“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”
The stock price will fall if we don't make more money then we did last year.
But why?
Because we are legally obliged to do what is best for shareholder, or they can sue us.
Right so the company needs to make more money again and again and again until the company or the world dies
About sums it up
Accurate. The laws need to find a balance as I get shareholders who took a risk on business would like to see a return, but it is way too slanted to the point that the risk is on our entire society. We need people to be in those laws not just shareholders.
Maybe stock market was a mistake?
Our implementation certainly is.
See Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund for more..
I think it's a great idea in theory. Basically a form of decentralised loans. You need money to invest, you sell shares of your company to get some cash. In return the shareholders get a return if you succeed. And of course they can sell their shares if now your company is worth more.
Seems alright with me tbh.
But nowadays it just seems like a fucking casino.
I don't know if you can have that ideology without it eventually turning into what it currently is.
I'm by no means an expert. So I asked the old CharlieGPT
This list seems pretty good to me though:
Transforming the stock market from its current state, which many perceive as being overly speculative, to a more stable and purposeful system would be challenging. However, here are some suggestions that could help mitigate its "casino-like" nature:
Limit High-Frequency Trading (HFT): HFT can exacerbate market volatility. Some argue it provides liquidity, while others feel it allows for manipulation. By setting limits or additional regulations on HFT, you might reduce some of the rapid, short-term fluctuations.
Enhance Financial Education: Educating the public about the fundamental analysis of companies, rather than speculative trading, can lead to a more informed investor base that makes decisions based on a company's intrinsic value, not short-term price movements.
Tax Incentives for Long-Term Holding: Offer tax benefits for long-term investments. For example, increase capital gains tax for stocks held less than a year and reduce it for those held longer. This would incentivize investors to think long-term.
Increase Transparency: Companies could be required to disclose more about their financial health and business operations, making it easier for investors to make informed decisions.
Reduce Leverage: Limit the amount of leverage retail investors can use. Excessive borrowing to buy stocks can magnify gains but also amplify losses, leading to more volatile markets.
Strengthen Short-Selling Regulations: While short-selling can be a useful tool for price discovery, unrestricted or manipulative shorting can destabilize markets. Strengthening regulations and increasing transparency around short positions might help.
Limit Derivatives or Complex Financial Products: Overly complex financial products can mask risk. By limiting or more strictly regulating these products, one might reduce systemic risks.
Robust Regulatory Oversight: Enhance the powers and resources of regulatory bodies to monitor market manipulations, insider trading, and other unethical practices.
Circuit Breakers: Strengthen and refine circuit breakers, which are mechanisms that temporarily halt trading on an exchange during significant declines for predefined periods.
Restrict Speculative Products for Retail Investors: Limit access to highly speculative or complex products for inexperienced retail investors.
Promote Stakeholder Capitalism: Shift the focus from purely shareholder returns to considering other stakeholders, such as employees, the community, and the environment. This can encourage companies to think long-term and align their strategies with broader societal benefits.
Enhanced Shareholder Rights: Grant shareholders more power in corporate decision-making, making it easier for them to hold company executives accountable.
Remember, the stock market serves as a crucial mechanism for companies to raise capital and for investors to grow wealth over time. Any regulations or reforms should be considered carefully to ensure they do not stifle innovation or economic growth.
Those sound like a great ideas, although I have to question the immense burden it would put on any governing authority, still seems better than the current system though.
As a counterpoint, stock markets (or any structured form of capital investment) require infinite growth, not only is this unsustainable, but it will always prioritize the profit motive over ethical concerns.
In addition, in a market where capital controls expansion, it will always benefit those with capital and by extension power to loosen those regulations.
To summarize, regulation will win you the battle but never the war.
These are just AI ramblings. But for the sake of the argument I don't think the stock market requires infinite growth per se.
Shareholders could just as well be happy with the dividend payout. Say you gave your apple farmer 20 units of wood to build a fence and storage, and in return he gives you an X amount of apples per fiscal quarter.
But this is hypothetical and in the capitalist system we enjoy you are right of course.
Though I will say that we could definitely regulate more. I would always be more inclined to put my faith in a regulatory body than the powers of the free market.
Needs more socialism. But we know how that goes..
It isn't a great idea even in theory. Even ideally, workers inalienable rights to appropriate the fruits of their labor and to democracy are still violated. These rights flow from the moral principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. In a company, employees are jointly de facto responsible for using up the inputs to produce the outputs, but receive 0% of property rights and liabilities. The employer is held solely legally responsible resulting in a mismatch
Someone tell them they don't have to follow Steve Jobs in everything.
Also fire.
"OH MY GOD! WE'RE HAVING A FIRE... Sale."
Tissue. A cancer tissue.
Cells are expendable in pursuit of infinite growth.
This is too perfect of an analogy...
I thought this was about a cereal for a hot second.
I love Apple Jacks. I haven’t had them in years.
Why don't they taste like apples!? (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
Wait until you hear about Grape Nuts.
Are those The Grapist's testicles?
I'm gonna tie you to the radiator!
This made me lol
They taste like jack instead.
Really? I've never even tried them but I always assumed they were basically apple flavored cheerios.
They’re a very strong artificial cinnamon flavor.
Apple Jacks are my number two, only behind Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
Also, number two, behind. Heh.
That joke was brought to you by lactose intolerance, btw.
I scrolled away and had to come back because I just kept repeating the sentence in my head. If Apple Jacks gets $19B in profit I better join the cereal industry.
Is this thread a secret marketing ploy?!?!? Now I want some delicious fake apple cereal!
Glad I wasn't the only one.
The cereal is that good, I wasn't doubting they were pulling that XD
I thought I was really out of the loop. A brand I haven't heard in over 20 years has been killin it.
Please vote with your money. Don't waste money and buy overpriced stuff and certainly don't support this kind of business practice. And fuck the shareholders too. If they want money, then work like most people.
Already do. Used to buy new phone every year. Now it’s every three years or so. That is completely due to price and lack of compelling innovation. Don’t care if shareholders make money or not. I just like good value.
I’m the same. I just got a 15 as my xr screen is cracked and the batter lasts half a day.
I’m home sick and didn’t even open the box yet.
I’m not particularly excited for a new phone, but my xr is just not working well enough any longer.
I am still using my XS max, just bought a $20 external battery for it.
A used smart battery case is pretty good too.
You can try 5 years with Fairphones, it's the length of their warranty and you can repair it yourself easily.
Economic genius.
Is this sarcasm? I don't think I'm a genius, just giving a reminder, and perhaps pointing a flaw in capitalism.
I read Apple Jack's like the cereal and was confused
That was the point. There are several turns of phrase in the headline.
You like them apples?!?!
Yea, I was like, "Who the fuck would get a cereal subscription for Apple Jacks?"
"This doesn't taste like apples!"
"For $9.99 a month, it will!"
Same I was wondering what they were changing the price of a box to. Tough times.
I do not understand all the rage, Apple does not provide any vital services or products. They can charge anything they want. If you don't like it then don't buy it.
but you still lock yourself in their offer space when you also bought devices that kind of depend on those services: music streaming for the homepod, fitness+ for watch, cloud storage for iphone photos...
every time you switch from apple to a third party, it's ever so slightly less convenient, and they probably conceive their products around that notion.
Yes you have to decide if the cost of the convenience is worth the lock in and price of Apple products. At the end of the day you still have a choice.
None of the products that had the price increased are locked in. Apple TV plus doesn’t even need an Apple device and has many competitors, Apple News has plenty of competitors, there are games you can buy without Apple Arcade though most do stupid in app purchases.
That is their business model, no? The convenience and integration of their products is what makes Apple unique. Seems weird hold it against them.
Yea i buy apple because it just kinda works and it’s what i’ve used since my first mobile device, being an ipod 5. The switch to android just isn’t worth losing all my paid apps and whatever else
It's always been trendy to rage at Apple and Apple owners. This is just the current rage.
