Asymco

> I get a message on the little internet on my wrist, so I get the big internet out of my pocket to read it?

“No Wireless. Less Space than the Nomad. Lame”.

In the pre-Covid days. I loved being able to take my cellular Apple Watch to the gym and leave my phone in the car. I could listen to music and podcasts check my heart rate, make and receive calls and messages. I would swim with it. Run with it, etc. and leave my phone at home.

You could tap quick - yes/no replies or if someone asks you do you want $X or $Y, it will give you those two choices as quick replies. You can also dictate replies. I find my phone unusable when I’m working out. I sweat like a pig in heat. Any sensitive capacitive touch display is unusable.

Even now, I use my Watch as a remote for my AppleTV while I’m working out in my home gym.

That’s not even to mention in December with Apple Fitness, the on screen workouts will be able to automatically activate the appropriate workout on the watch and granularly record and show your stats.

My wife would often leave her phone in the car when she was out and about.

As far as the phone. Even in 2007, there were already 1 billion phones being sold a year. Jobs said he wanted the iPhone to capture 1% - 10 million during the first year.

Now there are close to 5 billion phones being sold a year. There isn’t really any conceivable way that anything will have the ubiquity of the smart phone market at 90%+ penetration in the developed world and even 70%+ in the…

>> Come on, Apple didn't want DRM, labels insisted on it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080107121341/http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/*

> The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

"Thoughts on Music" | Steve Jobs | February 6, 2007

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And I've got a bridge in Alaska to sell you. Taking Jobs 100% at his word (i.e. Apple was dedicated to DRM-free music, was in continual negotiation with the labels to strip it, and was contractually obligated to continue to use it despite their reluctance), here's how the timeline ultimately turned out:

* October 23, 2001 - First iPod introduced

* April 28, 2003 - iTunes Store w/ Fairplay introduced

* February 6, 2007 - Job's "Thoughts on Music" letter

* April 2, 2007 - EMI agrees to sell iTunes catalog DRM free (initially for slightly higher price)

* ~ August, 2007(?) - Universal sells DRM-free tracks on iTunes Store competitors

* January-April…

The iPhone is as successful as it is because of the perception of exclusivity - the best, newest apps will always be on iPhone first.

That argument might have worked in back in the day when the iPhone was only available on AT&T but not in a world where the iPhone is available to more people than it ever has been before.

The iPhone is perhaps the single most successful product ever, with over 1 billion sold: http://www.asymco.com/2016/07/28/most-popular-product-of-all-time/

The total marketshare of Android is around 2 billion, but that's the total of Samsung, Motorola, HTC, LG, etc. None of them have individually sold a billion Android phones themselves.

If they enabled more progressive webapp features, we'd start to see a lot more cross platform webapps. That would not be in Apple's interest.

Do you think Apple cares more about selling a $700 iPhone or a 99¢ app? They have over a million native apps for iOS; what keeps that ecosystem strong is how Apple is able to innovate each year on new features for the iPhone, iPad and iOS, not by restricting what web apps can do.

The most compelling features are things web apps aren't very good at anyway. I seriously doubt Tim Cook is losing sleep worrying about Service Workers and the like.

People said the same thing about WebRTC and how it would compete with FaceTime. And now we have WebRTC in the new versions of macOS and iOS, so it's time to create reasons why other web features aren't there.

Web apps have made a lot of…

> Now the Mac market share is above 20%, because eventually the people using it in schools start using it somewhere else

Absolutely no kid says “I love these shitty Chrome OS laptops that I have to use in schools. Can I have one at home!” When they get to choose a computer for college at least in the US, they overwhelmingly choose Macs.

And Dell overtook Apple in schools in 1999.

Even back in 2010, 70% of students were choosing to buy Macs for college

https://www.asymco.com/2010/08/04/70-percent-of-college-freshman-are-entering-school-with-macs/

That trend has continued at least through 2020.

https://www.jamf.com/resources/press-releases/new-research-finds-71-of-students-in-higher-education-today-use-or-would-prefer-to-use-mac/

And saying that Linux grew from 1% to 5% in 10 years means it’s going to grow to 25% reads like every startup pitch. “We doubled from 1% to 2% in a year. At this rate we will have almost 70% of the market in 6 years!”

The “Year of the Desktop Linux” has been a meme for over 25 years.

https://www.howtogeek.com/676963/why-desktop-linux-still-matters/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

> My complaint is that the incremental improvements that Apple bring to the industry - regardless of how sleek they may be - isn't itself innovation.

That's really debatable. Innovation is about bringing something new and uniquely useful to the market [1]. It is an economic term, arguably coined by economists to distinguish from invention, which often has zero economic impact. Innovations can be incremental. They might not even be technology - a small change in process or in positioning can be an innovation. Incremental things add up to a big deal. My favorite list of sources of innovative opportunity is Drucker's [2]

I agree the true inventors often get forgotten about, and that's lamentable. And I'm sorry for reading into your comment too much about success.

[1] http://www.asymco.com/2014/04/16/innoveracy-misunderstanding-innovation/

[2] https://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/wholefarm/html/c5-10.html

A P/E ratio of 14, and the company basically tripled their numbers in ~4 years. Does Google's P/E of 35.7 suggests we can look forward to a rough 10x increase in Google's numbers over the next 4 years?

No, it means that investors didn't believe there was much room for further growth at Apple[1]. They were clearly wrong! (Note that if you think that they are still wrong then there is a good opportunity to make money here!)

(Also, P/E is often related to margin as well as growth potential. Google's better profit margin is a factor here).

[1] http://www.asymco.com/2011/03/24/analysts-apples-growth-next-year-to-drop-to-half-of-what-it-could-obtain-during-the-recession/ - the quote here is "The P/E ratio has remained at despondent levels for over two years.... The logical explanation is that pricing reflects a consensus that growth will fall off a cliff... Growth may slow to 18 percent the following year."