[arebop]

The problem is that ~all companies let themselves be controlled by such forces. Given there are so few counter examples it looks like it is a systemic issue and not a choice each board makes independently.

Google's unusual share class structure was supposed to give them a degree of independence from these forces, but it didn't last. They still tie employee comp to share prices, so they still have to care about share prices. Facebook has even stronger centralization of shareholder power, but its pay structure is very similar. Can you think of any example of a public company that is resisting these forces?

[dahfizz]

Apple comes to mind as a company with some degree of long term vision and strong leadership. They are meticulous about maintaining their brand, and so far have resisted the enshitification.

They also have more cash than they know how to spend. So maybe the pressure to increase revenue this quarter is just lower in general.

[Nemi]

If you don’t think that this goes on at Apple, I have a bridge to sell you.

Just food for thought - why do you think that the ipad (with the same processor as the laptop) has not gotten more capable over the years? They can’t figure out how to do it? No one on the ipadOS team has the brains to make it happen, or it just hasn’t occurred to them? Or maybe there has been an internal conversation and they realized that it would drop the sales of Mac machines below a threshold where fixed costs outweigh the mac team’s ability to stay afloat (pure speculation on my part)?

Make no mistake, Apple is no paragon of virtue here. I love their products (though they also frustrate me), but the company is largely the same as Google and Microsoft in ethics.

[dahfizz]

I am not personally a fan of Apple products for exactly this reason. I think the user experience on all their products (iphone, ipad, mac) is not good out of the box and is really restricting in what you can do.

But, I still believe Apple is trying to make the best products they can. Their design philosophy is heavily opinionated, and therefore a lot of people don't like it. Google's core mission is to slurp up user data & sell ads, and they are willing to make their products worse for the user to satisfy that goal. I don't think Apple would intentionally make a product worse to boost some short term metrics in that same way.

> why do you think that the ipad (with the same processor as the laptop) has not gotten more capable over the years?

I think Apple has consistently shown that they don't really care about power users. Why can't I snap windows on a mac? Why can't I customize the launcher on an iphone? Apple doesn't care about that use case. They stuck an m1 into the ipad because they already make them and its a super power efficient chip; they still have the same product vision for the ipad.

> Make no mistake, Apple is no paragon of virtue here.

Certainly, no company is virtuous. I think its more about incentives. Apple is incentivized to make good products and maintain their brand. Google is incentivized to sell as many ads as possible.

[wizzwizz4]

They also destroy perfectly good computers with their trade-in system, reducing the resale and spare parts market. This would be the plot of one of those environmentalist children's cartoons.

[TradingPlaces]

They resell them here https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished

[wizzwizz4]

From that page:

> If your device isn’t eligible for credit, we’ll recycle it for free.

Per https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphon... (2017, so it might have changed since):

> Apple rejects current industry best practices by forcing the recyclers it works with to shred iPhones and MacBooks so they cannot be repaired or reused—instead, they are turned into tiny shards of metal and glass.

> "Materials are manually and mechanically disassembled and shredded into commodity-sized fractions of metals, plastics, and glass," John Yeider, Apple's recycling program manager, wrote under a heading called "Takeback Program Report" in a 2013 report to Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. "All hard drives are shredded in confetti-sized pieces. The pieces are then sorted into commodities grade materials. After sorting, the materials are sold and used for production stock in new products. No reuse. No parts harvesting. No resale."

Recycling is not a good thing: it is an expensive and intensive industrial process. Recycling is a last resort: if you have to make new stuff then sure, recycle, but it's better to avoid making new stuff by (a) not needing stuff in the first place, and (b) maintaining and repairing old stuff for as long as possible. Whatever happened to “reduce” and “reuse”?

[dahfizz]

> Recycling is a last resort

It sounds like that's exactly what Apple is doing though?

>> If your device isn’t eligible for credit, we’ll recycle it for free.

If they can, they will resell the device. But a 5+ year old phone with a busted screen and dead battery is just trash. There is nothing to do but recycle it.

[wizzwizz4]

Scrapping the phones for spare parts would still be possible. This is usually standard practice for electronics recyclers, but the recyclers working for Apple are (were?) forbidden from doing that.

[lazide]

There are no true saints in the world. But some monsters are much worse than others.

[kmeisthax]

Shareholder independence does not actually liberate you from caring about share price if you want to be a successful monopolist.

Google is not an innovative company and cannot launch anything that people actually want to use. What they do is buy things other people built and scale them up. And in order to do that, you need access to the capital markets so you can borrow money[0] to buy other companies. Those loans are collateralized against the company that took out the loan, and if the company's value goes down, your credit limit goes down.

The only way to actually liberate companies from these forces is not to turn the company from a shareholder oligarchy into a founder dictatorship, but to restrict M&A so that the competitive pressures of "monopolize or die" subside.

[0] You could self-finance M&A but most businesses don't like to do that because it ties up cash flow.