1, the iPhone outsells every other category by 5-7x ratio, and the Mac (which includes everything from Macbooks to Mac Minis to iMacs) barely sells more than the iPad.
2, Services (iCloud, apps, music, TV shows etc.) now bigger than every other category, except the iPhone, combined
Basically 76% of the sales are iPhones and Services
(millions)
iPhone $209,586
Mac $33,708
iPad $28,023
Wearables, Home and Accessories $35,686
Services $109,158
Total $416,161
Next 5 years or so (or even less) both the iPad and the Wearables, Home and Accessories category will overtake the sales of Macs.
They're quite different from my side of the family, but the biggest thing is that they've never been big planners. Everything is by the seat of their pants. If you're like that, you're probably OK with taking one of the first three SEO-optimized search results and making it work.
Meanwhile, I'm not booking anything until I have a proposed itinerary.
Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes? If you have the choice to use a real computer for this, then why not? It's not like booking a big trip is something you do while sitting on a bus.
Then of course there's accommodation, itineraries, visas, trip research...
I'd be more surprised if they had a desktop than a laptop.
- the desktops in question tend to be "exclusively" used by one member of the household
- the desktop owners usually also have a laptop
- the desktop-owning households are well in the minority of households I know
But that says 1000% more about impulsivity coming to my rescue, with reckless disregard for the risk of regret at the first sign of boredom, than any trust in mobile interfaces.
I didn't (and would never) book the trip that cost a fraction of that on a phone or pad.
But i take issue with this concern:
> Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes?
My iphone (safari) auto-fills almost all of those details. It’s also likely that semi-frequent travelers have an account with the airline in question, so passport and TSA precheck info is pre-saved too.
It’s simply a non-issue in my experience.
Now I am wondering if this is Safari/Chrome thing and not a mobile/desktop thing.
Certainly if the autofill doesn't work and I do need to to type it in, the PC is way easier. I'm thinking international travel for 5 people - all my responsibility and I don't want to get held up half way across the world when no one has slept for a day, work visas beign contingent on correctness, etc.
The idea of manually typing any of this stuff in is very old fashioned.
Not only do they type it in, they let them save their information...
Frequently it isn't that google flights on a phone doesn't find the same flight, its that it is much easier to figure out the tradeoffs with more screen real estate. E.g. I can see that a flight is cheaper, but it involves mixing airlines, and a terminal change that I probably can't trust on a tight schedule in winter.
Use an Android or Linux laptop, pay less.
Not kidding, pricing is based on these bullshit assumptions more than you might think. For the German market, for example, it's also cheaper to buy tickets on Thursday evening around 22:00-23:30. Paid around 400$ less for a 2k trip, multiple times, reproducibly, not depending on seasons or years.
To figure all this out, I’m going to need to keep notes across several browser tabs, likely while communicating asynchronously with whoever else is going on the trip. All of this is dramatically easier with an actual computer.
But if you want to shuffle times/dates/different choices of flights to find the "best one" (which does not mean the cheapest one with weird connections)
I still do everything important on a computer and wouldn't book the flight on a smartphone, but that probably says more about my age than anything else.
But I'm too much of a penny pincher..
But I do often only pre-book the first night/s accom, then book the rest as I travel and know where I will be when. But I do travel with my laptop, and often will park up somewhere and hotspot it, to find that days accom. (+ I get cash back deals on computer)
But I couldn’t do it, especially with the presence of which I’ll call “expectations of planning” in my immediate circle. Some people want the best possible experience and can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research.
> Some people want the best possible experience and can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research.
The majority of such people perform what I call “checkbox vacationing”. It’s not about actually enjoying any particular thing, it’s just about checking the boxes of whatever some online list says is the current “best XYZ”.
Yeah, when traveling with others who do like/need to plan I'll go with their plans and flow unless it gets too boring. When traveling with my wife I'll even stick around even if I'm bored.
> Some people want the best possible experience
I mean, I do too! :) Just different methods of getting there.
> can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research
Man, just daily life must be tough if they're feeling FOMO from such low stakes situations, I couldn't handle that myself :/
For me, not knowing those things and figuring them out on the spot is part of why I love vacations, and going through review of neighborhoods or figuring out the exact place where to stay would remove a lot of the fun.
If I'm spending thousands on plane tickets and hotels, and taking time off from work, and I know I'll likely never visit a place again (because there are so many other places to visit), I can't understand not doing some basic research on the things that the area is famous for, to visit those things. But whatever, you do you.
