They would not, they would make less on Studio Displays and Mac Studios and Mac Minis, the decision not to do is product segmentation because they hate us customers and want to maximise revenue :-/
My grandmother with a 2015 27" iMac and a 2017 12" Macbook just replaced both devices with a 13" Macbook Air and a 27" Dell USB-C monitor. She would have preferred buying a MacBook Air + a 27" iMac, but Apple stubbornly refuses to make one for some reason. The studio display has an A19 chip in it already (more powerful than a MacBook neo!) why not just make it run MacOS?
Yeah. I mean, I guess I could go out of my way to make it work, but I'm halfway being nostalgic. Why cant they just keep doing the same form factor?? Anyway. Im on linux these days, I get gaming too thanks to Gabe, so i cant complain... but if there was ever a 27" imac, I'd put my money were my mouth is.
It may be a break-glass-in-case-of-slumping-sales-numbers option, the same way VW brought out a 4Motion Golf wagon (with a manual[!] with an LSD[!]) in NA after Dieselgate.
But those few extra grands of revenue at the cost of millions in design and inventory to support that product
Not to mention, at the price apple is selling their 27 inch display, i am doubtful anyone buying them want to make do with the base M chip. But if not the base chip, that will add even more inventory cost
The iPhone mini was a commercial flop. The sales numbers were bad. It only accounted for about 3–5% of total iPhone sales. And the product didn't make sense from a business standpoint: it required specialized/miniaturized hardware, cost more to manufacture than a regular iPhone, but had to be sold for less.
From an engineering standpoint, it was the most impressive iPhone Apple had ever made, but that fact doesn't translate to sales numbers.
There's a very vocal group of people online saying they want smaller phones, who make it sound like there's massive untapped demand for these phones, but when you actually give it to them, it turns out they're just a tiny slice of the market.
I’m a huge fan of small iPhones and only recently replaced it with a standard size model. I pretty much hate it for all the reasons I expected.
But when I looked up the sales numbers for all of the smaller phone versions I had to admit I must be pretty far outside the normal buyer. The market really spoke on this.
I thought I’d love my iPhone mini for these same reasons.
It turns out that the reachable nature of it wasn’t really that much of a benefit compared to the downsides: short battery life (going from the 12 mini to 13 mini helped, barely), small text/interface (my eyes literally started hurting), reduced area to see content while typing, compromised cameras compared to the Pro models.
Add a $30 PopSocket to your phone and all the problems with a bigger phone are resolved.
Aka 6million units. During the same period when the Pixel sold 10 million.
So every ipad , watch, mac sku that sells < 5% of the overall product line is immediately taken out back to the wood shed?
I guess, but when my iPhone is no longer supported, I’m migrating my entire family on to something else. 3 watches, 3 ipads and 2 phones…so its not always about the % sold.
The logical screen size was the same as the iPhone 11 Pro (375x812), so the iPhone mini didn’t add a new display size, and everything rendered exactly the same as on the 11 Pro (which itself was merely a vertical extension of the earlier iPhone Plus resolution). The display is rendered internally at the 11 Pro’s physical resolution (1125x2436) and then downscaled to the mini’s physical resolution (1080x2340) (except for fullscreen HD video, which displays at the native 1080p). Similar internal downscaling had already been done on the earlier iPhone Plus models, so also nothing new. The 11 Pro is still supported by current iOS, same as the mini.
It was, to the contrary, the non-mini iPhone 12 that introduced a new resolution and required adjustments.
> on the software side it must have been at least a non-zero pain to deal with
Compared to the iPhone Duo now in the lineup? And the iPhone Air was announced with some pride from the Apple hardware team for its special miniaturized hardware.
There may not be a market for an iPhone Mini-sized device when looking at the buyers, but the custom hardware and tweaks to software aren't a clear consideration for Apple when you look at their behavior with other products.
By “pain” I mean “providing an acceptable experience” more than “needing to make different scaled apps.”
I think with the iPhone Duo you at least have a larger screen that the user can utilize. On the iPhone mini the screen was as big as it was going to get.
If the experience of using a specific app is bad, the user can open the phone.
If iOS games are any indication then an Apple console would have 100x the low-effort microtransaction slopware as PS and Xbox. I think we’re better off without it.