If it's "always" then it's not a "trend." Maybe if there is "always" rage at Apple, there is a good reason for it.
Yeah. For some, hate is eternal.
It’s supposed to be a personal computer - some folks don’t respect personal choices.
That is the thing with for profit companies, especially publicly traded ones. No matter how much they make, it is never enough. Next quarter must always be higher than this quarter or the world is on fire and heads will roll.
"our company only made 19 billion, we expected to make 19.1 billion, we are not sure how we are going to survive this"
Better fire 50000 people ASAP
Fire one million
Infinite growth.
The problem is their moat. If customers can easily go somewhere else hiking prices will have clear consequences.
*if there is actual competition.
Reddit has competition but also a big moat in that a lot of people need to collectively decide to move platform.
No disagreements from me. Enshittification at its finest.
I read the title 3 times before I realized it's not about cereal
I am so happy that I'm not the only one that thought Apple Jacks were vastly more profitable than I had expected.
Honey smacks other coupon purveyors for substandard grifting.
Good one 😂
Or juice "profits." (I've never understood people having cereal with juice, but maybe it works with Apple Jacks.)
They are epitome of passive aggressive capitalism. “Will keep doin unethical shit til they make a law not to and even then you have to sue me to make me stop”
It’s nestle’s MO.
I had to read the title several times before I understood that the article isn't about Apple Jacks, the cereal.
Also I didn't know Apple Jacks made juice profits, since when do they make juice?
The thing I loved about Apple 15+ years ago was that even though the hardware was expensive, it was semi modular and tightly integrated with the software and you got an offline product that you could also buy Apple server equipment and software for. 10 years ago was still ok but things were starting to erode.
These days there is no server software, no modularity, no ways to use enough of the new features without a cloud subscription and the hardware is just as expensive and designed with defects to limit it's lifespan (in my opinion). They want to have their cake and eat it too. I was a proud Apple fan boy but not a blind one. Well now they can fuck off. Bye.
I'm now fanboying about Framework and Pine64.
Apple’s been ignoring professional users for a while now. Folks in sound and video production were the ones who kept them alive in the 90s. But they turned Final Cut Pro into iMovie+ and their professional machines are impossible to upgrade or repair.
Remember the outrigger cases? Or the G3/G4? Beautiful design, great airflow, and one latch and the whole thing opened up.
Remembering the G3 and G4s had daughterboards? So you can not only change out the memory, but also change out the CPU/GPU. It was a great time to be an Apple fan back then.
Yeah! IIRC there were even daughterboards with full Intel systems on them so you could run Windows/DOS applications
Oh ya!!! You could swap the IBM board or the Cirrix board. Oh man. Blast from the past.
Was also a fanboy 15+ years ago. First they got rid of the Macbook 17". Then they got started soldering memory to the motherboard. Thats when I left. It just got progressively worse ever since.
The solution is simple: Don't participate in the Church of Steve Jobs, don't turn yourself into an Apple disciple (and apologist).
The problem is that since there is no real competition all this shit propagates to other companies. If Apple is charging 1000 for a shitty phone, you better believe others will follow suit and charge 900-1000$
Meanwhile the fucking phone should actually cost 200$...
$200? what fantasy world do you live in?
The cost of making an iPhone 14 Pro was $570 and it sold for $800.
They are focused on services for making big profits, which is why you have to subscribe to a million services
I was exaggerating for effect. I just did a quick google:
A new report details how much it costs in materials to make Apple's top-of-the line iPhone 14 Pro Max. According to Counterpoint Research's bill of materials (BoM) analysis of the iPhone 14 Pro Max with 128GB, the cost is about $464. That model retails for $1,099
So I'm not far off in the price difference. Like I said overpriced bullshit. But you feel free to keep sucking that apple dong.
That’s just the materials used to make it though, what about R&D, software development, etc? I dislike apple but imo the phones are overpriced for a reason. Adding RAM or storage to their computers though… that’s real price gouging.
Nonsense. Apple has like a trillion dollars in cash laying around. So clearly their shit is marked up to such absurd levels, that not only does it cover all costs, including Rd, on top of all of that they still have a trillion in cash leftover. They don't even know what to do with the money except lobby and bribe governments.
Stop defending these price gauging asshole mega corps FFS
I can get the TV+ hike. I don’t like it, but I get it. When TV+ launched it had very little content and no one was going to pay for that little content unless it was cheap. But now there is a pretty good library of new stuff, and it’s usually of better quality than what’s floating around on HBO.
Arcade price hikes - now that seems like a good reason to cancel Arcade. If they’re going to add better games that take advantage of the new fast processors, I can understand console tier pricing. But the games still mostly feel like mobile games. And not mobile as in “Nintendo Switch,” mobile as in “flappy bird.”
The logic is that others raised subscription prices and got away with it, so they can too. Masks have come off in the last 1-2 years and corporations try to milk us for every last cent, using any excuse (e.g. Covid, energy prices) they can. Inflation is not a law of nature, it’s corporate greed for more profits
For All Mankind S4 comes out next month!!!
Oh shit finally, I love that show
!Get fucked Danny!<
Man hbo is just dead at this point.
You got downvoted, but I agree. HBO isn’t what is once was, although there are a few gems. TV+ seems to be the place where people are allowed to spend an ungodly amount of money on a show right now.
I thought the same thing until I found Scavengers Reign.
I'm so excited for that.... But that's definitely Williams St/Titmouse before the merger being awesome as usual with discovering new talent.
Honestly, arcade is a cool idea, but it’s never been cool enough to buy on its own. I feel like the majority of people that have it just get it as part of Apple One.
Yeah, I agree. I might be cool if you have kids. I don’t, so I’d rather just buy the one or two mobile games I play each year.
We need to abolish public trading, or at least vastly overhaul what it means to invest in a company
Minimum investment times and mandatory profit sharing might help.
Make investors consider long-term and create income for shareholders from all profitable companies.
Right now a company can lose money while making shareholders rich, or make money while making shareholders poor. This is stupid.
Stock buybacks should be made illegal (well, just don't allow them) again.
Also short selling. Maybe I don't have a full understanding of how it works, but I don't think you should be able to place money down in hopes of the decline of a company. I don't think that really encapsulates the spirit of the word "investment".
Like I thought the whole idea of stock was to put money into companies thag you believe in so they can have extra capital to grow, and then you get a cut of it. How in the world did people figure out a way to bet against companies and profit off of them losing? It just opens the doors for even more insider trading and corporate sabotage.
There was counterpoint I saw that advocated for the value of shorting.
You see this big successful company. You know that if they are caught doing something illegal or wildly unethical, you could profit by shorting. So you fund a bit of research to see if there are skeletons. Selling to an embargoed nation, poisoning an area, bribing officials.
Shorting provides a motivation to dig for dirt instead of just cheerleading a company blindly.
I agree that it doesn't rub me the right way. The mechanism is interesting though.
Essentially what it is is you borrow a share of stock of Company X from John Smith.
You now owe John Smith 1 share and you sell that share for current market value of $100.
You now have $100 but still owe John Smith 1 share of stock, and interest based on how long you take to give him his stock back.
The stock now drops to $10.
You buy 1 share of stock for $10 and return the stock back to John Smith as well as some interest.
You now have a net +$90 (minus some interest) you didn't have at the start of this. Voila, profit from stock going down. John Smith's share is worth less now, so he loses out.
Why would John loan someone a share of his stock? Well if it maintains it's value or goes up, then it's you who lost because you owe John a share that you have to purchase for the same or more than you got for it, plus interest too.
The heart of the mechanism is loaning stock, aka loaning property of value. So preventing it might be tricky.
Perhaps also interesting is the fact that a loan never happens.
Instead, a contract is sold. The contract is for an option to buy (or sell) 100 shares at a certain price (strike).
So there is no loaning of shares, really. But the seller of an options contract has the obligation to sell (or buy) the shares at any time until the contract expiration date.