It's funny, I'd say the same to you! :)
How often do you sleep over on the couch or floor of strangers homes, waking up when they wake up, participating in something that isn't overflowing with tourists already? Or got to experience how a day is for someone who works and lives in the place you're visiting for the first time?
Granted, it's not for everybody, but we both feel the same about each other, which hopefully means we at least enjoy our own lives, even if we wouldn't like each others. But I won't say you're lazy just because you don't try to truly experience other cultures when you travel, we just have different ways of traveling and enjoying life. And that's OK, as long as you enjoy what you do, and I enjoy what I do :)
Do take a look at what people from developing countries go through - sometimes you cannot even get a visa without all your lodging booked and a confirmed return flight ticket.
Like, have you tried doing data entry on a phone? Who is using these products?
None of the mobile finance apps I've used even have half the reporting ability I want (presumably because users don't care, and not because it wouldn't fit on the screen).
I have a bunch of scripts to help and wrote a custom web scraper to pull the data, automating much of this, but much is still quite manual.
there's resource rot it seems, desktop/web have less than the phone, and it shows
hp printer/scanner app is way leaner than anything they've ever released on windows (not saying much but still), same for my bank app it's a bit faster, and better designed (features and ui)
Me, I was in on the ground floor with laptops (and desktops) and so prefer them. Kids though?
You narrow down your options by having knowledge like "I have points on these airlines so I want to fly on Star Alliance which has partners that fly out of (quick check) these airports, so let's plan the itinerary in this way..."
I just got back from traveling the last 3 months (40 flights, 6 continents) and planned all of it from my phone. From flights, to hotels, to visas.
And it's simply better than a laptop. 4 tabs in 4 browsers means you're distracted, you're not pruning useless information, you don't know what you don't know.
I do 95% of my work on my phone too, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
"I don't get why the kids these days book their travel using an app" is this generation's "I don't understand why people don't use travel agents". There are better sources of information and that information has moved to walled-garden mobile apps.
I laughed. Just used a travel agent.
If you’re not getting paid to promote them, you’re not a shill. Honest recommendations are welcome!
People used to do it in their heads.
Einstein, Tolkien, Hawking, Newton, Shakespeare, Euclid, Archimedes.
With paper being an storage medium they occasionally saved to :)
> (like finding good flight tickets, or comparing hotels to stay in for a trip)
Heck I was doing EXACTLY that on an iPhone while loafing at a friend's just now, because I wanted to make the most of my time and I don't want to carry my laptop/iPad anywhere.
Lightweight XR glasses would be the best of both worlds.
these days only idiots would do so on pen and paper only
For a lot of people, time is more valuable than money.
They get on their phone and complete a task and move on.
Spending an hour comparing a dozen tabs on a computer to save $30 on a flight is less important than spending that time with their loved ones.
I would understand if you saved $500 or more. If you are frequent flyer, that would add up.
Maybe one in 100k does
Are we reading the same quarterly report?
Wearables/Home/Accessories is slightly higher than the Mac, yes, but its a category that has been trending poorly for Apple for ~18 months now IIRC, and that hasn't gotten better this quarter (9.04B->9.01B 3mo YoY). There's no foreseeable future where Vision starts driving Mac-like revenue (meaning, it'll be at least 2 years). Airpods are huge mainstays but have really hit market capacity and aren't growing. Apple Watch will see strong growth if they can successfully get glucose monitoring working, but that's an *if, and until then its slipping from an "upgrade every 3 years" to even longer lifecycle for most people.
Meanwhile: Mac is their fastest growing hardware segment by revenue (+12% 3mo YoY) (iPhone is +6%, iPad is flat, Services +15%).
iPhone aint going anywhere, Services are carrying their growth, but Mac is very solidly the #3 darling of this report. Their other product lines (Apple Watch, iPad, Airpods, etc) are interesting, successful businesses, but its unlikely we're going to see much growth out of them over the next 2 years. The story is iPhone, Services, and Mac, in that order, and there's no #4.
I suspect iPhone adoption has done a lot more toward Mac adoption.
That CPU was dropped from Windows 10 support with 22H2, pretty much the same time that Apple stopped supporting it in macOS. The last build of Windows 10 supporting that CPU reached "end of service" more than two years ago.
