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.
Did any of the Foxconn workers that have to live in company dorms for slave wages get a raise?
Do they ever?
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
working to the point of suicide is a living wage?
“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?
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Robust Regulatory Oversight: Enhance the powers and resources of regulatory bodies to monitor market manipulations, insider trading, and other unethical practices.
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Circuit Breakers: Strengthen and refine circuit breakers, which are mechanisms that temporarily halt trading on an exchange during significant declines for predefined periods.
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Restrict Speculative Products for Retail Investors: Limit access to highly speculative or complex products for inexperienced retail investors.
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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.
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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.
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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
Our implementation certainly is.
See Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund for more…
This is too perfect of an analogy…
Also fire.
“OH MY GOD! WE’RE HAVING A FIRE… Sale.”
Someone tell them they don’t have to follow Steve Jobs in everything.
Tissue. A cancer tissue.
Cells are expendable in pursuit of infinite growth.
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
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.
Infinite growth.
It will never be enough. That’s the model of capitalism.
It will never be enough- for this quarter.
(homer cheering up bart)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not yet.
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…
wall street hungry, feed me
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).
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See? No tears! Not crying. Just strong disappointment. Ooo is that a new iPhone?
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Ok bro
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!
I thought this was about a cereal for a hot second.
Is this thread a secret marketing ploy?!?!? Now I want some delicious fake apple cereal!
I love Apple Jacks. I haven’t had them in years.
Why don’t they taste like apples!? (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
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Wait until you hear about Grape Nuts.
This made me lol
Are those The Grapist’s testicles?
I’m gonna tie you to the radiator!
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.
Glad I wasn’t the only one.
I thought I was really out of the loop. A brand I haven’t heard in over 20 years has been killin it.
The cereal is that good, I wasn’t doubting they were pulling that XD
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.
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.
Apple Jacks Juices
Why am I hungry?
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 🤣🤣
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This article is literally about subscriptions and somehow everyone has turned it into a hardware problem.
If your subscription goes up and you’re not happy…change it. Or cancel it. Buying a new phone is not the solution.
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What are you on about?! This comment chain was started by me asking why people are comparing hardware prices & subscription prices 🤦♂️
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.
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.
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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.
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.