Sometimes, market participants borrow the shares instead of owning them. This is what I consider the shady part. Certain participants get a long time to "locate" the shares and are given a lot of leeway to do so. Often in the name of liquidity, they will just sell contracts without even going through the trouble of borrowing shares. They are allowed to if they believe they can locate the shares later.
This entire process allows for certain parties to basically create infinite shares from nothing. Believe it or not, this often gets abused. Money is basically siphoned from public companies in order to enrich Wall St.
When the stock price moves too much, which would put the stock counterfeiters at risk of insolvency, trading is halted.
Yeah, the problem sounds like we should be not allowing recursion, or regulating how many levels of recursion of allows for a reasonable level of liquidity and velocity of cash in an economy. Allowing for it to infinitely nest guarantees a bubble is going to pop somewhere eventually.
Sounds like an excellent start to me 👍
They are just mad that they lost to "right to repair" in California so they are throwing a "fuck em we will charge them double then" tantrum.
They did not lose, sir.
Fighting for years against right to repair, seeing the sentiment stay against them and the EU forcing them to be more repairable, leading to them suddenly jump on the right to repair train isn't losing? Interesting.
They drafted this law via lobbying. They didn't lose, but we didn't win. And now the topic will get forgotten as we already have a law.
Considering they fought similar laws tooth and nail all over the world, I'd say getting them to even be repairable is a win.
Not yet.
This is just a whitewashing maneuver from apple in my opinion. And they got it through, so I don’t think this California thing a loss for apple.
On the other hand, apple is indeed losing a bit at the EU site, I agree, but that was not what top commentor was talking about.
We're Not Retreating; We're Advancing in a Different Direction! -Apple
If you can not prevent a law from being written, you make sure it is written in your favor. Apple did just that.
And why would I want an apple anything? They get cheap labor so....what the investors want more money? Never had an iPhone or apple product never will.
Hate to burst your bubble on that one, but all of the latest and greatest phones are made by cheap labour these days. Apple uses China and India, Samsung uses Vietnam, Google uses China and Vietnam with some assembly in the US.
I just have second hand ipod touches and manage my collection by burning cds through media monkey to them. There is so many mp3 players out there that look good but when you get them the software is junk.
Why would anyone need a dedicated piece of hardware to play mp3s these days? My $250 smartphone accepts SD cards up to 1 terabyte, plays flacs, and runs whatever media software you want. I was using GoneMad until updates turned that to shit and now I'm happily using PowerAmp. But there are dozens of others I haven't even tried.
I had a 5th Gen iPod video back in 2006 and loved the thing like it was my firstborn child but eventually it broke and I got a smartphone and have never felt the need for another one.
Output quality is a reason. Even if you have headphone jack, it's usually built as cheaply as possible. Granted, Bluetooth headsets can be OK these days.
Come to think of it, do Bluetooth headphones only use class D amplifiers? Seems like it'd be hard to fit any kind of decent class AB amp in there. Class D amps have improved a lot in recent years, but you still want to use an AB if you're serious (not even audiophile nonsense, just somewhat serious).
I had the first gen iPod 20 BG, that heavy white brick. It was glorious, the only focus was to hear music. There was like 19.5 GB just for your music, nothing else installed, than the music player. The mini LCD screen was perfect and quick.
Also loved my Nano ipod Video, the last nano.
It will never be enough. That's the model of capitalism.
Did any of the Foxconn workers that have to live in company dorms for slave wages get a raise?
You call it slave wages, for them its living wages. Im not supporting Apple. But unemployment for young over there so though, working at Foxconn seems like upscale to them
Consumers are not dumb, they're just nearly powerless.
Very untrue. Consumers have the power to buy far cheaper Android phones where they have far more freedoms, but not only do the majority of American consumers refuse to do this, they voluntarily and systematically shame those who do.
Statistically, Most American consumers are pretty dumb and act against their own interests
Consumers literally do not have a choice to buy the services the article was discussing -- apple's media streamers -- from someone else. Apple monopolizes that content.
RTFA. It is not about phones.
And even for phones, to get a functionally-acceptable product, your choice is one of maybe 5 manufacturers who all tacitly collude to keep prices up and keep unprofitable consumer choices far, far away.
Workers and consumers actually have all the power, they just don't want to inconvenience themselves by using it. Collective action has destroyed empires and absolutely can annihilate multinationals.
I’ve been an Apple loyalist since 1993. Practically everything I’ve loved about the company has gone to shit in the past few years. It used to be inspirational, seamless, intuitive. Now every new OS update makes something needlessly complex and confusing.
On top of that, they’re increasing prices for their services. I genuinely love Apple TV+ and still think with the increase that it’s an incredible deal. Still, they can suck a dick if they think I’m falling prey to this annual price increase bullshit. Apple stopped being an industry leader under Cook and became a basic vanilla consumer electronics and digital services company. It’s fucking disappointing.
What’s worse, they still do most things better than the competition so there’s little to do but hope things don’t break and disable auto updates. I have nearly every product category they put out but as things start to fail, I will not be replacing them. Instead, I’ll simply choose a more simple life without excessive tech.
I have thought about doing this in the past. I eat, sleep and breath technology and also work in the field so I feel it would be difficult for me to make this transition.
Yeah. Same. It's not an easy process.
I know for sure that my Apple Watch will be the first to go since they've handicapped the OS and I'll never upgrade from OS 9. My Apple TV is one of my most used devices but it's very likely that I get rid of that along with my TV within the next five years (despite having well over 1,000 movies on my Plex server). iPad might be the next on the list in favor of just a Mac mini and iPhone.
Although, my ideal end-game (what I DREAM about), is just an Apple Watch and iPad. It doesn't seem like Apple's interested in making that a thing though. And, even if they did, I no longer trust them to make it "just work". Oh, how I'd love to abandon iPhone. The 12 Mini I have is about the right size but the camera bump is still ridiculous. I just might switch to a dumb phone if Apple refuses to offer reasonably sized, slim, camera-bumpless phones.
I'm approaching middle middle-age soon. I've invested so much of my life (and money) in tech, I think it's time to step back and enjoy the disconnected life I should have had as a young adult. There's no reward. There's no freedom. No simplicity. I do worry if it's even possible though.
Dang. That zany Kellogg’s cereal that the cool frog sells makes $19 billion a year 😳
Apple doesn't make any kind of necessity. Every single one of their products is completely optional in life and has alternatives.
If people are willing to pay for it, whatever. It's a luxury. It's not medicine or housing.
You could even argue because no one needs to buy any of their stuff, it could be a good thing, because you could tax those extra profits and put it towards subsidising something everyone needs.
Oh wait we live in this world. My bad everyone.
Yes, but what if company was worth four trillion.
In any case, dollar down, prices up.
I find fanboyism pretty much a naïve attitude to have. These are large companies that only have one aim in mind, and that is to make as much money as they can out of you. That is not the same as buying into an infrastructure that gives you a comfort zone. All phone companies strife to push people into that comfort zone, where they do not want to change. On that I am guilty as charged.
All in all you spend your money where you feel happier about it. If Apple want to out price their products then people will find alternatives. I never understand this culture of griefing people for having differing comfort zones. There seems to be a lot more emphasis on calling out people buying a bad deal, rather than just educating people on where the good deals are to be had.
I think there's a distinction to be made between being a fan and being a fanboi. I like AMD, but I also know Bulldozer was a disaster, the GPU division tends to over promise and under deliver, and their marketing and naming is covered in self-inflected wounds. Then there's people who bought the AMD-branded mountain bike, a cheap Chinese bike with some vinyl AMD logo stickers slapped on with a $300 markup, and I don't get those people at all.
I think that you mean by distinction, what you really mean some have a sensible approach. Both are likely to buy a product just by preference.
As for people buying the less informed option, if people are happy with their purchases, then let them have at it. It is hard to compare anything with the disappointment of buying something you are getting enjoyment from, only to find some smart Alec calling you an idiot. It is great to see guides on best purchases before you buy them, but once a purchase has been made there is no real going back on that.