According to the current supported processor list, the oldest Intel CPU supported by Windows 7 was introduced about 5 years after Windows 7 itself [1].
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/mi...
It’s a great feeling to get years more life out of your old system with about an hour of work.
Hate to say it, but Macs aren't any better. I've worked on literally thousands of laptops, and you win some, and you lose some. There are some shitty Dells, and some good Dells, and there are some shitty MacBooks and some good MacBooks.
I even have a couple of old Dells that are about 10 years old now. Working just fine too.
I think it’s been a while since there was a MBP MLB lawsuit but maybe I’m forgetting about one.
This is the last one I recall.
“Apple faces class-action lawsuit over 2011 MacBook Pro GPU issues“
https://9to5mac.com/2014/10/28/apple-class-action-lawsuit-20...
Seems to imply that anyone cares beyond a niche. I use Windows 11 on my gaming PC and emulator PC, and I don't care at all. It works perfectly fine.
OS X is much worse in my opinion, with awful window management and constant bugs breaking basic functionality.
The only decent OS experience I've ever had is with KDE and Gnome. But Linux sucks at running games, and there is no good Linux/x86 hardware out there.
Pick your poison.
This isn't true in the slightest. You must be dealing with some seriously outdated information.
I've been running games on Linux full time for 3 years. I made the switch the week Elden Ring launched when it immediately ran better on Linux than on Windows. That was the top selling game at the time. I've had extremely minimal performance issues since my switch. Other major games I've run include Baldur's Gate 3, multiple Resident Evil games, and the Oblivion remaster.
I'm running a 7600X with a 9070XT as of last month and am finding my hardware is perfectly fine.
Linux compatibility is very high, and Linux install base is becoming a considerable size of total PC gaming market.
Do you really think that anything MSFT has done with MW11 --unfriendly to consumers or not-- will significantly impede the success of MW11?
According to TechRadar this is exactly what has driven the uptick in Mac sales:
https://www.techradar.com/computing/macbooks/never-mind-linu...
The option is between Windows, ChromeOS and Android based laptops (aka tablets with keyboards).
Thus most consumers without endless budgets end up getting a Windows laptop, regardless of its current state.
We had the option with Linux, however first all netbooks already showed the trend with OEMs distros (gotta differentiate), Microsoft reacted, and tablets delivered the final blow.
Ideally there would be nice laptops with other options at consumer shops that people during their Weekend window shopping tour would feel like buying on a whim.
This is reputation laundering. 'Services revenue' is undoubtably App Store game microtransactions, bigger than all other services categories combined.
The second reason is likely that there are computers that are 1/3 of the price subsidized by the terrible ad-supported OS installs. (Has anyone tried to setup a MS computer lately, it's an ad-box).
That is even not counting the additional Windows updates after you get to the desktop and updates from the OEM. This is also with a Microsoft account while restoring my own settings from OneDrive.
We had that development with cars. 40 years ago, it was common to fix your own car. Nowadays, we have a subscription for seat warmers. The manual tells you to visit the dealer to get your brakes checked. Makes me sad, somehow. But people have choosen this path as a collective.
On the other hand, I've done my own cooking more than not.
You make choices about what you do yourself and what you have others do for you.
For the consumable stuff every car owner has to deal with, nothing has really changed in 40 years, honestly! A brake service is still done the exact same way, same with virtually all the fluid services.
I just find far more people parrot "modern cars are so complicated" today and don't even consider that in fact, it is relatively simple to change a brake pad and disc, or your own oil, perhaps an air filter, even on most brand new cars. Fluids filters and brakes are like 90% of most people's maintenance needs nowadays.
YouTube has also massively lowered the barrier to working on cars, given there are multiple easy to follow guides for just about any car service for any car model you can think of.
Not everyone needs to know how to compile their own kernel, build their own furniture or clean their laundry perfectly. Everyone has their own interests and areas of expertise they want to delve in to. Now I can screw up a brake job working on it all day and rewatching YouTube videos wondering what I missed, or I can take it to a shop and get it done in an hour for cheap. That's just me though. I spent a lot of time working on cars in my youth and I'm just tired of spending my time on it. I don't like it and I am more than willing to pay someone who does like it to do it.
That is irrelevant to the argument he is making that things have not gotten harder in the last 40 years in regards to car maintenance that you can do at home.
His point is that the perception that car maintenance has gotten harder for the average joe does not match reality. Almost all of the things that need periodic on modern cars are more or less the same as they were in 1985.
