Who is surprized by these numbers? Since Cook took over from Jobs earnings are the only thing they're focused on. The product quality, developer experience, user experience,.. everything that made Apple great is declining.
It seems they have arrested some of the decline since Jony Ive left. The newest MacBook Pro has gone back to a formula that works well with processors that blow away the competition. Things are less rosy on the software side though.
They also poached the head architect from Arm. Now that M1/M1 Pro/Max are out I think a lot of top engineers have seen their project to completion and are moving on to new interesting things. No amount of money is going to bring them back but you can be sure they'll be back in 3-4 years if Apple has a compelling project (like say, their AR/VR headset).
Apple typically tries to enter an existing product category that they think they can execute better on or otherwise disrupt.
Depending on your viewpoint these can be highly disruptive plays - smart phones were going no place for many demographics until the iPhone came out. Android was going to be a cheaper blackberry clone until they saw what iPhone was doing.
But another view of the iPad famously was the Slashdot single-line review, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
Phones were a bit of a blind spot in the market. There should have been a lot more investment going on.
Phones are expensive devices that people update often (with "often" really being a function of the demographic), where the price was disguised in many markets via carrier subsidies and cellular contracts. The carriers were often trying to figure out how to get more customers and get them to pay for more services, so charging for data tiers on top of minutes and messaging was attractive.
Nokia had teams that understood this and obviously the company in general was capitalizing on how much money was going into phones, but they were highly dysfunctional in terms of massive amounts of duplicated work (e.g. little commonalities between hardware or OS on dozens of phones released every year). An example of Nokia trying to leverage cellphones to go into a new market would be the N-Gage.
In terms of markets they tend to go after, VR would be the one where I might worry they missed the wave. Some of that is not knowing if VR actually has broad demographic appeal though - there are technology leaps still needed for many people to tolerate longer headset usage, and most computer applications aren't really VR as much as they are 'large virtual monitor' - you don't see N-dimensional word processing as much as games and experiences. Their money is obviously on AR having much broader appeal.
There are certainly cases where market disruption attempts have failed, such as the HomeKit ecosystem. The more open (and cheaper) ecosystems that Google and Amazon have had managed to get significantly more adoption by manufacturers. For that reason they now seem to be aligning much more with and driving new industry standards instead, such as Matter.
All the rumors about them investing toward a full self-driving car product is really odd, because it goes against so much of their formula for incremental evolution of product lines - seems about as likely as them releasing a television or refrigerator.
>All the rumors about them investing toward a full self-driving car product is really odd ...
I can see technology companies looking at the automotive industry and thinking those traditional manufacturers are struggling with the technology side and that maybe they can do a better job.
I'll be surprised if it ever sees the light of day though, the car side is hard as well.
The iPhone is a once-in-a-generation product. Virtually no company ever creates a product this successful. Why are you treating that level of success as if it’s the new norm that Apple must repeatedly reach in order to keep up?
What happens if they don’t catch the next wave? In that case, they will still be wildly successful. They’ve already had the iPad, which is the clear winner in the tablet market. They’ve already had the Apple Watch, which is the clear winner in the smartwatch market. They’ve already had the AirPods, which is the clear winner in the earphone market. None of these are the one-in-a-generation products that the iPhone is, yet they are all massive successes that bring in tonnes of money.
Apple will probably never have a hit as big as the iPhone ever again… but that’s perfectly fine and not at all incompatible with massive success and huge profits.
No, the BlackBerry wasn’t even close to being the same magnitude hit as the iPhone.
Nokia is a company not a product. They’ve released a tremendous number of products, none of which came close to the iPhone.
We’re talking about a product that captured greater than 100% of the profits for the entire smartphone market one year. That brought in more revenue than most countries. How often does that happen?
And every cycle of quarterly results there’s surprise on HN.