Tell me AMD would be any different from Nvidia or Intel if the market share was reversed.
I ask this as one who only buys AMD GPUs because I reject proprietary GPU drivers (Linux).
wall street hungry, feed me
News+ was worthless and they dropped the one show I gave a shit about because Jon Stewart wasn't towing the line for Chinese propaganda. This was easy to not give a fuck about already, and they are making it even easier.
Now tell us again how their devices are better than any Android.
As I remember cameras hardware is more advanced (correct me if I'm wrong)
The costs of Apple subscriptions are probably part of the reason I left the iPhone ecosystem
Goddamn they were proud of that title "Apple Jack"(originally hard apple cider concentrated by freezing the water out vs heat distillation of the alcohol itself) and "Apple Juice" both make appearances. Gotta love El Reg.
My brain couldn't get past it
Apple Jacks
Juices
Why am I hungry?
Apple shareholders be singing Luther vandross "never too much, never too much, never too much!"
I really like the idea of mandatory profit distribution to workers.
Imagine a world where this (or even half) gets divided equally by all apple workers. So much money going back into the economy, and a much smaller incentive to maximize profits...
Just like the paperclip game. Invest in AI marketing, raise price to find the new stable product flux.
Not sure if I was getting a sweet deal or what but I'm currently paying 4.99/mo. They are raising prices ro 9.99. In what universe would anybody think doubling prices is okay?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Subscription pricing has been on the rise for nearly every service imaginable, and Apple isn't about to miss the opportunity to squeeze its customers for a little more.
In a statement provided to The Register, Apple said it'd begun rolling out new subscription pricing "in the US and select international markets."
Apple typically notifies customers by email of upcoming price increases, but this humble vulture has yet to receive such a notice.
"We are focused on delivering the best experiences possible for our customers by consistently adding high-quality entertainment, content, and innovative features for our services."
In August, executives boasted that services revenues reached an all-time high in Q3, with the company counting over a billion paid subscriptions.
Last quarter Apple as a whole made $221 million a day in profit and paid an effective tax rate of 12.5 percent [PDF].
The original article contains 378 words, the summary contains 141 words. Saved 63%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
That's capitalism for you baby 💰💰💰💰💰💰
Well, they could also lay off personnel, as some of the other *evil* tech companies.
Apple users can probably stomach it. Not like they can't afford 100$/year or so after paying 1000$ for a phone, 2000$ for a laptop, and don't even know how much else for peripherals. They'll gladly do it again, so of course 200$/year for a subscription ain't much. They probably pay more for their phone bill.
You sound salty that some people have money, when you could be salty that apple are being greedy and hoarding wealth like a mad mountain dragon
Why would I be salty? I have money too, but choose to save it by buying stuff at half the price that doesn't lock me in. The rest of the money is invested in crypto, ETFs, or on my bank for a rainy day.
If people are willing to pay a steep price for Apple's products, then it should mean that they can afford marginal increases to their overall Apple spending. If not, they shouldn't be buying Apple 🤷
Why can't it be both? Just because you have money and can realistically afford these devices, doesn't mean you should buy it. Purchasing tells Apple you're fine with the price.
Because prices rise every day? The cost of food in many countries has risen 10%-20% over the last 12 months. Do you think people should stop buying food?
The outcry here is because Apple are literally Scrooge McDuck levels of rich but like to paint themselves as a for-the-people company that "gets you", when really they're obsessed with money and beholden to the stock market just like every other tech giant.
Ngl, if they weren't so fucking money obsessed and skilled in convincing people to pay too much for too little, I wouldn't own stock.
Because prices rise every day? The cost of food in many countries has risen 10%-20% over the last 12 months. Do you think people should stop buying food?
l.o.l.
Can't compare apples to oranges mate. An iPhone and a MacBook are wants and not needs.
We all know they're overpriced and marketed at a premium. If you want a phone or laptop, there are dozens to choose from that are far less than what Apple offers. My phone was $600. My laptop was $800. Both have the same performance as Apple's offerings. I'm quite happy with them.
Now if you need a connected device there are significantly cheaper options out there that again provide the same level of performance. You can even get government assistance for a new phone or laptop. Unsurprisingly, no iPhones or MacBooks. Will be low end Android and Windows devices just enough to do basic tasks.
Wants and needs doesn't matter here, buddy, because your argument is that it's either unethical or illogical to give money to a company that is putting it's prices up unnecessarily, if you can afford it but others can not.
Whether you try to find something more economical elsewhere also applies. You're either boycotting that particular provider of phones/food/whatever or you're not, and your argument is that everyone should boycott prices if a portion of the population can't afford the increase or generally finds it unreasonable.
I'm fine with them hiking the prices if they actually let us integrate alternative cloud services.
What are they making you buy it?
Why is everyone’s solution to buy an android phone? As if buying a new phone is the solution to my music subscription going up by a few dollars 🤣🤣
Buying a phone that is able to store your music locally is definitely a solution
As far as I’m aware almost all phones will do this, including iPhones.
Let me rephrase that. You can pirate shit on android. You can't do that with iPhone.
Huh, guess these FLAC files on my phone don't exist
You’re severely uninformed.
For starters you can just transfer files.
Other than that, you can stream things with YTMusicUltimate and SpotC++ and then you also have many torrent clients, though all of these have to be sideloaded, so just choose two + use sidestore if you can’t jailbreak or use trollstore. There are also web apps and PWAs for these.
Subscribe to a different service. Choose to download your own music. Buy albums direct from the artists and rip them yourself. There are several solutions to switching away from Apple services. Whether you're willing to give up some inconvenience for the sake of switching is entirely up to you.
Private company, they can do whatever they like. Also, I can purchase phones from whomever I like. This is a non-story.
They are a public company, not a private one. That said, profits > *, always.
True. What I meant was, they are not a government entity, so they are free to make a profit.
They are not free to make a profit. They must.*
* "must"
You should read the article because this isn't about phone prices. It's about stuff that you actually can only buy from them.
We're backsliding from a world where you could have just one or two streaming platforms and basically get access to everything to one that's even worse than old cable packages.
Buy Android. Use Linux. You have options.
This is the correct answer 👍. Best comment on this thread.
Except... the article still wasn't about phones, or any device/OS. Just more people who didn't read it.
We're talking about the principle of free computing to help people get out of apple's ecosystem prison of greed.
Cool, cool.
The article is talking about Apple services you can use on Android or Windows or even regular Linux PCs, though. There's no "free computing" alternative to Apple+ , other than the high seas.
Linux. Linux respects user freedom. The user is free to examine the code of the software or os, modify it to their liking and share it on
For example, if Apple was FOSS/Libre and people were unhappy with any Apple app, iOS, macos, ipados, tvos, watchos - they could simply modify the code to make it work the way they want (fork it, is the technical term) and even release the new version under a new name. Or they could keep it for their own personal use.
In Linux you can do exactly that. I could take any Linux OS, make as many changes as I want and use it for myself or name it and make it available for download. I could even sell it.
In fact they is exactly what Steve did with Unix. Unix is like Linux in how it works. And there are free Unix versions available called FreeBSD.
Steve Jobs took that free OS, modified it to make NextOS and sold it on his Next PC's.
When Apple acquired Next, they renamed NextOS to AppleOS/OS X/macOS. Later they modified it and called it iOS, then ipadOS, then TVOS, then WatchOS.
And make Billions from this free operating system
Just barge on talking about something entirely irrelevant to the article you didn't read. Don't look back or doubt yourself for even one moment.
I will thanks 👍. The point is to have conversations, what on or off topic
Ahem 🏴☠️
Yeah, I encourage this wholeheartedly.
Private company
I don't think this means what you think it means
Yes, but I'd like to make an informed decision. This information is valuable to my choice of who to purchase a phone from
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”
The stock price will fall if we don't make more money then we did last year.
Because we are legally obliged to do what is best for shareholder, or they can sue us.