BTW just before Covid, or during Covid, I took a car mechanic course from the local De Anza college - no hands on, so that's why I think it was during Covid. But after 5 years and no experience, I have forgotten except the abstract concepts. Then imagine people who never had to look under the hood -- ever.
But my primary takeaway was that this is hard & dirty work, and there are numerous ways in which you can make mistakes that ruin the car and/or endanger your safety, so generally paying a professional to do it is a more sensible way.
Of course, if you enjoy doing this, or have a very old car, or more time than money, the trade-offs are different.
Cabin air filter and wiper fluid, sure. Headlights and taillights used to be a no-brainer, but now those are often sealed LED assemblies and difficult to access as well.
(Air filters are, admittedly, pretty easy.)
Depends on the car. My Subaru oil filter cannot be accessed from above. The oil filter on my Audi is on the top of the engine - it appears to have been designed for using extraction pumps (a lot of various fluid change processes assume you will be using a pump).
You just have to see what your cars are like before ordering the pump :)
I also choose not to mow my lawn at this point. I'm perfectly capable of doing so but just prefer not to do so,
I can attest that changing a brake pad is mission impossible level without the proper tools. The tools and experience are what make it look easy, for someone that has both.
What is so noble about changing your oil?
Also similarly as with iPhones, many cars require connecting to the authorized service to change headlights and other parts since they are paired with the MCU.
I know how to work on my car but I am not able to because someone decided to lock it down.
> https://www.brakeandfrontend.com/quick-answer-electronic-par...
You typically need the piston fully retracted to replace pads, which very rarely happens just by disengaging the park brake.
If you are old enough to have changed a manual handbrake pad, you normally had to screw the piston back in before you could fit the thicker new pad with a "caliper rewind tool" even if the handbrake was off, the electronic parking brake service mode essentially does this for you, or unblocks the piston permitting a rewind tool to work.
> https://www.thedrive.com/guides-and-gear/how-to-use-a-brake-...
FWIW, I've never found an electronic parking brake I couldn't rewind myself after a few minutes on google.
On the cars I've worked on, the hand brake did not actuate the primary caliper so retracting the piston wasn't an issue.
Where new cars get shitty is the electronics that get shoehorned in to control systems that were previously controlled by a button or dial.
https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
On one hand, yes. But also, cars are now an appliance. They rarely break, can be bought quite cheaply (if that’s what you want) and consume little time. I like this.
We will see if it lives up to the promise, but the dealer said ‘don’t bother’ when I asked about serving.
So far that has held true, but it’s early years.
I 'member when "personal" computers were going to be a kind of capital-equipment made available to the masses, creating new levels of autonomy and personal control over our own lives, working for our goals and interests... Whoops.
Folks like Stallman did warn me though.
The better question is, who do you know pays full price up front for an iPhone with no discounts? Only people who destroy or lose their current iPhone? The parents of teenagers giving the teenager the old phone and replacing theirs?
The big carriers hide the phone in the price but you're still paying it. I just use US Mobile unlimited plans for $35/mo, plus it gives me free international service which was the real advantage for me. Paying 1/3 the annual service plan and $0/day int'l roaming instead of $15/day.
For doing tasks like online banking or booking plane tickets, I find the mobile experience frustrating and therefore do it on my laptop. She finds the laptop clunky and finds mobile much easier.
This is logical result of walled gardens.
So Mac is doing very well!
Though if the Mac Pro with all those slots could run nvidia GPUs I’d be even crazier I think.
Apple’s investment in building its own in-house “Apple Silicon” is large. Can anyone definitely prove they haven’t been working on the sort of AI GPU stuff that NVidia has been?
AirPods completely saturated their market incredibly quickly.
I view this the exact opposite way. The death of the laptop in favor of tablets has been touted for about a decade now, and it has still failed to materialize. Wearables have even surpassed the iPad.
Not to mention, the Mac laptops have seen a recent surge of popularity last few years, due to still being the only realistic ARM-based laptop, with the battery life / weight vs performance you get from this. This is still likely to remain the reality for at least a few years, and thus they're likely to snowball even more based on this reputation.
Theres also the fact much of the developing world went straight to mobile, skipping laptops.
2025: iPhone $209.586 billion, Mac $33.708 billion, iPad $28.023 billion, Wearables, Home and Accessories $35.686 billion, Services $109.158 billion, Total $416.161 billion
(Wearables, home, and accessories already surpassed Mac sales, although I don't know what exactly is included in accessories.)
