Apple reports fourth quarter results

Personal take :

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.

> leaning towards Arch on framework

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).

Won where?

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.

Android has the biggest market share, but way less margins than Apple; this is true for both phone and the App segments.

For companies revenue and especially profit margin share usually matters much more. If an iPhone user in the US etc. is worth >= 10x more than an user in a third world country (both for manufacturers and ad/service providers that’s a win).

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)

It is hard to get profits from people that don't buy an iPhone.

There are 195 official countries in the world, many of those have close to zero iPhone customers, and surely the companies on those countries also need customers.

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.

They certainly don’t see themselves that way. Maybe Lexus or Audi, but not even that.

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