About sums it up
Accurate. The laws need to find a balance as I get shareholders who took a risk on business would like to see a return, but it is way too slanted to the point that the risk is on our entire society. We need people to be in those laws not just shareholders.
Maybe stock market was a mistake?
Our implementation certainly is.
See Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund for more..
I think it's a great idea in theory. Basically a form of decentralised loans. You need money to invest, you sell shares of your company to get some cash. In return the shareholders get a return if you succeed. And of course they can sell their shares if now your company is worth more. Seems alright with me tbh.
But nowadays it just seems like a fucking casino.
I don't know if you can have that ideology without it eventually turning into what it currently is.
I'm by no means an expert. So I asked the old CharlieGPT
This list seems pretty good to me though:
Transforming the stock market from its current state, which many perceive as being overly speculative, to a more stable and purposeful system would be challenging. However, here are some suggestions that could help mitigate its "casino-like" nature:
Limit High-Frequency Trading (HFT): HFT can exacerbate market volatility. Some argue it provides liquidity, while others feel it allows for manipulation. By setting limits or additional regulations on HFT, you might reduce some of the rapid, short-term fluctuations.
Enhance Financial Education: Educating the public about the fundamental analysis of companies, rather than speculative trading, can lead to a more informed investor base that makes decisions based on a company's intrinsic value, not short-term price movements.
Tax Incentives for Long-Term Holding: Offer tax benefits for long-term investments. For example, increase capital gains tax for stocks held less than a year and reduce it for those held longer. This would incentivize investors to think long-term.
Increase Transparency: Companies could be required to disclose more about their financial health and business operations, making it easier for investors to make informed decisions.
Reduce Leverage: Limit the amount of leverage retail investors can use. Excessive borrowing to buy stocks can magnify gains but also amplify losses, leading to more volatile markets.
Strengthen Short-Selling Regulations: While short-selling can be a useful tool for price discovery, unrestricted or manipulative shorting can destabilize markets. Strengthening regulations and increasing transparency around short positions might help.
Limit Derivatives or Complex Financial Products: Overly complex financial products can mask risk. By limiting or more strictly regulating these products, one might reduce systemic risks.
Robust Regulatory Oversight: Enhance the powers and resources of regulatory bodies to monitor market manipulations, insider trading, and other unethical practices.
Circuit Breakers: Strengthen and refine circuit breakers, which are mechanisms that temporarily halt trading on an exchange during significant declines for predefined periods.
Restrict Speculative Products for Retail Investors: Limit access to highly speculative or complex products for inexperienced retail investors.
Promote Stakeholder Capitalism: Shift the focus from purely shareholder returns to considering other stakeholders, such as employees, the community, and the environment. This can encourage companies to think long-term and align their strategies with broader societal benefits.
Enhanced Shareholder Rights: Grant shareholders more power in corporate decision-making, making it easier for them to hold company executives accountable.
Remember, the stock market serves as a crucial mechanism for companies to raise capital and for investors to grow wealth over time. Any regulations or reforms should be considered carefully to ensure they do not stifle innovation or economic growth.
Those sound like a great ideas, although I have to question the immense burden it would put on any governing authority, still seems better than the current system though.
As a counterpoint, stock markets (or any structured form of capital investment) require infinite growth, not only is this unsustainable, but it will always prioritize the profit motive over ethical concerns.
In addition, in a market where capital controls expansion, it will always benefit those with capital and by extension power to loosen those regulations.
To summarize, regulation will win you the battle but never the war.
These are just AI ramblings. But for the sake of the argument I don't think the stock market requires infinite growth per se. Shareholders could just as well be happy with the dividend payout. Say you gave your apple farmer 20 units of wood to build a fence and storage, and in return he gives you an X amount of apples per fiscal quarter.
But this is hypothetical and in the capitalist system we enjoy you are right of course.
Though I will say that we could definitely regulate more. I would always be more inclined to put my faith in a regulatory body than the powers of the free market.
Needs more socialism. But we know how that goes..
It isn't a great idea even in theory. Even ideally, workers inalienable rights to appropriate the fruits of their labor and to democracy are still violated. These rights flow from the moral principle that legal and de facto responsibility should match. In a company, employees are jointly de facto responsible for using up the inputs to produce the outputs, but receive 0% of property rights and liabilities. The employer is held solely legally responsible resulting in a mismatch
Someone tell them they don't have to follow Steve Jobs in everything.
Also fire.
"OH MY GOD! WE'RE HAVING A FIRE... Sale."
Tissue. A cancer tissue.
Cells are expendable in pursuit of infinite growth.
This is too perfect of an analogy...
I thought this was about a cereal for a hot second.
I love Apple Jacks. I haven’t had them in years.
Why don't they taste like apples!? (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
Wait until you hear about Grape Nuts.
Are those The Grapist's testicles?
I'm gonna tie you to the radiator!
This made me lol
They taste like jack instead.
Really? I've never even tried them but I always assumed they were basically apple flavored cheerios.
They’re a very strong artificial cinnamon flavor.
Apple Jacks are my number two, only behind Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
Also, number two, behind. Heh.
That joke was brought to you by lactose intolerance, btw.
I scrolled away and had to come back because I just kept repeating the sentence in my head. If Apple Jacks gets $19B in profit I better join the cereal industry.
Is this thread a secret marketing ploy?!?!? Now I want some delicious fake apple cereal!
Glad I wasn't the only one.
The cereal is that good, I wasn't doubting they were pulling that XD
I thought I was really out of the loop. A brand I haven't heard in over 20 years has been killin it.
Please vote with your money. Don't waste money and buy overpriced stuff and certainly don't support this kind of business practice. And fuck the shareholders too. If they want money, then work like most people.
Already do. Used to buy new phone every year. Now it’s every three years or so. That is completely due to price and lack of compelling innovation. Don’t care if shareholders make money or not. I just like good value.
I’m the same. I just got a 15 as my xr screen is cracked and the batter lasts half a day.
I’m home sick and didn’t even open the box yet.
I’m not particularly excited for a new phone, but my xr is just not working well enough any longer.
I am still using my XS max, just bought a $20 external battery for it.
A used smart battery case is pretty good too.
You can try 5 years with Fairphones, it's the length of their warranty and you can repair it yourself easily.
Economic genius.
Is this sarcasm? I don't think I'm a genius, just giving a reminder, and perhaps pointing a flaw in capitalism.
I read Apple Jack's like the cereal and was confused
That was the point. There are several turns of phrase in the headline.
You like them apples?!?!
Yea, I was like, "Who the fuck would get a cereal subscription for Apple Jacks?"
"This doesn't taste like apples!"
"For $9.99 a month, it will!"
Same I was wondering what they were changing the price of a box to. Tough times.
I do not understand all the rage, Apple does not provide any vital services or products. They can charge anything they want. If you don't like it then don't buy it.
but you still lock yourself in their offer space when you also bought devices that kind of depend on those services: music streaming for the homepod, fitness+ for watch, cloud storage for iphone photos...
every time you switch from apple to a third party, it's ever so slightly less convenient, and they probably conceive their products around that notion.
Yes you have to decide if the cost of the convenience is worth the lock in and price of Apple products. At the end of the day you still have a choice.
None of the products that had the price increased are locked in. Apple TV plus doesn’t even need an Apple device and has many competitors, Apple News has plenty of competitors, there are games you can buy without Apple Arcade though most do stupid in app purchases.
That is their business model, no? The convenience and integration of their products is what makes Apple unique. Seems weird hold it against them.
Yea i buy apple because it just kinda works and it’s what i’ve used since my first mobile device, being an ipod 5. The switch to android just isn’t worth losing all my paid apps and whatever else
It's always been trendy to rage at Apple and Apple owners. This is just the current rage.
If it's "always" then it's not a "trend." Maybe if there is "always" rage at Apple, there is a good reason for it.
Yeah. For some, hate is eternal.
It’s supposed to be a personal computer - some folks don’t respect personal choices.