Also, I don't think it's useful to compare wearables to Mac, because Watch isn't much of a computing platform, AirPods aren't a computing platform at all, and Vision Pro has almost no sales. This category is mostly accessories to iPhone.
https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/10/charts-apple-caps-off-bes...
Re: Macbooks generally. My mind was somewhat blown when a former co-worker told me their kid didn't want a Macbook. They were fine with an iPhone for their schoolwork.
Personally, I still find MacBooks as the least replaceable category--other than the iPhone. Anything else I could live without as needed.
EDIT: Ack, you're right. Bad comment, self.
Apple no longer announces unit sales. In any case, it has always been true that Mac Average Selling Price is much higher than iPad Average Selling Price. In the sense of unit sales, iPad is bigger than Mac and has been for many years, so in that respect the 2024 Q4 results would not prove anything new.
The OP was giving a false narrative about future growth that is contrary to what recent quarterly results have shown.
In ancient times Apple prided itself on not polluting its platforms with intrusive advertisements, but the line has been crossed and going back seems unlikely at this point.
DRM slowdowns have also made the built-in apps like TV worse for watching shows than just pirating and watching them with IINA etc. In Jobs' days iTunes even let you play purchased songs on any computer.
I wish there was a law or something that did not allow shareholders & board members who did not have an understanding of the industry, to influence or dictate the course of a company, without feedback from its USERS/customers.
Google's law says that "don't be evil" and "unlimited growth" are ultimately opposing forces.
Take "Services" for example: most of their services are things like App Store revenue and Google Search revenue, something they technically have on all of their platforms, but the lion's share of that revenue comes directly from iPhone users subscribed to iPhone apps, playing iPhone gacha games or using Google (or any of the other officially supported search engines) in the iPhone version of Safari. The reason to have iCloud+ is to be able to backup your phone, and the photos you take on your phone, and store the emails and iMessages and other data you create on your phone. It's all there accessible on the Mac and iPad too, but they have far more iPhone customers than Mac or iPad customers.
Even the smaller services are mostly supported by iPhone users: most AppleCare users, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple News+, arguably you could make a case that Apple TV+ (a.k.a. just Apple TV now for some reason) is the one service that isn't directly attributable to the iPhone, but that is also like the one part of their services division that has had prior reports that it isn't exactly turning a profit, and I don't think you can even apply for an Apple Card unless you own an iPhone.
It's the same with most of the other divisions: the reason to have an Apple Watch or AirPods is they go great with your iPhone. They have their individual appeal, and at least with the AirPods, you don't technically need an iPhone to use them, but these are at the end of the day iPhone accessories, the same as their Magic Keyboard, Trackpad and Mouse lines or displays are Mac accessories even though technically, any iPad could also take advantage of them now, or you could plug a Magic Keyboard into a Windows PC or something. The math on that doesn't change just because of technicalities like that.
So yeah, Apple is the iPhone company and has been for a very long time now. Macs & iPads, the tens of billions of dollar businesses that they are, are just side gigs for them and Services/Wearables et al. is just obfuscating the degree to which they are the iPhone company.
Some people still hope they haven't completely forgotten about UNIX workstation market, after dropping the server one.
I spoke above about Apple being the iPhone company, but that doesn’t make the Mac inessential. An iPad with Xcode would be great for the iPad, but it’s a far cry from any kind of justification for killing off an extremely successful and profitable product line. You could stick macOS on an iPad tomorrow and it wouldn’t be an adequate replacement for a MacBook Air, let alone a MacBook Pro or anything else in the lineup.
Also nobody is talking about UNIX workstations in 2025.
If the rumors about a cheaper entry-level MacBook are true, that might put a small dent into that, though I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Congrats to Eddy Cue then?
It's too bad the world has moved on as it has. I liked Apple a lot when they were just a computer company.
At least not until there's an external design refresh. But maybe I'll get the M5 Max just for the heck of it.
Mostly because it'd be a pain to move all the data and state (the Time Machine or Mac-to-Mac transfer is not always perfect and hands-free in my experience)
They're just too good for their own good.
The iPhone and services that go with the iPhone (music apps iCloud) together make apple what it is even today. The numbers are huge and the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro are still the gold standard of smartphones. Everything else is probably secondary support hardware and software for the iPhone.
