
Apple Was Headed for a Slump. Then It Had One of the Biggest Rallies Ever - tempsy
https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-was-headed-for-a-slump-then-it-had-one-of-the-biggest-rallies-ever-11580034601
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mistrial9
It appears that few companies have benefited financially as much as Apple Inc
from literally decades of outside FOSS development (bsd etc).

Are new Apple software engineers still asked to sign a paper that they will
not contribute to FOSS at any time during employment? Are they legally bound
from discussing the existence of that agreement?

~~~
jldugger
This is a bit hyperbole. The employee intellectual property agreement is
pretty much 'we own everything you do[1]', same as every other company. So
you're at the whim of legal and director approval for CLAs. There are numerous
teams contributing to OSS projects, a small smattering of which can be found
under Apple's own Github: [https://github.com/apple](https://github.com/apple)

However, folks undergoing software engineer training could be forgiven for
this impression, as the training is very OSS hostile. Some of this is
understandable, as the two major concerns are corporate engineers plagiarizing
OSS, and accidentally giving away patents, both of which are massive
liabilities to be avoided.

And yes, the company is very allergic to GPLv3, for a variety of reasons. My
recollection is that all the tech companies don't like it or its companion,
AGPL. You'll note that many of the GNU tools shipped predate GPLv3.

[1]: Unless you live in California and comply with all the gotchas of that one
loophole.

~~~
mistrial9
"we own everything you do" \-- is not the same as "every other company" ..
flatly false

"You are at the whim of legal (dept)" \-- true

numerous teams contributing to OSS -- true, like LLVM ; how many software
engineers work at Apple?

"training is very OSS hostile" \-- true

software patents -- lets talk about that later

plagiarizing OSS -- certainly a serious concern on both sides of this chat

very allergic to GPLv3, .. AGPL -- why is that? surely the rules of GPL, by
the third version, are pretty well understood.. Apple Inc benefits quite a bit
from say, the Internet ..

Thank you for this reply -- I believe that this factual parent response does
address each point, but in a voice that makes it sound like it is all ok and
expected. But you see, its not all ok and not all expected.

How much money is enough money, Apple Inc ? What is the world we are creating
here?

~~~
jldugger
> "we own everything you do" \-- is not the same as "every other company" ..
> flatly false

This is not a commonly held position, but maybe we can use a third party to
mediate the dispute. Joel Spolsky has written on the subject not that long
ago[1]:

> So before you hire this developer, you agree, “hey listen, I know that
> inventing happens all the time, and it’s impossible to prove whether you
> invented something while you were sitting in the chair I supplied in the
> cubicle I supplied or not. I don’t just want to buy your 9:00-5:00
> inventions. I want them all, and I’m going to pay you a nice salary to get
> them all,” and she agrees to that, so now you want to sign something that
> says that all her inventions belong to the company for as long as she is
> employed by the company.

> This is where we are by default. This is the standard employment contract
> for developers, inventors, and researchers.

So let's meet in the middle: it is an uphill battle to get an employer to
assign IP created 'off the clock' to you. Even when I was working for a public
university, for a department dedicated to supporting open source, they had me
sign an IP agreement. I don't have the text of the contract to quote you, but
as I recall it was the same 24/7/365 overreach.

Amusingly, this leads to a substantial conflict; I hear tales of people
circumventing the policy by using a personal email account to land things
upstream.

[1]: [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-
pr...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-projects/)

------
Despegar
I think the continued underestimation of Apple since Tim Cook became CEO
really just comes down to this: people desperately want a Great Man to
worship. Tim Cook isn't revered in that way like Steve Jobs was.

~~~
adventured
If Apple develops another new product under Tim Cook that generates $500+
billion in profit over time, he might be.

The only interesting product that has been originated under Cook, that isn't a
direct derivative of the iPhone (as the watch is), are the AirPods.

Cook is an excellent steward and operator, which is why Jobs de facto
installed him as CEO.

~~~
zepto
You do realize the iPhone was a direct derivative of the Mac, so by your logic
even Steve Jobs did nothing that wasn’t derivative?

~~~
jki275
Are you suggesting Steve Jobs wasn't involved with the development of the Mac?

~~~
zepto
Some people would say Jeff Raskin and Xerox were where the Mac concept came
from.

