback. Tesla's stock price should be 1/10th of it's current market cap even under the most optimistic valuation. The fact that it peaked higher than Ford is just absurd.
The problem there is that they aren't adequately funded. They've been through something like 4 rounds of funding, their currently credit rating is C+, which for a company is pretty fricken garbage.
Doesn't matter as long as investors are still willing to throw money at them. Given the ludicrous value of the stock price that obviously hasn't been a problem to date.
And if they don't start turning a true profit by the end of the year, they're in serious trouble as their debts start to become due at the end of this year.
Only a problem if they cannot find additional financing. You really want to bet Elon isn't going to be able to sweet talk investors into another round of financing? Possible of course but I wouldn't bet against the guy.
Holy crap. I haven't been posting attention to the market recently, so thanks! Great time to buy.
TSLA isn't even close to being cheap enough to be a good buy. It's a fine company but their stock price is ludicrously overvalued even after the recent pullback.
Learn the difference between margins and profits. Thanks.
Are you talking about Gross Margins or Net Margins? Net margin ARE profits - the terms are literally synonyms. I'm an accountant so I should know. Gross margins are just revenue minus cost of goods sold but have nothing to do with profits directly until you include overhead, taxes, etc. A manufacturing company will have gross margins around 25%-35% but the most profitable car companies in the world have net margins around 10%. Tesla's net margins are negative since they are losing money.
Meanwhile, Tesla produced its first 10k Model 3s in the time it took GM to produce its first 1000 Bolts
That doesn't really tell you some very important information. What good is it to produce something fast if the quality stinks? I'm not saying Tesla's quality is good or bad but as the saying goes you can have it good, fast, or cheap. Pick two. Furthermore, it is pointless to run a production line faster than demand for the product. Tesla has a huge backlog of orders for the Model 3. The Bolt? Not so much even though it is a respectably good vehicle. I think the production line in Lake Orion has a capacity of something like 25-50K vehicles per year which is probably reasonable given expected sales.
And in all seriousness, do you REALLY doubt that GM's ability to ramp up production in a big hurry if they decide to do so?
Incidentally I'm distantly involved in the supply chain for the Bolt and I can see why GM is losing their ass on the Bolt based on the meeting I've had to sit through. The part I was involved in was a inexpensive piece and we had innumerably meetings with 10-15 people in attendance which had to have cost FAR more than the sales value of the part could ever amount to. Unbelievably inefficient.
If they're so good at making EVs, well, why don't they?
The answer is because they don't have to. he strategy they are using is called fast follower and it has been used very successfully by a lot of companies. Ford, GM and the rest can afford to wait and let Tesla prove the market and make the mistakes for them. It takes them about 18-24 months to bring a completely new vehicle to market and start production at scale which isn't very long in the car industry. Once they decide to move they can move very quickly and they know it. So they are playing wait and see because establishing a new market segment is expensive and risky. The big automakers are well funded, experienced in manufacturing, and are doing a lot of research into EVs even if they aren't bringing them to market yet.
Now there are risks in waiting. The longer they wait the more chance that Tesla takes market share that they cannot get back. There also is the risk that they will not invest enough in key battery vehicle technology putting them at a competitive disadvantage. Being a first mover does have advantages as well.
At one point, Elon Musk was talking about doing 500,000 a year which is clearly still way out of reach. Even 200,000 a year (not enough to clear the order backlog in a year) looks unattainable right now.
For perspective the Ford F150 which is the fastest selling vehicle in the US most years has an annual production volume of around 800K/year.
Tesla doesn't have to please their critics - that's probably impossible. They just have to please their customers. The question is whether they can do so fast enough to keep their customers excited about the product. I know I wouldn't buy a car I had to wait 3 years to receive.
Skipping proto tooling would be a big gamble for a well-established company; for a start-up, that's suicide and IMHO just further confirms the team at Tesla really doesn't have much experience in manufacturing.
If they are adequately funded it might not matter. Yeah they are taking some risks and they know it. But I work with some of those big established auto makers and I can assure you that they waste HUGE amounts of money and time in endless meetings and reviews and prototypes that often don't actually make things better. My company makes a part for an EV for one of the big automakers and given how much time we spent in meetings with 10-15 engineers in attendance about this one little part I cannot imagine how they are making money on it. If Tesla tried to operate like the big automakers do Tesla would be out of business in a big hurry.