
Apple’s Covid-19 Response - Austin_Conlon
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/03/apples-covid-19-response/
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chadd
"We will be closing all of our retail stores outside of Greater China until
March 27" \- Does this mean all stores globally closed, except inside China,
which are back open?

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briandear
Yes. And all retail employees will continue to be paid.

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keidjfks
At least in Europe, they need to continue paying wages, unless they
established some (potentially illegal) freelancing scheme over employment.

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antonzabirko
Nice! Everyone make sure you get your coronavirus response papers ready!
Wouldnt want to be the only person on the planet not talking about how they're
handling it!

~~~
stickfigure
This really is an underrated comment.

In the last 24 hours I've received more than a dozen emails from random
businesses that have my email address - many of which I have not interacted
with in years - letting me know that my health and safety is their _top
priority_. It's like someone in the marketing department realized "hey, here's
an opportunity to send some spam without looking sleazy".

It's opportunistic and gross.

~~~
antonzabirko
Thank you for your support here. I want you to know that I deeply care about
everyone who responds to my post. You'll be glad to know that you can keep
writing responses from home for the next week. After that the coast should be
clear, so I expect you to come in.

-sent from nuclear bunker

~~~
Austin_Conlon
The nuclear bunker is their industrial design lab in Cupertino.

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blowski
I wonder which companies will benefit from this pandemic, long-term. If
there’s a surge in remote working, for example, seems like that could be good
for FAANG, bad for transport companies, commercial real estate, public events.
Is there any analysis out there about this?

~~~
ehsankia
Streaming sites like Netflix, maybe?

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unlinked_dll
Maybe Disney, more likely. Hollywood has essentially frozen production and
from what I'm hearing they're really not setup for working remote in pre/post
(especially the latter). Combine with delayed releases, cancellation of film
festivals (which are marketplaces as much as exhibitions for content) and the
_new_ releases this year appear to be on a giant delay.

Disney is interesting because they have the deepest bench, so to speak in
terms of catalog. They also have the kids stuff, and all the kids are at home.
They also had their stock dip below $100 with the crash this week, had to
shutdown their parks, and quite recently reorganized the entire direct to
consumer business. I'd put some money on Disney coming out on top there.

Netflix relies on new content to reduce churn. If production is halted I don't
know how that looks for them. However if you take out their capex on
production, they suddenly become stupidly profitable. So who knows.

~~~
ehsankia
Even with it's deep catalog, Disney+ still has far less content than Netflix.
I do agree that Netflix relies on new content to reduce churn, but my argument
wasn't so much about existing users (churn), but about millions of new people
who never had Netflix deciding to sign up because they have nothing else to do
at home.

As for the rest of people, I agree that when you're competing with hundreds of
other sources of entertainment and ways to spend your days, Netflix's catalog
may not be amazing, but when most of the population is stuck at home, I'm sure
there are plenty of stuff people will find and enjoy on Netflix.

Disney is definitely a runner up too. They've started moving releases closers.
They just released Frozen 2 and the new Starwars movie digitally.

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bramkrom
Good to read they're doing what they can. In the meantime, there's business
like ours (in travel, 70-ish people, not profitable) that are fighting to
survive this crisis. Would've liked to see an extension of the deadline for
the apple sign-up requirement. I know we're late, but this means we need to
spend valuable time redesigning our sign-up whereas what we currently need to
do is redesign our entire business model to stay alive. Curious how others in
the market feel about this

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tbrock
Great, at least this one was more interesting than the critical response my
dry cleaner or 10 minute oil change place is taking.

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totalZero
My intuition is that this is a supply chain / inventory management closure,
not a virus risk closure. They have 509 stores in 25 countries (incl China). I
don't believe that they would close over 90% of those stores simultaneously
due simply to generalized viral transmission risk.

I find it guileful that they announced the closure in the middle of the night
at the end of the week, a day after having announced the opening of their four
remaining China stores to great fanfare from the equity market.

~~~
jonknee
They are providing inventory to a bunch of other retailers and are continuing
online sales, this really sounds like they don't want people coming in and
touching the same piece of glass.

~~~
totalZero
Inventory is a lot easier to manage when you don't have to send it to 500
different sites and predict demand. If you're coming up short on inventory,
the reasonable choice is to put it into one central repository and ship from
there. There are several different configurations for each type of device,
varying based on color, memory, and carrier.

If they were only concerned about the virus, they would take the display
models out of the showroom and continue to process pick-up orders. And they
wouldn't shut down stores worldwide (ex-China).

No health body has recommended worldwide retail shutdowns, and no competing
device vendor has closed all of its stores worldwide (ex-China). This is a
ramification of the factory shutdowns we saw in China several weeks ago.

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caymanjim
Bragging about unrelated topics in the first paragraph, and touting a $15M
donation while sitting on $200B in cash. So magnanimous. By the way, get back
to work.

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klohto
Is there a guide on how much are you supposed to give? Would $200B be good
enough? Why criticize how much is one giving

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exclusiv
We have tipping guidelines so yes someone should create one. They probably got
15m in earned media from the PR alone.

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debaserab2
For a company that literally owns a significant chunk of all the money
available in the world, this response seems tepid at best.