And what does “hardware and performance is there” mean? The latest Apple TV 4K has an A19 chip, same as the base iPhone 17. What console market are they eating alive with that exactly?
Correct. And the fact that Apple has been raked over the coals for years about it, yet people, even on HN, don't know that the rest are doing it, really makes me question people's motives.
To be fair it kind of remains to be seen how successful all of those are, long-term (I kind of expect Microsoft to exit the hardware console business at this point).
I work on Mac's every day. The device I use most is my AppleTV - music streaming, background noise, etc. It's a passive thing but the first device the last couple of times I've moved.
Still an open question whether not investing in AI infrastructure was the right move. They did better than Alphabet, Amazon and Intel, but Apple renting its AI from Alphabet (Gemini with Siri) might be a long term risk, since they're building on someone else's platform.
It’s not a long term risk at all. Long term, models are going to be running on local hardware.
The AI data center is analogous to the mainframe.
If I can run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on my DDR4 closet server with a $500 16GB GPU at 50 tok/s (which I can) then I just about guarantee you that in 2-3 years a pretty acceptable AI model is going to be running off of iPhones and M7/M8 Macs.
The other option that reduces Apple’s long-term risk is that they could just buy an AI company.
Models running locally doesn’t benefit Apple unless they have a competitive model of their own. Otherwise they’ll end up being dependent on Google, Meta etc the same way they are today for apps and services. And getting out of that hole won’t be as simple as building a maps app.
Yeah I can kinda see why Altman is out there trying to shame the public for having compute. The longer they carry those massive debt obligations, the more the models are going to economize.
It would not be surprising that Apple just waits and snatches their compute up from insolvent companies sliding past.
I equate it to partnering with AT&T on the first iPhone. Very inconsistent with Apple’s preference of owning the entire stack, but if your bet is this a short term stop gap until the market is more “unlocked” - less of an issue, and better to get the direct market learnings along the way.
> I equate it to partnering with AT&T on the first iPhone.
In terms of strategy, they picked the underdog carrier (Cingular) specifically to avoid having to bundle bloatware and carrier customization at the cost of exclusivity. Likewise, when Apple brought the iPhone to Japan, they did the same thing with the underdog carrier here, SoftBank.
The strategic importance of this was as a bargaining chip with other carriers and fundamentally gave them a lot of control they would not have had if they had gone with Verizon or similar.
Context for Europeans: the US mobile market was basically total vendor lock-in hell up until the mid-2010s. There were only two carriers (AT&T and T-Mobile[1]) you could bring-your-own-phone with, the other two (Verizon and Sprint[2]) only allowed the phones they sold on their network. Phone service and plans were bundled together.
In fact, one of the critical arguments Apple made as to why they weren't a monopoly was "Sure, we demand 30% - but the phone company monopoly we made obsolete used to charge 70%!" Mobile app stores on other platforms were absolutely hell.
One extra wrinkle of this is that Apple didn't actually partner with AT&T, they partnered with Cingular, the smallest national[0] carrier, who only agreed to let Apple ship an unmolested device because they got 5 year exclusivity. Then Cingular got bought out by AT&T. AFAIK AT&T didn't want the iPhone, they wanted the AT&T (insert terrible name here) Powered by AppleTM, with like 20 AT&T services preinstalled and unremovable. 'Cause that's literally what happened with the first Samsung Galaxy phone, every carrier gave it a different name and their own bloatware.
And yes, this hatred was mutual: the 5 year exclusivity meant iPhones were shackled to a terrible network in the US, and there was a significant amount of effort put into baseband jailbreaking just so people could violate Apple's exclusivity agreement and use their iPhone with their choice of carrier - which, to be clear, meant "use it on T-Mobile".
Also, while I'm giving a lot of credit to Apple, the thing that really broke the vendor lock-in was:
1. Google deliberately bidding up spectrum to trigger an FCC open-access pledge on LTE bands, which forced Verizon to allow third-party networks
2. Qualcomm giving up on UMB, forcing Verizon to adopt LTE, and by extension, SIM cards[3]
3. Clearwire / Sprint's WiMAX service totally failing, also forcing Sprint to adopt LTE and SIMs
[0] The US has a few "regional" carriers like US Cellular that only operate towers in some markets and license spectrum outside of that area.