That is the thing with for profit companies, especially publicly traded ones. No matter how much they make, it is never enough. Next quarter must always be higher than this quarter or the world is on fire and heads will roll.
"our company only made 19 billion, we expected to make 19.1 billion, we are not sure how we are going to survive this"
Better fire 50000 people ASAP
Fire one million
Infinite growth.
The problem is their moat. If customers can easily go somewhere else hiking prices will have clear consequences.
*if there is actual competition.
Reddit has competition but also a big moat in that a lot of people need to collectively decide to move platform.
No disagreements from me. Enshittification at its finest.
I read the title 3 times before I realized it's not about cereal
I am so happy that I'm not the only one that thought Apple Jacks were vastly more profitable than I had expected.
Honey smacks other coupon purveyors for substandard grifting.
Good one 😂
Or juice "profits." (I've never understood people having cereal with juice, but maybe it works with Apple Jacks.)
They are epitome of passive aggressive capitalism. “Will keep doin unethical shit til they make a law not to and even then you have to sue me to make me stop”
It’s nestle’s MO.
I had to read the title several times before I understood that the article isn't about Apple Jacks, the cereal.
Also I didn't know Apple Jacks made juice profits, since when do they make juice?
No one ever pays me in juice 🥺
And what are prices-to-juice profits? Like how much they make per balanced breakfast?
It took me 24 hours, saw the headline yesterday morning and skipped over it. Didn't realize it wasn't about cereal until this morning.
The thing I loved about Apple 15+ years ago was that even though the hardware was expensive, it was semi modular and tightly integrated with the software and you got an offline product that you could also buy Apple server equipment and software for. 10 years ago was still ok but things were starting to erode.
These days there is no server software, no modularity, no ways to use enough of the new features without a cloud subscription and the hardware is just as expensive and designed with defects to limit it's lifespan (in my opinion). They want to have their cake and eat it too. I was a proud Apple fan boy but not a blind one. Well now they can fuck off. Bye.
I'm now fanboying about Framework and Pine64.
Apple’s been ignoring professional users for a while now. Folks in sound and video production were the ones who kept them alive in the 90s. But they turned Final Cut Pro into iMovie+ and their professional machines are impossible to upgrade or repair.
Remember the outrigger cases? Or the G3/G4? Beautiful design, great airflow, and one latch and the whole thing opened up.
Remembering the G3 and G4s had daughterboards? So you can not only change out the memory, but also change out the CPU/GPU. It was a great time to be an Apple fan back then.
Yeah! IIRC there were even daughterboards with full Intel systems on them so you could run Windows/DOS applications
Oh ya!!! You could swap the IBM board or the Cirrix board. Oh man. Blast from the past.
Was also a fanboy 15+ years ago. First they got rid of the Macbook 17". Then they got started soldering memory to the motherboard. Thats when I left. It just got progressively worse ever since.
The solution is simple: Don't participate in the Church of Steve Jobs, don't turn yourself into an Apple disciple (and apologist).
The problem is that since there is no real competition all this shit propagates to other companies. If Apple is charging 1000 for a shitty phone, you better believe others will follow suit and charge 900-1000$
Meanwhile the fucking phone should actually cost 200$...
$200? what fantasy world do you live in?
The cost of making an iPhone 14 Pro was $570 and it sold for $800.
They are focused on services for making big profits, which is why you have to subscribe to a million services
I was exaggerating for effect. I just did a quick google:
A new report details how much it costs in materials to make Apple's top-of-the line iPhone 14 Pro Max. According to Counterpoint Research's bill of materials (BoM) analysis of the iPhone 14 Pro Max with 128GB, the cost is about $464. That model retails for $1,099
So I'm not far off in the price difference. Like I said overpriced bullshit. But you feel free to keep sucking that apple dong.
That’s just the materials used to make it though, what about R&D, software development, etc? I dislike apple but imo the phones are overpriced for a reason. Adding RAM or storage to their computers though… that’s real price gouging.
Nonsense. Apple has like a trillion dollars in cash laying around. So clearly their shit is marked up to such absurd levels, that not only does it cover all costs, including Rd, on top of all of that they still have a trillion in cash leftover. They don't even know what to do with the money except lobby and bribe governments.
Stop defending these price gauging asshole mega corps FFS
I can get the TV+ hike. I don’t like it, but I get it. When TV+ launched it had very little content and no one was going to pay for that little content unless it was cheap. But now there is a pretty good library of new stuff, and it’s usually of better quality than what’s floating around on HBO.
Arcade price hikes - now that seems like a good reason to cancel Arcade. If they’re going to add better games that take advantage of the new fast processors, I can understand console tier pricing. But the games still mostly feel like mobile games. And not mobile as in “Nintendo Switch,” mobile as in “flappy bird.”
The logic is that others raised subscription prices and got away with it, so they can too. Masks have come off in the last 1-2 years and corporations try to milk us for every last cent, using any excuse (e.g. Covid, energy prices) they can. Inflation is not a law of nature, it’s corporate greed for more profits
For All Mankind S4 comes out next month!!!
Oh shit finally, I love that show
Man hbo is just dead at this point.
You got downvoted, but I agree. HBO isn’t what is once was, although there are a few gems. TV+ seems to be the place where people are allowed to spend an ungodly amount of money on a show right now.
I thought the same thing until I found Scavengers Reign.
I'm so excited for that.... But that's definitely Williams St/Titmouse before the merger being awesome as usual with discovering new talent.
Honestly, arcade is a cool idea, but it’s never been cool enough to buy on its own. I feel like the majority of people that have it just get it as part of Apple One.
Yeah, I agree. I might be cool if you have kids. I don’t, so I’d rather just buy the one or two mobile games I play each year.
We need to abolish public trading, or at least vastly overhaul what it means to invest in a company
Minimum investment times and mandatory profit sharing might help.
Make investors consider long-term and create income for shareholders from all profitable companies.
Right now a company can lose money while making shareholders rich, or make money while making shareholders poor. This is stupid.
Stock buybacks should be made illegal (well, just don't allow them) again.
Also short selling. Maybe I don't have a full understanding of how it works, but I don't think you should be able to place money down in hopes of the decline of a company. I don't think that really encapsulates the spirit of the word "investment".
Like I thought the whole idea of stock was to put money into companies thag you believe in so they can have extra capital to grow, and then you get a cut of it. How in the world did people figure out a way to bet against companies and profit off of them losing? It just opens the doors for even more insider trading and corporate sabotage.
There was counterpoint I saw that advocated for the value of shorting.
You see this big successful company. You know that if they are caught doing something illegal or wildly unethical, you could profit by shorting. So you fund a bit of research to see if there are skeletons. Selling to an embargoed nation, poisoning an area, bribing officials.
Shorting provides a motivation to dig for dirt instead of just cheerleading a company blindly.
I agree that it doesn't rub me the right way. The mechanism is interesting though.
Essentially what it is is you borrow a share of stock of Company X from John Smith.
You now owe John Smith 1 share and you sell that share for current market value of $100.
You now have $100 but still owe John Smith 1 share of stock, and interest based on how long you take to give him his stock back.
The stock now drops to $10.
You buy 1 share of stock for $10 and return the stock back to John Smith as well as some interest.
You now have a net +$90 (minus some interest) you didn't have at the start of this. Voila, profit from stock going down. John Smith's share is worth less now, so he loses out.
Why would John loan someone a share of his stock? Well if it maintains it's value or goes up, then it's you who lost because you owe John a share that you have to purchase for the same or more than you got for it, plus interest too.
The heart of the mechanism is loaning stock, aka loaning property of value. So preventing it might be tricky.
Perhaps also interesting is the fact that a loan never happens.
Instead, a contract is sold. The contract is for an option to buy (or sell) 100 shares at a certain price (strike).
So there is no loaning of shares, really. But the seller of an options contract has the obligation to sell (or buy) the shares at any time until the contract expiration date.