I plan on moving away from macOS (maybe Asahi on my old M1 Air but leaning towards Arch on framework) but every attempt to reconsider the iPhone for me has failed.
The biggest thing I see is how the iPhone helped fuel social media and in turn social media helped iPhone with sales. The phone is a social and secure device and the iPhone excels at that thanks to iCloud services and the ease with which you can manage the phone. Upgrading is so seamless, managing Photos with iCloud is a no-brainer. Everything about it screams social and it does it extremely well.
The personal computer vs Mac war is still ongoing but android vs iPhone war was over years ago. The iPhone won and there is not much anyone can do at this point to compete at that scale unless someone comes up with something truly extraordinary rather than just putting LLMs inside apps.
Android has about 70% market share and there are countries where only rich people get to use iOS devices.
Other population layers also need phones and digital services.
Apple could probably get > 50% market share in those countries if they significantly reduced their margins (they’d still be profitable but of course it makes little sense m)
Truth is Apple doesn't care about those countries where regular citizens cannot afford Apple, they see themselves as the Ferrari, Bentley, Karan Acoustics, ... of the computer world.
Those are very niche luxury brands, that sell impractical status products (there isn’t really and equivalent for them in the “computer world”) for the 1% or subset of it. Apple is not that, it’s an upper middle tier mass market brand.
But yes, they certainly don’t care about markets where they can’t be competitive while maintaining their margins
That's a wonderful idea.
> The personal computer vs Mac war is still ongoing but android vs iPhone war was over years ago.
I don't think Macs are even a consideration for most "hackers." You can't build you own machine, Linux support is limited, they just cater to a crowd that wants a polished experience and don't mind giving up their freedom for it.
As for the phone market, I think Apple's success mostly comes to a combination of clever marketing and phone users being on average even less technically-minded than desktop users. Add to that social pressure now the the iPhone is dominant. That being said you couldn't pay me to give up my Pixel running Graphene, a device that is completely immune to corporate spyware, forced "upgrades," sideloading restrictions and compliance with idiotic laws like client-side scanning (if it ever happens).
But where I used to get a new iPhone every other year, I’m now on the fourth year of my 13P and it still works great. That’s only $300/yr.
It’s interesting to think about.
Q4 2024: Income before provision for income taxes $29.610 billion, Provision for income taxes $14.874 billion
Q4 2025: Income before provision for income taxes $32.804 billion, Provision for income taxes $5.338 billion
[EDIT:] The 2024 taxes were actually an aberration.
"the one-time charge recognized during the fourth quarter of 2024 related to the impact of the reversal of the European General Court’s State Aid decision" https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-reports-fourth-...
Personal income taxes are a better choice according to [0] and that makes sense if you think about it. Let companies go wild creating wealth; eventually the company matures, growth slows, and instead of reinvesting, the money mostly gets paid out to employees and owners as salaries, dividends, or stock buybacks. That's the point where it's most efficient to tax it.
[0] https://www.economicsobservatory.com/which-taxes-are-best-an...
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/taxedu/primers/primer-not-all-taxe...
Corporate tax rates were insanely higher many decades ago. Both industry and the public thrived despite it. Corporate tax rate slashed, public flounders, corporations act in ungrounded and bizarre ways. This is not a healthy system.
"The last part" of GP is taxing the company's money when it's distributed to shareholders, and that is absolutely already happening. You might not like the current rates or loopholes (neither do I), but I think most of the somewhat-wealthy big tech engineers on this board can attest that it "is happening".
Taxing company profits directly may be less efficient from an economics point of view but it's much more politically palatable.
This is the last part. Where do you think the money goes if not to employees or owners?
Land value tax is a consumption tax too, since defending and servicing and routing around one’s occupied surface area of the earth is very costly for the rest of society.
- spend their profits to try and grow, but fail; thus spreading their capital into the rest of the economy
- spend their profits to try and grow, and succeed; not only spreading capital but creating new wealth that will eventually work its way around to the shareholders
- return it to shareholders, where it gets taxed
So you could have a situation where you have $1m in profit, and you want to buy a $1m machine, but the machine goes on your balance sheet and not your income statement, so your books still show $1m in profit, even though you now have no cash. And now you still have to pay tax on the $1m.
Now, in the next year, the rules allow you to write off say $200k of that machine, reducing your profit by that much. Eventually, you get to write off much / all of the machine.