[1] Yes, they were owned by Deutsche Telekom at one point
[2] At one point owned by Softbank, now owned by T-Mobile
[3] Strictly speaking, the SIM card spec includes CDMA/3GPP2[4] support, but the largest CDMA market was the US, and any carrier that wanted to support foreign phones used GSM/3GPP track standards
[4] Yes, Qualcomm was really that petty that they named their 3G standards body "3G 2"
> but Apple renting its AI from Alphabet (Gemini with Siri) might be a long term risk, since they're building on someone else's platform.
Apple isn't renting; they distilled Gemini to create their own model for "broad world knowledge". Some of this runs on Google's infrastructure because Apple didn't have enough compute.
All of the personal context stuff is Apple's Foundation Models.
Apple is always not-going to have enough compute of their own, they have billions of users and whatever they are investing in datacenters to service them is negligible.
That said renting storage from Google for iCloud reportedly carries an ~80% profit margin, there's no reason they can't also put a 5x markup on what Google charges them for PCC and Siri since they can still prevent rivals from providing the same service in most markets.
They're not building on someone else's platform as much as leasing completely commoditized compute from whomever gave them the best deal. I wouldn't be surprised if this compute will actually be happening on xAI hardware [1].
I think this will depend on the commoditization, or lack thereof, of the AI models. If they are more or less interchangeable, Apple will have made the right bet.
Apple's AI infrastructure is a hub device like AppleTV, Mac Mini, iMac, or MacBook connected to iPhone and Watch. They will be the first to benefit from cheaper to run, eventually embed in chip models, and are positioned to be a key player in offloading demand from data centers.
They’re the bridge to the frontier models until iPhone 21 ships with then modern frontier model baked into Apple Silicon.
It took me a while to realize, but Yahoo charts was showing 3% up from Jun 30 to Nov 2. Turns out there was a huge drop on day 1, so where you start counting _really_ matters!
Wait, we shouldn’t be basing our investment decisions today on data from the past and projections from people with a vested interest in the stock going up?
Apple's fiscal year more or less matches the US federal FY. It's not exact because the federal FY is 1 October - 30 September, where Apple's ends on the last Saturday of September so there's a bit of float on the starting date.
This is a crazy big number. I think the problem for them now is how people are going to be able to afford to keep buying their products in the age of AI job replacement? They'll have to massively increase their prices and become more of a luxury product and manufacture fewer units with bigger margins.
It's always been easier for Apple to grow down market than it is for its competitors to grow up market. Apple is also quite happy to cannibalize its sales as long as it's the one doing it. See the MacBook Neo as an example.
One thing I can tell about Apple is they could make at least a few extra grand in any quarter if they were to bring back the 27' iMac
They would not, they would make less on Studio Displays and Mac Studios and Mac Minis, the decision not to do is product segmentation because they hate us customers and want to maximise revenue :-/
My grandmother with a 2015 27" iMac and a 2017 12" Macbook just replaced both devices with a 13" Macbook Air and a 27" Dell USB-C monitor. She would have preferred buying a MacBook Air + a 27" iMac, but Apple stubbornly refuses to make one for some reason. The studio display has an A19 chip in it already (more powerful than a MacBook neo!) why not just make it run MacOS?
Yeah. I mean, I guess I could go out of my way to make it work, but I'm halfway being nostalgic. Why cant they just keep doing the same form factor?? Anyway. Im on linux these days, I get gaming too thanks to Gabe, so i cant complain... but if there was ever a 27" imac, I'd put my money were my mouth is.
It may be a break-glass-in-case-of-slumping-sales-numbers option, the same way VW brought out a 4Motion Golf wagon (with a manual[!] with an LSD[!]) in NA after Dieselgate.
I see no point in buying a Mac Studio. I would buy a 27" iMac. I would definitely buy a 35" iMac.
I might as well just get some Asus and whatever fancy monitor I can afford (that's not a Mac Studio) if it just has to be a tangle of hardware.
But those few extra grands of revenue at the cost of millions in design and inventory to support that product
Not to mention, at the price apple is selling their 27 inch display, i am doubtful anyone buying them want to make do with the base M chip. But if not the base chip, that will add even more inventory cost
Same for the iPhone mini. ;)
The iPhone mini was a commercial flop. The sales numbers were bad. It only accounted for about 3–5% of total iPhone sales. And the product didn't make sense from a business standpoint: it required specialized/miniaturized hardware, cost more to manufacture than a regular iPhone, but had to be sold for less.