Sometimes, market participants borrow the shares instead of owning them. This is what I consider the shady part. Certain participants get a long time to "locate" the shares and are given a lot of leeway to do so. Often in the name of liquidity, they will just sell contracts without even going through the trouble of borrowing shares. They are allowed to if they believe they can locate the shares later.
This entire process allows for certain parties to basically create infinite shares from nothing. Believe it or not, this often gets abused. Money is basically siphoned from public companies in order to enrich Wall St.
When the stock price moves too much, which would put the stock counterfeiters at risk of insolvency, trading is halted.
Yeah, the problem sounds like we should be not allowing recursion, or regulating how many levels of recursion of allows for a reasonable level of liquidity and velocity of cash in an economy. Allowing for it to infinitely nest guarantees a bubble is going to pop somewhere eventually.
Sounds like an excellent start to me 👍
They are just mad that they lost to "right to repair" in California so they are throwing a "fuck em we will charge them double then" tantrum.
They did not lose, sir.
Fighting for years against right to repair, seeing the sentiment stay against them and the EU forcing them to be more repairable, leading to them suddenly jump on the right to repair train isn't losing? Interesting.
They drafted this law via lobbying. They didn't lose, but we didn't win. And now the topic will get forgotten as we already have a law.
Considering they fought similar laws tooth and nail all over the world, I'd say getting them to even be repairable is a win.
Not yet.
This is just a whitewashing maneuver from apple in my opinion. And they got it through, so I don’t think this California thing a loss for apple. On the other hand, apple is indeed losing a bit at the EU site, I agree, but that was not what top commentor was talking about.
We're Not Retreating; We're Advancing in a Different Direction! -Apple
If you can not prevent a law from being written, you make sure it is written in your favor. Apple did just that.
And why would I want an apple anything? They get cheap labor so....what the investors want more money? Never had an iPhone or apple product never will.
Hate to burst your bubble on that one, but all of the latest and greatest phones are made by cheap labour these days. Apple uses China and India, Samsung uses Vietnam, Google uses China and Vietnam with some assembly in the US.
I just have second hand ipod touches and manage my collection by burning cds through media monkey to them. There is so many mp3 players out there that look good but when you get them the software is junk.
Why would anyone need a dedicated piece of hardware to play mp3s these days? My $250 smartphone accepts SD cards up to 1 terabyte, plays flacs, and runs whatever media software you want. I was using GoneMad until updates turned that to shit and now I'm happily using PowerAmp. But there are dozens of others I haven't even tried.
I had a 5th Gen iPod video back in 2006 and loved the thing like it was my firstborn child but eventually it broke and I got a smartphone and have never felt the need for another one.
Output quality is a reason. Even if you have headphone jack, it's usually built as cheaply as possible. Granted, Bluetooth headsets can be OK these days.
Come to think of it, do Bluetooth headphones only use class D amplifiers? Seems like it'd be hard to fit any kind of decent class AB amp in there. Class D amps have improved a lot in recent years, but you still want to use an AB if you're serious (not even audiophile nonsense, just somewhat serious).
I had the first gen iPod 20 BG, that heavy white brick. It was glorious, the only focus was to hear music. There was like 19.5 GB just for your music, nothing else installed, than the music player. The mini LCD screen was perfect and quick.
Also loved my Nano ipod Video, the last nano.
It will never be enough. That's the model of capitalism.
Did any of the Foxconn workers that have to live in company dorms for slave wages get a raise?
You call it slave wages, for them its living wages. Im not supporting Apple. But unemployment for young over there so though, working at Foxconn seems like upscale to them
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract
working to the point of suicide is a living wage?
Why are consumers so dumb?
Consumers are not dumb, they're just nearly powerless.
Very untrue. Consumers have the power to buy far cheaper Android phones where they have far more freedoms, but not only do the majority of American consumers refuse to do this, they voluntarily and systematically shame those who do.
Statistically, Most American consumers are pretty dumb and act against their own interests
Consumers literally do not have a choice to buy the services the article was discussing -- apple's media streamers -- from someone else. Apple monopolizes that content.
RTFA. It is not about phones.
And even for phones, to get a functionally-acceptable product, your choice is one of maybe 5 manufacturers who all tacitly collude to keep prices up and keep unprofitable consumer choices far, far away.
Workers and consumers actually have all the power, they just don't want to inconvenience themselves by using it. Collective action has destroyed empires and absolutely can annihilate multinationals.
Pirating TV is absurdly easy these days.
The power to buy a product or not is all the power. Consumers may be apathetic about a price raise but they are still choosing.
And why are they powerless? That's right, dumb consumers.
I’ve been an Apple loyalist since 1993. Practically everything I’ve loved about the company has gone to shit in the past few years. It used to be inspirational, seamless, intuitive. Now every new OS update makes something needlessly complex and confusing.
On top of that, they’re increasing prices for their services. I genuinely love Apple TV+ and still think with the increase that it’s an incredible deal. Still, they can suck a dick if they think I’m falling prey to this annual price increase bullshit. Apple stopped being an industry leader under Cook and became a basic vanilla consumer electronics and digital services company. It’s fucking disappointing.
What’s worse, they still do most things better than the competition so there’s little to do but hope things don’t break and disable auto updates. I have nearly every product category they put out but as things start to fail, I will not be replacing them. Instead, I’ll simply choose a more simple life without excessive tech.
I have thought about doing this in the past. I eat, sleep and breath technology and also work in the field so I feel it would be difficult for me to make this transition.
Yeah. Same. It's not an easy process.
I know for sure that my Apple Watch will be the first to go since they've handicapped the OS and I'll never upgrade from OS 9. My Apple TV is one of my most used devices but it's very likely that I get rid of that along with my TV within the next five years (despite having well over 1,000 movies on my Plex server). iPad might be the next on the list in favor of just a Mac mini and iPhone.
Although, my ideal end-game (what I DREAM about), is just an Apple Watch and iPad. It doesn't seem like Apple's interested in making that a thing though. And, even if they did, I no longer trust them to make it "just work". Oh, how I'd love to abandon iPhone. The 12 Mini I have is about the right size but the camera bump is still ridiculous. I just might switch to a dumb phone if Apple refuses to offer reasonably sized, slim, camera-bumpless phones.
I'm approaching middle middle-age soon. I've invested so much of my life (and money) in tech, I think it's time to step back and enjoy the disconnected life I should have had as a young adult. There's no reward. There's no freedom. No simplicity. I do worry if it's even possible though.
Dang. That zany Kellogg’s cereal that the cool frog sells makes $19 billion a year 😳
Apple doesn't make any kind of necessity. Every single one of their products is completely optional in life and has alternatives.
If people are willing to pay for it, whatever. It's a luxury. It's not medicine or housing.
You could even argue because no one needs to buy any of their stuff, it could be a good thing, because you could tax those extra profits and put it towards subsidising something everyone needs.
Oh wait we live in this world. My bad everyone.
Yes, but what if company was worth four trillion.
In any case, dollar down, prices up.
I find fanboyism pretty much a naïve attitude to have. These are large companies that only have one aim in mind, and that is to make as much money as they can out of you. That is not the same as buying into an infrastructure that gives you a comfort zone. All phone companies strife to push people into that comfort zone, where they do not want to change. On that I am guilty as charged.
All in all you spend your money where you feel happier about it. If Apple want to out price their products then people will find alternatives. I never understand this culture of griefing people for having differing comfort zones. There seems to be a lot more emphasis on calling out people buying a bad deal, rather than just educating people on where the good deals are to be had.
I think there's a distinction to be made between being a fan and being a fanboi. I like AMD, but I also know Bulldozer was a disaster, the GPU division tends to over promise and under deliver, and their marketing and naming is covered in self-inflected wounds. Then there's people who bought the AMD-branded mountain bike, a cheap Chinese bike with some vinyl AMD logo stickers slapped on with a $300 markup, and I don't get those people at all.
I think that you mean by distinction, what you really mean some have a sensible approach. Both are likely to buy a product just by preference.
