[rossdavidh]

I think that is giving CEO's and corporate boards way, way more credit for long term thinking than they deserve. Corporations base their business out of whatever gives them the best result over the time period when they expect to be involved. If it's a founder, that is a lifetime commitment, probably, unless the founder is intending to sell to a larger business. But in any other case, the CEO and all of the other high-ranking types are thinking about this year and next, for the most part.

[throwaway5752]

I don't think that is true of Apple given the scale of their operations.

[Krasnol]

What special scale would that be?

[jodrellblank]

If you have a point, please make it without whatever this is.

Apple scale is hundreds of millions of devices sold per year. Nobody said it was a “special” scale only for Apple.

[Krasnol]

So the persons pointless comment is no problem but my question is? Why? The commenter does not give any sign to why the size may be relevant so the only special thing about the sentence is the name of the company. As if that may be enough to kill the long and descriptive comment above. The second answer by someone else followed up on this bait.

At the topic of size: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20309140

[jodrellblank]

The person’s comment is a reasonable, if low effort, comment. The exchange is “companies go to stable countries”, “no they go wherever short term profit leads”, and the comment says “Apple is too big not to think of long term stability”.

Which is a point, even if it’s not substantiated. Even if it’s not true it’s a reasonable claim to reply with.

Your question is a problem because it’s a fake-innocent question, with a veiled accusation of Apple being a special case. You’re not engaging with whether Apple could move often, or does or doesn’t look at the long term, or is too big to ignore the long term, instead you’ve taken a straw man “Apple is special” - which was never claimed - and not even argued that either way, just tried to set some trap for the unwary.

[throwaway5752]

Yes. I wish I hadn't made the comment. I think it's just obvious that certain classes of products and companies that build them that have longer planning cycles

Maybe rossdavidh's comment was reasonable in general. But with Apple you have a long term CEO under essentially no pressure for succession. You have product cycles that are going to push two years. You have supply chains that are going to involve dozens or more firms. You have a premium luxury brand. There is so much working against the idea that Apple, specifically, is make short term decisions at the expense of the long term. Still, Apple is not special, per se. It's executing astonishingly well, but I'd expect other capex heavy companies (auto manufacturing, vertically integrated oil e&p, and other hardware-weighted electronics, among others) to approach similar classes of decisions with similar care.

Part of the reason I regret engaging is because this thread is pretty far off topic. This is a low volume product and it's going to an existing partner. It's a minor decision and say nothing about stability in the US or China. The only reason it's getting coverage is because it moves their only US manufacturing to Taiwan or Shanghai.

edit: rossdavidh - I think we're wading a bit too far into hypotheticals. Moving Mac Pro production to Quanex closer to their existing supply chain is not an example of the behavior you described (but I won't deny happens)

[pertymcpert]

It wasn't pointless, your contributions however have been.

[AdamJacobMuller]

largest-ish company in the world scale?

[Krasnol]

And how is this related to the argument above now?

Is it some kind of monarchy?

PS. It's not the largest. Neither by market cap nor by employee number.

[killjoywashere]

> Is it some kind of monarchy?

Bueno de Mesquita makes a compelling case for modeling most corporations as dictatorships in The Dictator's Handbook. So as long as succession is planned at the Corp, then yes, I suppose monar hy would be the correct model.

[Krasnol]

But Apple is not a monarchy and the size of a company even protects a CEO in the western capitalism. A CEO of a startup may end up in debt and without a company if bad decisions are made. A CEO of a huge company will usually be let go with a sufficient good bye pay and an outlook for another job (or he blames somebody else and never leaves even if guilty).