From an engineering standpoint, it was the most impressive iPhone Apple had ever made, but that fact doesn't translate to sales numbers.
There's a very vocal group of people online saying they want smaller phones, who make it sound like there's massive untapped demand for these phones, but when you actually give it to them, it turns out they're just a tiny slice of the market.
I’m a huge fan of small iPhones and only recently replaced it with a standard size model. I pretty much hate it for all the reasons I expected.
But when I looked up the sales numbers for all of the smaller phone versions I had to admit I must be pretty far outside the normal buyer. The market really spoke on this.
I thought I’d love my iPhone mini for these same reasons.
It turns out that the reachable nature of it wasn’t really that much of a benefit compared to the downsides: short battery life (going from the 12 mini to 13 mini helped, barely), small text/interface (my eyes literally started hurting), reduced area to see content while typing, compromised cameras compared to the Pro models.
Add a $30 PopSocket to your phone and all the problems with a bigger phone are resolved.
The iPhone mini competed with a $30 accessory.
Aka 6million units. During the same period when the Pixel sold 10 million.
So every ipad , watch, mac sku that sells < 5% of the overall product line is immediately taken out back to the wood shed?
I guess, but when my iPhone is no longer supported, I’m migrating my entire family on to something else. 3 watches, 3 ipads and 2 phones…so its not always about the % sold.
Not just special miniaturized hardware, on the software side it must have been at least a non-zero pain to deal with.
The logical screen size was the same as the iPhone 11 Pro (375x812), so the iPhone mini didn’t add a new display size, and everything rendered exactly the same as on the 11 Pro (which itself was merely a vertical extension of the earlier iPhone Plus resolution). The display is rendered internally at the 11 Pro’s physical resolution (1125x2436) and then downscaled to the mini’s physical resolution (1080x2340) (except for fullscreen HD video, which displays at the native 1080p). Similar internal downscaling had already been done on the earlier iPhone Plus models, so also nothing new. The 11 Pro is still supported by current iOS, same as the mini.
It was, to the contrary, the non-mini iPhone 12 that introduced a new resolution and required adjustments.
https://iosref.com/res
> on the software side it must have been at least a non-zero pain to deal with
Compared to the iPhone Duo now in the lineup? And the iPhone Air was announced with some pride from the Apple hardware team for its special miniaturized hardware.
There may not be a market for an iPhone Mini-sized device when looking at the buyers, but the custom hardware and tweaks to software aren't a clear consideration for Apple when you look at their behavior with other products.
By “pain” I mean “providing an acceptable experience” more than “needing to make different scaled apps.”
I think with the iPhone Duo you at least have a larger screen that the user can utilize. On the iPhone mini the screen was as big as it was going to get.
If the experience of using a specific app is bad, the user can open the phone.
Hence the smiley.
Apple could eat the console market alive with the Apple TV. The hardware and performance is there but they don’t seem to care about it.
If iOS games are any indication then an Apple console would have 100x the low-effort microtransaction slopware as PS and Xbox. I think we’re better off without it.
And what does “hardware and performance is there” mean? The latest Apple TV 4K has an A19 chip, same as the base iPhone 17. What console market are they eating alive with that exactly?
I don’t think a successful console can take a 30% cut and I don’t think Apple is really interested in anything less.
Playstation, Xbox, and Steam charge 30%.
Correct. And the fact that Apple has been raked over the coals for years about it, yet people, even on HN, don't know that the rest are doing it, really makes me question people's motives.
To be fair it kind of remains to be seen how successful all of those are, long-term (I kind of expect Microsoft to exit the hardware console business at this point).
You fool! They created their own market on mobile worth 10x the console market (probably more)
(you fool should be read in the voice of Gilbert Gottfried)
Gilbert Gottfried or Wallace Shawn?
Not to mention the potential if they gave it decent storage and included a game controller.
I work on Mac's every day. The device I use most is my AppleTV - music streaming, background noise, etc. It's a passive thing but the first device the last couple of times I've moved.