As for people buying the less informed option, if people are happy with their purchases, then let them have at it. It is hard to compare anything with the disappointment of buying something you are getting enjoyment from, only to find some smart Alec calling you an idiot. It is great to see guides on best purchases before you buy them, but once a purchase has been made there is no real going back on that.
Tell me AMD would be any different from Nvidia or Intel if the market share was reversed.
I ask this as one who only buys AMD GPUs because I reject proprietary GPU drivers (Linux).
wall street hungry, feed me
News+ was worthless and they dropped the one show I gave a shit about because Jon Stewart wasn't towing the line for Chinese propaganda. This was easy to not give a fuck about already, and they are making it even easier.
Now tell us again how their devices are better than any Android.
As I remember cameras hardware is more advanced (correct me if I'm wrong)
The costs of Apple subscriptions are probably part of the reason I left the iPhone ecosystem
Goddamn they were proud of that title "Apple Jack"(originally hard apple cider concentrated by freezing the water out vs heat distillation of the alcohol itself) and "Apple Juice" both make appearances. Gotta love El Reg.
My brain couldn't get past it
Apple Jacks Juices
Why am I hungry?
Apple shareholders be singing Luther vandross "never too much, never too much, never too much!"
I really like the idea of mandatory profit distribution to workers.
Imagine a world where this (or even half) gets divided equally by all apple workers. So much money going back into the economy, and a much smaller incentive to maximize profits...
Just like the paperclip game. Invest in AI marketing, raise price to find the new stable product flux.
Not sure if I was getting a sweet deal or what but I'm currently paying 4.99/mo. They are raising prices ro 9.99. In what universe would anybody think doubling prices is okay?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Subscription pricing has been on the rise for nearly every service imaginable, and Apple isn't about to miss the opportunity to squeeze its customers for a little more.
In a statement provided to The Register, Apple said it'd begun rolling out new subscription pricing "in the US and select international markets."
Apple typically notifies customers by email of upcoming price increases, but this humble vulture has yet to receive such a notice.
"We are focused on delivering the best experiences possible for our customers by consistently adding high-quality entertainment, content, and innovative features for our services."
In August, executives boasted that services revenues reached an all-time high in Q3, with the company counting over a billion paid subscriptions.
Last quarter Apple as a whole made $221 million a day in profit and paid an effective tax rate of 12.5 percent [PDF].
The original article contains 378 words, the summary contains 141 words. Saved 63%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
That's capitalism for you baby 💰💰💰💰💰💰
Well, they could also lay off personnel, as some of the other
*evil*tech companies.Apple users can probably stomach it. Not like they can't afford 100$/year or so after paying 1000$ for a phone, 2000$ for a laptop, and don't even know how much else for peripherals. They'll gladly do it again, so of course 200$/year for a subscription ain't much. They probably pay more for their phone bill.
You sound salty that some people have money, when you could be salty that apple are being greedy and hoarding wealth like a mad mountain dragon
Why would I be salty? I have money too, but choose to save it by buying stuff at half the price that doesn't lock me in. The rest of the money is invested in crypto, ETFs, or on my bank for a rainy day.
If people are willing to pay a steep price for Apple's products, then it should mean that they can afford marginal increases to their overall Apple spending. If not, they shouldn't be buying Apple 🤷
Why can't it be both? Just because you have money and can realistically afford these devices, doesn't mean you should buy it. Purchasing tells Apple you're fine with the price.
Because prices rise every day? The cost of food in many countries has risen 10%-20% over the last 12 months. Do you think people should stop buying food?
The outcry here is because Apple are literally Scrooge McDuck levels of rich but like to paint themselves as a for-the-people company that "gets you", when really they're obsessed with money and beholden to the stock market just like every other tech giant.
Ngl, if they weren't so fucking money obsessed and skilled in convincing people to pay too much for too little, I wouldn't own stock.
l.o.l.
Can't compare apples to oranges mate. An iPhone and a MacBook are wants and not needs.
We all know they're overpriced and marketed at a premium. If you want a phone or laptop, there are dozens to choose from that are far less than what Apple offers. My phone was $600. My laptop was $800. Both have the same performance as Apple's offerings. I'm quite happy with them.
Now if you need a connected device there are significantly cheaper options out there that again provide the same level of performance. You can even get government assistance for a new phone or laptop. Unsurprisingly, no iPhones or MacBooks. Will be low end Android and Windows devices just enough to do basic tasks.
Wants and needs doesn't matter here, buddy, because your argument is that it's either unethical or illogical to give money to a company that is putting it's prices up unnecessarily, if you can afford it but others can not.
Whether you try to find something more economical elsewhere also applies. You're either boycotting that particular provider of phones/food/whatever or you're not, and your argument is that everyone should boycott prices if a portion of the population can't afford the increase or generally finds it unreasonable.
I'm fine with them hiking the prices if they actually let us integrate alternative cloud services.
What are they making you buy it?
Why is everyone’s solution to buy an android phone? As if buying a new phone is the solution to my music subscription going up by a few dollars 🤣🤣
Buying a phone that is able to store your music locally is definitely a solution
As far as I’m aware almost all phones will do this, including iPhones.
Let me rephrase that. You can pirate shit on android. You can't do that with iPhone.
Huh, guess these FLAC files on my phone don't exist
You’re severely uninformed.
For starters you can just transfer files.
Other than that, you can stream things with YTMusicUltimate and SpotC++ and then you also have many torrent clients, though all of these have to be sideloaded, so just choose two + use sidestore if you can’t jailbreak or use trollstore. There are also web apps and PWAs for these.
Subscribe to a different service. Choose to download your own music. Buy albums direct from the artists and rip them yourself. There are several solutions to switching away from Apple services. Whether you're willing to give up some inconvenience for the sake of switching is entirely up to you.
Private company, they can do whatever they like. Also, I can purchase phones from whomever I like. This is a non-story.
They are a public company, not a private one. That said, profits > *, always.
True. What I meant was, they are not a government entity, so they are free to make a profit.
They are not free to make a profit. They must.*
* "must"
You should read the article because this isn't about phone prices. It's about stuff that you actually can only buy from them.
We're backsliding from a world where you could have just one or two streaming platforms and basically get access to everything to one that's even worse than old cable packages.
Buy Android. Use Linux. You have options.
This is the correct answer 👍. Best comment on this thread.
Except... the article still wasn't about phones, or any device/OS. Just more people who didn't read it.
We're talking about the principle of free computing to help people get out of apple's ecosystem prison of greed.
Cool, cool.
The article is talking about Apple services you can use on Android or Windows or even regular Linux PCs, though. There's no "free computing" alternative to Apple+ , other than the high seas.
Linux. Linux respects user freedom. The user is free to examine the code of the software or os, modify it to their liking and share it on
For example, if Apple was FOSS/Libre and people were unhappy with any Apple app, iOS, macos, ipados, tvos, watchos - they could simply modify the code to make it work the way they want (fork it, is the technical term) and even release the new version under a new name. Or they could keep it for their own personal use.
In Linux you can do exactly that. I could take any Linux OS, make as many changes as I want and use it for myself or name it and make it available for download. I could even sell it.
In fact they is exactly what Steve did with Unix. Unix is like Linux in how it works. And there are free Unix versions available called FreeBSD.
Steve Jobs took that free OS, modified it to make NextOS and sold it on his Next PC's. When Apple acquired Next, they renamed NextOS to AppleOS/OS X/macOS. Later they modified it and called it iOS, then ipadOS, then TVOS, then WatchOS.
And make Billions from this free operating system
Just barge on talking about something entirely irrelevant to the article you didn't read. Don't look back or doubt yourself for even one moment.
I will thanks 👍. The point is to have conversations, what on or off topic
Ahem 🏴☠️
Yeah, I encourage this wholeheartedly.
I don't think this means what you think it means
Yes, but I'd like to make an informed decision. This information is valuable to my choice of who to purchase a phone from