~~~
kbenson
More money doesn't always make something happen faster or better. Governments
are likely spending hundreds of millions to billions. Even if Apple had
committed a billion dollars, would that result in better training, more
personnel, more useful medication, medication where it needs to be, better
tests, or more testing in the short term?

I suspect the answer is no, because I think those are likely all constrained
on the supply side right now and money is not currently the problem.

It's sort of like a disaster happening in the area close to you. Maybe you go
to try to donate your time to help others affected by the disaster. Maybe when
you get there you see 50 other people standing around twiddling their thumbs
because there's more people than they have useful tasks for at the moment. Do
you stick around all day with nothing to do so you can say you helped, or do
you leave after 30 minutes and promise you'll check back tomorrow to see if
they have more use for you then?

~~~
jodrellblank
> _More money doesn 't always make something happen faster or better._

Elon Musk tweeted "Coronavirus panic is dumb"[1]. When there were school kids
stuck in a cave, he sent a team of engineers halfway round the world to try
and build a submarine rescue effort. Instead of tweeting that, he could have
tried to build cheap CPAP/respirators in bulk, on short notice and deliver
them to hospitals.

I'm not saying he should have, but SpaceX dropped the price of rocketry _a
lot_ by trying and using off the shelf components; manufacturing is something
which effort and money could plausibly move the needle on quickly, where
research into speculative medication might not have any results, and that is
something we can imagine him doing where we can't imagine a large company with
big manufacturing experience pivoting to doing unexpectedly.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1236029449042198528?ref_...](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1236029449042198528?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

~~~
kbenson
> Instead of tweeting that, he could have tried to build cheap
> CPAP/respirators in bulk, on short notice and deliver them to hospitals.

Could he have? How long would it take to retool and retrain whatever resources
are needed to be able to do that and actually start producing something? What
capacity would he be capable of putting out, given that his his facilities are
probably configured for a much difference scale (cars and large semi-bespoke
aeronautical components)? If it's a 5% increase in CPAP machines 6 months from
now, how helpful is that?

What if doing so means that 20% of the workforce no longer has work to do?
What if not producing their actual product and CPAP machines instead leads to
enough loss in money/market they need to let some amount of their workforce
go?

At some level I don't think asking Musk or Tesla/SapceX to do this is really
any different than asking you to work half days for three months and donate
the other half your time to helping with Coronavirus issues in some manner
while living off savings to help supplement less pay. If during or at the end
of that time you don't have a job anymore (either because you weren't there or
general market recession), or some major problem came up that you were
unprepared to address because you've been reducing your savings, was that a
smart thing to do? Did it help more than it hurt? What if you have a family to
support?

Musk's responsibility is to his stock holders and employees. He should do his
best to make sure his company runs well and is profitable enough that he's not
laying people off, or causing the stock price to drop any more than it might
because the general market is in free fall, which also negatively affects many
(including retirees and pension funds).

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jodrellblank
_Apple’s committed donations to the global COVID-19 response — both to help
treat those who are sick and to help lessen the economic and community impacts
of the pandemic — today reached $15 million worldwide._

Not that it's Apple's job to fix COVID-19, but this is the equivalent of an
average US houshold income family crowing about donating $1.80 of their yearly
$63k income. Using Apple's annual profit, not revenue. [Edit: correction $18]

~~~
jonknee
And then the next part:

> We’re also announcing that we are matching our employee donations two-to-one
> to support COVID-19 response efforts locally, nationally and
> internationally.

Plus everyone is still getting paid:

> All of our hourly workers will continue to receive pay in alignment with
> business as usual operations. We have expanded our leave policies to
> accommodate personal or family health circumstances created by COVID-19 —
> including recovering from an illness, caring for a sick loved one, mandatory
> quarantining, or childcare challenges due to school closures.

~~~
jodrellblank
I don't know whether to be happy that a major American company has publically
said such things, or carry on being disgusted that such a thing is not normal
and is worth a PR announcement.

Seriously, _Apple_ 's leave policy didn't include " _recovering from an
illness_ "??

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spacedcowboy
I work at Apple. I’ve not reviewed the new guidelines but can confirm that
yes, Apple do indeed let you take sick time to recover from an illness. Of
course they do.

In fact, the only time I ever had to interact with Apple HR about time off was
when I wanted 3 months off after my kid was born. I ended up getting paid for
all of it except the last week. Any other time I’ve taken sick leave I just
need to let my manager know, and I took 2 weeks once when I was hit by a car.

Don’t get the wrong idea, I don’t take sick leave at the drop of a hat, but
I’ve been here for 15 years, and life happens. I currently have the max-
possible 240 hours of sick leave available. In my view, Apple are fairly
generous for a US company regarding sick leave. US companies pale in
comparison to EU companies, but that’s the US for you.