Still an open question whether not investing in AI infrastructure was the right move. They did better than Alphabet, Amazon and Intel, but Apple renting its AI from Alphabet (Gemini with Siri) might be a long term risk, since they're building on someone else's platform.
It’s not a long term risk at all. Long term, models are going to be running on local hardware.
The AI data center is analogous to the mainframe.
If I can run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next on my DDR4 closet server with a $500 16GB GPU at 50 tok/s (which I can) then I just about guarantee you that in 2-3 years a pretty acceptable AI model is going to be running off of iPhones and M7/M8 Macs.
The other option that reduces Apple’s long-term risk is that they could just buy an AI company.
Models running locally doesn’t benefit Apple unless they have a competitive model of their own. Otherwise they’ll end up being dependent on Google, Meta etc the same way they are today for apps and services. And getting out of that hole won’t be as simple as building a maps app.
Yeah I can kinda see why Altman is out there trying to shame the public for having compute. The longer they carry those massive debt obligations, the more the models are going to economize.
It would not be surprising that Apple just waits and snatches their compute up from insolvent companies sliding past.
I equate it to partnering with AT&T on the first iPhone. Very inconsistent with Apple’s preference of owning the entire stack, but if your bet is this a short term stop gap until the market is more “unlocked” - less of an issue, and better to get the direct market learnings along the way.
> I equate it to partnering with AT&T on the first iPhone.
In terms of strategy, they picked the underdog carrier (Cingular) specifically to avoid having to bundle bloatware and carrier customization at the cost of exclusivity. Likewise, when Apple brought the iPhone to Japan, they did the same thing with the underdog carrier here, SoftBank.
The strategic importance of this was as a bargaining chip with other carriers and fundamentally gave them a lot of control they would not have had if they had gone with Verizon or similar.
> I equate it to partnering with AT&T on the first iPhone. Very inconsistent with Apple’s preference of owning the entire stack
They went to Verizon first but were turned down. Apple needed distribution, which meant partnering with an established carrier.
Regarding "owning the entire stack" didn't make any sense in 2007, especially for a company that was new to the cell phone business.
Three years later, the first iPhone with Apple's silicon was the iPhone 4 with the A4 processor.
Context for Europeans: the US mobile market was basically total vendor lock-in hell up until the mid-2010s. There were only two carriers (AT&T and T-Mobile[1]) you could bring-your-own-phone with, the other two (Verizon and Sprint[2]) only allowed the phones they sold on their network. Phone service and plans were bundled together.
In fact, one of the critical arguments Apple made as to why they weren't a monopoly was "Sure, we demand 30% - but the phone company monopoly we made obsolete used to charge 70%!" Mobile app stores on other platforms were absolutely hell.
One extra wrinkle of this is that Apple didn't actually partner with AT&T, they partnered with Cingular, the smallest national[0] carrier, who only agreed to let Apple ship an unmolested device because they got 5 year exclusivity. Then Cingular got bought out by AT&T. AFAIK AT&T didn't want the iPhone, they wanted the AT&T (insert terrible name here) Powered by AppleTM, with like 20 AT&T services preinstalled and unremovable. 'Cause that's literally what happened with the first Samsung Galaxy phone, every carrier gave it a different name and their own bloatware.
And yes, this hatred was mutual: the 5 year exclusivity meant iPhones were shackled to a terrible network in the US, and there was a significant amount of effort put into baseband jailbreaking just so people could violate Apple's exclusivity agreement and use their iPhone with their choice of carrier - which, to be clear, meant "use it on T-Mobile".
Also, while I'm giving a lot of credit to Apple, the thing that really broke the vendor lock-in was:
1. Google deliberately bidding up spectrum to trigger an FCC open-access pledge on LTE bands, which forced Verizon to allow third-party networks
2. Qualcomm giving up on UMB, forcing Verizon to adopt LTE, and by extension, SIM cards[3]
3. Clearwire / Sprint's WiMAX service totally failing, also forcing Sprint to adopt LTE and SIMs
[0] The US has a few "regional" carriers like US Cellular that only operate towers in some markets and license spectrum outside of that area.