~~~
jki275
Which may be as it may be, but has no bearing on my comment or the discussion.

~~~
zepto
Are you suggesting that Tim Cook was not involved in the development of the
Apple Watch or AirPods?

~~~
jki275
When did I say that?

~~~
zepto
The point was about the meaningless of calling products ‘derivative’.

~~~
jki275
The Mac can hardly be called derivative. If you want to go that deep into that
kind of logic, you're really reaching to the point that all things are
"derivative" of basic physics and no one has ever done anything that's not
"derivative".

It's pointless argument.

~~~
zepto
If you don’t think the Mac is derivative of the Lisa, which is derivative of
the Xerox Alto, then I’m quite surprised.

~~~
jki275
Which was a derivative of ... which was a derivative of ... which was really
all derivative of John von Neumann so what's the point of this ridiculous
argument.

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twright
I wonder if more speculation around the stock is driven by not reporting
iDevice sales numbers each quarter.

Speculation aside, Airpods really have taken off, at least as a status symbol.
So much so that I know a kid who has airpods but (until he got his dad's old
6s) was without a device he could use them with. He would just flick the case
open and closed like a fidget spinner.

~~~
scarface74
Why would unit “sales numbers” matter as far as stock price? They report
revenue and overall profit.

The Apple Watch is already a larger revenue generator than the iPod ever was.
AirPods are either thought to be larger or soon will be.

~~~
twright
A motivation for no longer reporting unit sales was that analysts paid way too
much attention to those numbers. I recall several quarters where device sales
fell just a little and people would proclaim the soon death of the company[1].
Though unit sales can be inferred from revenue, as the company moves into
services it benefits them to group all device sales under one line item
because it's a business category that doesn't have the crazy growth it used
to.

[1]: (2016) [https://www.zdnet.com/article/iphone-apocalypse-end-of-
apple...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/iphone-apocalypse-end-of-apple-as-we-
know-it/)

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cdiddy2
Its literally all stock buybacks. When the fed says monetary easing they just
start to dump money into their own stock

~~~
mleo
If it was just stock buybacks, the market cap would more or less remain the
same due to increased price but less stock outstanding. The market cap has
nearly doubled as well since 2019 low.

~~~
cdiddy2
thats not true. A billion dollar stock purchase can push the market cap of an
asset much more than a billion dollars. Even if you retired the shares you
bought after.

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imeron
Is there a study out there which tested if Apple's stock and other S&P500
stocks are pushed ever higher by all this money pouring into unmanaged ETF
indexes? E.g. if you buy an S&P500 index-tracking ETF you automatically buy a
bunch of Apple shares too. This might mean that the trend of buying ETFs will
help Apple stock price staying high.

~~~
pedrosorio
You can compare the return on Apple stock price vs S&P500 price for the past
year:

AAPL: 318.31 / 156.30 - 1 = 103.65%

S&P500: 3295.47 / 2643.87 - 1 = 24.65%

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neonate
[http://archive.md/rnix5](http://archive.md/rnix5)

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elfexec
Not just Apple. Microsoft had quite a rally itself over the past decade. So
did tesla, netflix, facebook, AMD, Amazon, nvidia, etc. The tech sector did
very well during the loose monetary period since the financial crisis.

It's insane looking at Apple and Microsoft. They are valued at about 1.39T and
1.25T respectively. The trillion mark by itself is amazing, but if you just
look at the fraction alone, Apple's fraction is nearly 2X Disney and
Microsoft's fraction is 2.5X Tesla. And microsoft pays you a dividend every
quarter.

Rising tides lift all boats, but some more than others.

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mnemonicsloth
_> “A lot of the knock on Apple is that they haven’t been very innovative, but
they changed the game more than anyone else with things like AirPods and
ancillary things,” said Mr. Bryan, whose firm in Arden Hills, Minn., has $2.6
billion under management and owns 41,000 shares of Apple._

So Apple can innovate, but not on anything important. Steve is rolling over.

~~~
scarface74
The iPhone was a once in a lifetime thing. The phone market was already a 1
billion device a year market when the iPhone was introduced. Now it’s 5
billion.

The Apple Watch is much more impressive technically than the iPad. Once you
had the iPhone, the iPad was easy. It also was just a big iPhone and didn’t
come into its own until 2015.

The Apple Watch is also generating more revenue than the iPod did at its peak.

