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Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

Long AAPL, you say? Or what else are you saying?

I agree that Ive's influence will not be missed.

I would be long AAPL if they didn't have the majority of their production in China. That now poses a significant risk and Apple execs must be sweating bullets right now scrambling to onshore.

They’re slowly moving production to Vietnam and India. But I don’t think that’s far enough from China if a war between US and China breaks out.

Let alone China invading Taiwan.

What’s going on in Ukraine is alteady horrible, add this scenario to the equation and we’re looking at ultimate doom.

There. I said it.

I have a bunch of money ready to spend at a moments notice at my nearby computer shop as soon as I hear Taiwan has been invaded.

I figure whatever I can get at that time will serve me well for the next 10 years.

Aren't Macs basically a rounding error for the overall company?

Their Mac business is still a Fortune 500 company in terms of revenue by itself. Besides Halo effect, they still make a ton of money off Macs, and now that their chips cross pollinate with the iOS devices, it makes no sense to kill it off.

Not to mention, the Mac platform is effectively the SDK for the iOS/iPadOS platform. And it's a thing which pretty much every single person who works at Apple uses on a daily basis. The Mac is not — I assure you — going anywhere.

Especially not after they made this push into their own silicon where the majority of the benefits reaped so far have been in the Mac line.

Yup. If for some reason Apple didn't make computers, don't think I'd own an iPhone -- the whole ecosystem fitting together is a major part of the appeal for me.

I don't disagree at all. But the context of the comment I was responding to was specifically about whether this would be enough to justify a high conviction bet on AAPL stock.

Even if this model sells like hotcakes (which I'm sure it will), and even if that isn't priced in (which I'm less sure of), don't really see that having a large enough impact on overall earnings to move the needle on the stock. The reality is that small differences in the next Fed announcement probably will move AAPL to a much larger degree than this product.

As others have said, it's about 20% of phone revenue but you need a mac to build an iOS app. THey're also selling a whole ecosystem that needs to be cohesive and technically strong. For a while the mac part of the ecosystem wasn't living up to the quality of the phones, IMHO.

I've brought this up before, and someone responded that they'll move iOS app building and compilation into a web service, and they will no longer need to sell general-purpose computers, and the idea haunts me.

That feels like it cuts against the core of the f what Apple is, but it’s possible if Cook is succeeded by someone with no connection to old leadership.

They've built pieces of that already: https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/

I'm not personally very excited about living inside that sealed of a bubble.

It's outsourcing a key part of the Apple ecosystem to Google (Chrome), which is why Apple will never do it. Big-tech companies go to extremely great lengths to own every part of the pathway from consumer to developer to hardware. Google first developed a browser, then an OS, then a hardware division just so Microsoft couldn't sit between Search and a microchip. Similarly, Apple has worked extremely hard to develop an App Store, IDE (XCode), and developer machine (Mac) so that neither Google nor Microsoft can come between them and the developer.

Facebook is currently paying the price of not owning their distribution infrastructure - they've been hurt extremely badly by recent privacy changes that Apple and Google have put out, while Apple and Google themselves have been relatively isolated from them.

I don't think Google factors into this plan anywhere. The endpoint is iOS devices able to build iOS apps with full fidelity using Xcode for iPad, not a web based IDE. Total control for Apple.

Even if that's their plan, it will be at least another decade before that service is viable to be a hard requirement, completely replacing local builds.

Apple is virtually the only consumer computer company that has had positive YoY computer growth every year in the past 20 years. Apple is selling way more iPhones, but the Mac has been gradually and steadily gaining growth.

Around 20% of what iphone makes - not the most important category, but not a rounding error either.

And people don't need to replace iphones as much as they used to in the past...

Still a formidable company don't get me wrong.

Besides what other commenters mentioned, it is also the longest running revenue source for Apple.

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