[1] Yes, they were owned by Deutsche Telekom at one point
[2] At one point owned by Softbank, now owned by T-Mobile
[3] Strictly speaking, the SIM card spec includes CDMA/3GPP2[4] support, but the largest CDMA market was the US, and any carrier that wanted to support foreign phones used GSM/3GPP track standards
[4] Yes, Qualcomm was really that petty that they named their 3G standards body "3G 2"
> but Apple renting its AI from Alphabet (Gemini with Siri) might be a long term risk, since they're building on someone else's platform.
Apple isn't renting; they distilled Gemini to create their own model for "broad world knowledge". Some of this runs on Google's infrastructure because Apple didn't have enough compute.
All of the personal context stuff is Apple's Foundation Models.
Apple is always not-going to have enough compute of their own, they have billions of users and whatever they are investing in datacenters to service them is negligible.
That said renting storage from Google for iCloud reportedly carries an ~80% profit margin, there's no reason they can't also put a 5x markup on what Google charges them for PCC and Siri since they can still prevent rivals from providing the same service in most markets.
I assume Apple is buying time.
> ... Apple renting its AI from Alphabet (Gemini with Siri) might be a long term risk...
Similar to Apple (and everybody else) using Google maps. They survived.
Apple doesn't pay Google.
Google gets a small discount how much they pay Apple to be the default search engine on Safari.
They're not building on someone else's platform as much as leasing completely commoditized compute from whomever gave them the best deal. I wouldn't be surprised if this compute will actually be happening on xAI hardware [1].
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/google...
I think this will depend on the commoditization, or lack thereof, of the AI models. If they are more or less interchangeable, Apple will have made the right bet.
Apple's AI infrastructure is a hub device like AppleTV, Mac Mini, iMac, or MacBook connected to iPhone and Watch. They will be the first to benefit from cheaper to run, eventually embed in chip models, and are positioned to be a key player in offloading demand from data centers.
They’re the bridge to the frontier models until iPhone 21 ships with then modern frontier model baked into Apple Silicon.
> until iPhone 21 ships with then modern frontier model baked into Apple Silicon.
Citation: It Came To Me In A Dream
But they could rent from any of the 200+ neo clouds right?
Apple can pivot Siri pretty easily.
> Apple renting its AI from Alphabet (Gemini with Siri)
this is not how it works.
Naturally, AAPL stock has slumped nearly 5% on this news after hours.
It dropped at the moment that they announced they were issuing a dividend. Before that it was pretty flat after losing ~2% throughout the day.
Coincidence. They've issued a dividend every quarter for more than a decade.
Because good news indicates a relative high and that’s when you should sell.
Look at the 3 month chart. Strong quarter. Certainly doesn’t look like a deal I want to get in on
Now look at the 2yr 5yr and 10yr charts. Looks like historically high values
5% dips after hours is nothing
> Look at the 3 month chart
It took me a while to realize, but Yahoo charts was showing 3% up from Jun 30 to Nov 2. Turns out there was a huge drop on day 1, so where you start counting _really_ matters!
Wait, we shouldn’t be basing our investment decisions today on data from the past and projections from people with a vested interest in the stock going up?
But you literally are? By looking at past performance you are trying to gage when to sell at a relative high.
> Diluted earnings per share was $2.10, up 14 percent year over year, and included a favorable impact of $0.05 from tariff refunds.
In other words, the money consumers used to pay Trump's tariffs was not refunded to the consumers, but went straight to Apple's bottom line instead.
If I remember correctly, Apple didn't put up prices due to the tariffs, they ate it out of their bottom line.
Hey Alexa, define "refund"
Shouldn't this be third quarter?
Fiscal 4th quarter. It doesn’t have to align with the calendar year and usually doesn’t.
Apple's fiscal year more or less matches the US federal FY. It's not exact because the federal FY is 1 October - 30 September, where Apple's ends on the last Saturday of September so there's a bit of float on the starting date.
This is a crazy big number. I think the problem for them now is how people are going to be able to afford to keep buying their products in the age of AI job replacement? They'll have to massively increase their prices and become more of a luxury product and manufacture fewer units with bigger margins.
The age of AI job replacement that doesn't really exist?
It's always been easier for Apple to grow down market than it is for its competitors to grow up market. Apple is also quite happy to cannibalize its sales as long as it's the one doing it. See the MacBook Neo as an example.
dividend = please don't sell!
dividend = please don't sell!
dividend = interested in long-term performance and institutional investment, not pump-and-dump for the next quarter.