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pHollda  2yr ago (text post)   2338 thread views

How Apple might die

Apple could be the first of FAMGA to die. Die, in the same way Nokia and Blackberry are dead. The one thing Apple does is sell personal computing devices (and accessories to them), the unique and most valuable part of which is the OS.

There has been a continuous abstraction of things by the cloud, beginning with files.That, and the fact of cloud storage becoming a commodity has resulted in reasonable prediction by some people of the impending death of companies offering personal cloud storage as a service.

Video gaming is already being experimented on. Cc Google Stadia.

I think at some point in the near future, mobile OSes too will either be abstracted away — with apps streamed in real-time, like we currently stream music on Spotify or TV on Netflix — or completely die, giving way to the web (which we already 'stream' in real-time) as the only platform.

If mobile OSes die, then Apple probably dies. Everything else Apple does is appended to personal computing. Other tech coys have lock-in with some of their products and services. Apple is a big company; a bureaucracy like any other. When the change happens, no one who will be at the company will have enough consolidated power to perform a re-founding of the company. Reed Hastings' founder re-founding of Netflix is a famous success. There is no Reed Hastings at Apple.

If mobile OSes are only abstracted away to the cloud, then Apple's OS would be in competition with the web, which has more 'content'. Accessing the web on Apple's devices would require an additional level: Physical device —> Cloud mobile OS —> Web browser in the cloud. Compared to the web as the platform, in which things only move from Physical device --> Web.

Aside the difficulty of the specific problems of founding and re-founding, there are also other related, general systemic reasons to be pessimistic about their chances of surviving this inflection point:

(i) The fact that functional institutions are the exception.

(ii) Success is really really difficult to achieve; a ton of things have to go exactly right.

Love it. But I'm convinced it is closer to: everything that does not survive, dies for a reason.

Survival demands a multitudinous harmony; ruin, only one sour note.

— Joe Norman (@normonics) February 16, 2018

Success is never due to one thing, but failure can be.

Sleeping well won’t make you successful, but not sleeping enough will hold you back.

Hard work is rarely enough without good strategy, but even the best strategy is useless without hard work.

Necessary, but not sufficient.

— James Clear (@JamesClear) November 4, 2019
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Personally, as an Apple user, I always felt that Apple is better at designing hardware than software. Designing software is more of a necessary factor in being able to design the hardware with the freedom they want. (Bespoke chips everywhere, complete control over the entire trust chain, etc.)

iOS is pretty much a pile of trash and the major downside to being able to use an Apple device.

Apple is as much a jewelry store as it is a manufacturer of personal electronics. The Iphone fulfills much the same roll in modern society as the gold watch with diamond accents did 100+ years ago. There were tons of much cheaper watches that told time just as well, often better. For the people that bought the gold watches it wasn't about having accurate or reliable time pieces. Its about other people knowing they had a gold watch. Apple is not that much different. I've known people that lug around older iphones that don't have service, much like some people 100 years ago didn't even bother to wind their watches. The average iphone user uses a tiny fraction of the devices capabilities: text, social media, calls. Features available on phones at 1/8 the price, yet they do not want those cheaper phones at all. Apple will be fine barring some other luxury status symbol electronics maker challenging their spot. Their average customer has no idea what an "operating system" even is.

Never happen (for the listed reasons).

Same reason that 'cloud' will never replace hardware: the speed of an electron in a conductor.

This on top of apples hardware division doing tome kickass work on big risc; which I thought for sure was gonna trail team red and blue for a couple years at least but dang.

Currently when I get on a boat and sail out of cell range...or take a train/subway riding a rail under a river...or get on an airplane that doesn't have wifi...or hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon...my phone still pretty much works. I can still play games, read books, listen to music, take notes. Because the apps that do those things still work without connectivity; they aren't "in the cloud".

In your hypothetical "abstracted" future, what happens? Do we just have high-speed connectivity literally everywhere so the situation doesn't come up anymore? Do those kind of places still exist but when you go there your phone turns into a useless brick? (seems suboptimal...)

If your phone DOES retain that sort of functionality in these kind of situations, doesn't that constitute having an OS?

Like everyone here, my feels also say you're wrong. But let's take a look at some reals.

Here's the top 20 from the Fortune 500 in 1955.