But cash is king, and on a cash basis, the tax man is doing very much better than the business in this scenario.
Better to dispense with all the accounting intrigues, tax corporations at 0%, and just tax dividends, buybacks, and salaries.
There isn't a "right" answer, there are trade offs between incentives that drive the flows into different places.
Companies are single-purpose wealth creation machines, let them find their optimal investment mix. Taxing only dividends, buybacks, and salaries will bias the taxation to mature companies that aren’t growing so fast anymore, minimizing the damage.
> Taxing only dividends, buybacks, and salaries will bias the taxation to mature companies that aren’t growing so fast anymore, minimizing the damage.
This is a reactionary policy to the existing system, not a sustainable new one. At the minimum, it incentivizes:
1. Hoarding cash
2. The acquisition of assets unrelated to the core business (real estate for example)
3. Increased corporate debt (no tax on interest payments)
4. Shifts from salary to stock options
5. Acquisitions over investments in new product lines or R&D
Functionally, you and I probably disagree on some things though - I would want to encourage companies to spend their money on salaries, pushing the money towards the broad consumer base.
I thought corporate income tax was a tax on profits, and if a company pays a dividend that doesn't lower profits so wouldn't that be after taxes?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-profit-drops-36-tech-20...
What could have possibly changed…
And ASML licensed the technology from EUV LLC.
Which was a conglomerate of a bunch of state-funded US research labs.
And the US cut its science funding.
Misery all the way down!
And glass/mirrors from Zeiss, amongst a whole bunch others:
> ASML employs more than 42,000 people[1] from 143 nationalities and relies on a network of nearly 5,000 tier 1 suppliers.[6]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding
* https://www.robotsops.com/complete-list-of-all-suppliers-and...
Let's also not forget the the two most prominent chip design software companies, Cadence and Synopsys, are American:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_EDA_companies
There are all sorts of inter-dependencies between companies and countries: welcome to globalization.
I think the science funding cuts will be inconsequential to that entity
What would Apple's next best option be if a war rendered TSMC unavailable?
> The fund’s expansion includes a multibillion-dollar commitment from Apple to produce advanced silicon in TSMC’s Fab 21 facility in Arizona. Apple is the largest customer at this state-of-the-art facility, which employs more than 2,000 workers to manufacture the chips in the United States. Mass production of Apple chips began last month.
Also Chip Wars is really good. I may be confusing which one is which because I read them back to back, but they overlap!
Onshore TSMC fabs followed by Intel fabs.
Properly motivated, I think Intel and Apple could do a lot relatively quickly.
It takes years to bring a fab online. Fab 21 in Arizona took 5 years to enter mass production from ground breaking. Some believe it could be done in two but that’s yet to be demonstrated. Then there are the wafers themselves. The total time it takes to process one wafer at the single nm scale is around 100 days.
So realistically, even if one makes up their mind to make a fab fast, you’re looking at 3 years before you have your first sellable wafer.
We're not giving them EUV and they can't reinvent it, so they're stuck.
other companies should also follow that trend, use ai for useful features, just give the feature a good name... no need to mention "ai"... because next year it could be something else that is powering the feature.
But by AI, people mean LLM and context. Remember what I told you -- yesterday I was booking a flight, can we check the prices again? What happened to that hotel booking? Dozens of other use cases. A private AI with awesome memory and zero hallucinations will be ... awesome.
If you're only talking language models, Apple has on-device language models available to developers and end-users via Shortcuts, and image generation for emojis. They just don't advertise most of their neural network models as "AI".
The main purpose of the Mac (for Apple) is to host the development environment that is used to create apps which sustain the iPhone ecosystem.
It does continue to baffle me just how cheap Macs are. $649 for a brand new 16GB MacBook at Best Buy with M2, more than powerful enough to do the aforementioned development. And cheaper than most iPhone models.
https://www.worten.pt/produtos/portatil-apple-914-7662-13-6-...
Hardly a great value for Portuguese households.
It gets even worse outside southern Europe.
I don't think some power efficient laptop SoCs gives you much competitive advantage there.
Is that true? Does cash mean nothing?
I thought there were already external GPUs for Macs. Since before COVID, IIRC.
In theory you could make things work for some sort of computational acceleration (e.g.: AI, or some OpenCL work), but I am not sure that that market is really worth all of the work it would take. For those sorts of things it is probably a lot easier to setup an external (Linux) box, and send the work over.