  1. GM - still around

  2. Exxon - still around

  3. US Steel - still around

  4. GE - still around

  5. Esmark - conglomerate (purchased by other owners - its brands such as Peter Pan and Butterball turkey are still around)

  6. Chrysler - still around (went bankrupt once)

  7. Armour - sold to ConAgra in 1983

  8. Gulf Oil - merged and rebranded as Chevron

  9. Mobile - bought by Exxon

  10. Dupont - still around

  11. Amoco - bought by BP

  12. Bethlehem Steel - defunct in 2003

  13. CBS - division of Paramount global

  14. Texaco - part of Chevron

  15. AT&T - still around

  16. Shell Oil - still around

  17. Kraft - Merged with Heinz

  18. ChevronTexaco - Not sure why this is here

  19. Goodyear Tire - still around

  20. Boeing still around

Of the top 20 companies from 68 years ago, 19 are still around in some way shape or form.

Barring a singularity or global catastrophe, Apple isn't going anywhere anytime soon. High confidence.

Honestly Apple would see a big fall in revenue if they weren’t allowed to make their text blue. That’s the biggest hook they have on their customer base.

Theoretically I guess if WhatsApp took over the text market it would hurt them more than anything.

That people care about this is incredibly pathetic.

The idea of running your OS in the cloud is the same old "thin client" scheme that has been the Next Big Thing for 40 years. Ever since PCs started replacing terminals, some people have been convinced we must RETVRN.

The thin client approach seems appealing for two reasons. First, it centralizes administration. Second, it allows shared use of pooled computing resources. In practice, neither of these quite works.

A platform like iOS or modern macOS actually imposes almost no per-device administrative overhead. System and app updates get installed automatically. Devices can be configured and backed up remotely. The OS lives on a "sealed" system volume where it's extremely unlikely to be compromised or corrupted. There's still some per-user administrative overhead — the configuration of a particular user's environment can be screwy — but a cloud-based OS still has per-user state, so does nothing to address this.

Pooling resources is great for cases where you want access to a lot of resources, but there's no need to go full-cloud for this. Devices that run real operating systems can access remote resources just fine. The benefit of going full-cloud is hypothetically that your end-user devices can be cheaper if they don't need the hardware to run a full OS... but the cost difference between the hardware required by a thin client and the hardware required to run a full OS is now trivial.

Meanwhile, the thin client approach will always be hobbled by connectivity, latency, bandwidth, and privacy concerns. Connectivity is especially critical on mobile, where Apple makes most of its money. Latency is especially critical in emerging categories like VR/AR, where Apple is looking to expand.

The future is more compute in the cloud and more compute at the edge. There's no structural threat to Apple here.

Apple died on March 24, 2001 -- the current company is a skinsuit optimized for extracting money from stupid people; fite me.

Easy.

M1.

Skinsuit leechers don't produce state of the art CPU architectures. Ask Oracle how many they've done since they started wearing Sun.

You may say they're not as good at product design as they used to be, but that's only because they went from best of all time to best in the world.

Not to mention if the glasses catch on, that'll arguably be an equal or greater feat than the iPhone. They'll eat the entire market for monitors if that gamble works out.

And I say all this as someone who deeply hates Apple's business model and refuses to buy their products on principle. People who expected they would get stuck after Jobs death, including myself, were just wrong.

Nonsense. Netflix will die sooner than Apple ever does. Google is probably more likely too.

Apple has a gigantic war chest, state of the art in house CPU design, insane brand recognition and loyalty, not to mention the best product designers in the world.

Cloud OSes are never going to work because of the speed of light. Stadia was a total failure that anybody familiar with the history of cloud gaming, or indeed the physics of computer networks, saw coming.

You're not the first person to think of this scenario, but it's not possible. We're not going back to IBM, not without losing insane amount of functionality.

Even if OS' live in the Cloud, I think Apple would be the top seller of the screen or headset you use the cloud with.

I don't see it happening any time soon, apple is a lifestyle brand moreso than a software or hardware company at this point. people buy iphones to fit in with other people who have iphones, this is why their USA market share has gone up in the past few years. They have a stranglehold on all the trendsetting populations, and they're a tool for teenagers to socially exclude other teenagers.

Yes, apple could go out of business far in the future when technology changes in unforseen and unrecognizable ways. That doesn't make this a useful prediction.

mobile OSes too will either be abstracted away

Why would Apple cooperate with that? And agree to substitute their OS with some standard abstract OS?

I have no idea why Apple would cripple their main selling point to follow trend.

There were some remarkably stupid business decisions, but that would be one of the worst in history. It sometimes happens but is not very likely. And entirely about leadership being terminally stupid, not about tech trends.

Apple has soooo much money. They might get unseated as the top dog, but I think they'll be around forever, even if they're in a zombified state.

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